Human Rights Learning : The Significance of Narratives, Relationality and Uniqueness

Abstract: Whereas educational policy is mainly concerned with the content of Human Rights Education (HRE), philosophers of education have widely explored the subject and her social condition in terms of social justice education. This thesis draws on philosophers of education in exploring the subject rather than the content of HRE, focusing the study on ontological rather than epistemological aspects of learning. In this thesis learning is explored through narratives, as a relational process of becoming. The turn to narrative is taken against the dominant historical narrative of human rights as a Western project. This turn concerns how claims toward universalism of human rights exclude difference and equally concerns how notions of particularity overshadows the uniqueness in life stories. The concept of uniqueness serves to elucidate the complexity of the subject, not easily reduced into social categorizations, a concept drawn from Adriana Cavarero and Hannah Arendt.