U.S./Canada

Endangered life is often used to justify humanitarian media intervention, but what if suffering humanity is both the fuel and outcome of such media representations? Pooja Rangan argues that this vicious circle is the result of immediation, a prevailing documentary ethos that seeks to render human suffering urgent and immediate at all costs. Rangan interrogates this ethos in films seeking to “give a voice to the voiceless,” an established method of validating the humanity of marginalized subjects, including children, refugees, autistics, and animals.

Photographs of the Holocaust bear a double burden: to act as history lessons for future generations so we will “never forget” and to provide a means of mourning. In Trespassing through Shadows, Andrea Liss examines the inherent difficulties and productive possibilities of using photographs to bear witness, initiating a critical dialogue about the ways the post-Auschwitz generation has employed these documents to represent Holocaust memory and history.

Intelligence Work establishes a new genealogy of American social documentary, proposing a fresh critical approach to the aesthetic and political issues of nonfiction cinema and media. Jonathan Kahana argues that the use of documentary film by intellectuals, activists, government agencies, and community groups constitutes a national-public form of culture, one that challenges traditional oppositions between official and vernacular speech, between high art and popular culture, and between academic knowledge and common sense.

Lawyers argue the UN should compensate victims of the disease allegedly spread by its peacekeepers.

This article combines health and water research results, evidence from confidential documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, legal analysis, and discussion of historical context to demonstrate that actions taken by the international community through the Inter-American Development Bank are directly related to a lack of access to clean water in Haiti. The article demonstrates that these actions constitute a clear violation of Haitians’ right to water under both domestic and international law.

Lesbians, prostitutes, women likely to have sex across racial lines, "brought to the United States for immoral purposes," or "arriving in a state of pregnancy"—national threats, one and all. Since the late nineteenth century, immigrant women’s sexuality has been viewed as a threat to national security, to be contained through strict border-monitoring practices. By scrutinizing this policy, its origins, and its application, Eithne Luibhéid shows how the U.S.

Taking a critical view of a venerated international principle, Randall Williams shows how the concept of human rights—often taken for granted as a force for good in the world—corresponds directly with U.S. imperialist aims. Citing internationalists from W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to, more recently, M. Jacqui Alexander and China Miéville, Williams insists on a reckoning of human rights with the violence of colonial modernity.

Major national organizations of physicians, psychiatrists, and nurses determined that their ethical obligations prohibited their members from participating in these interrogations, so what was the American Psychological Association doing?

The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on C.I.A. interrogation tactics added a new chapter to the national conversation on the government's use of torture.