Resource Review Assignment

The Resource Review assignment is designed to get you to pay attention to the discourse of human rights in other places besides the texts you're assigned for the class. There are two ways to think about it: you can choose a text (and by text, I mean any form of media and/or writing) that helps inform your understanding of one of the historical contexts we're studying in class (I have listed some below), or you can choose a text that helps you understand a different context altogether. If there is a particular human rights situation you were hoping we would cover in this class and we're not, this is an opportunity for you to learn more about it on your own. Have you always wanted to watch Hotel Rwanda but needed an excuse to make yourself do it? Did you watch a documentary recently that deals with contemporary slavery or food justice? Are you curious about South African apartheid or Nelson Mandela, but you don't know very much about what happened? What human rights issue have you always wanted to learn more about? Find a book, film, or web resource that teaches you about it. I'm open to lots of possibilities for text selection, but it's probably a good idea to run it by me first if it doesn't fit easily into one of the listed categories.

Then, create a post that summarizes the text (explains the main point and the key details), hits the highlights of the human rights issues at stake, and explains how the text is connected to our larger class topic of representation and human rights issues.

Resource Reviews can be posted at any time with the following caveat: if your Historical Context Project is due before midterm, your Resource Review is not due until May 2. If you signed up for a Historical Context project after spring break, then your Resource Review is due by February 28.

Possible texts that connect to our course texts (there are lots of others!):
Schindler's List
The Pianist
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich
Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese Internment Camps by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald (or any of the other books in the bibliography at the end of When the Emporer Was Divine)
White Light/Black Rain
Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb by Ronald Takaki
12 Years a Slave
Amistad
The Great Debaters
The Hurricane
Freedom on My Mind
Malcolm X
King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

One caveat: I am going to ask you to choose something new to you, so not something you read or watched for another course. I'm open to films you've seen before, just not those you've studied in depth in a class. The point is for you to learn something new about human rights and share it with us.