Chapter 12: Human Rights, Scholarship, and Action for Change

In our global age, we need tools that will support educational research and development which can be applied in a range of contexts: local, cultural, national and international. Within the human rights framework the concept of intersectionality is implicit. Here, I aim to make this implicitness explicit. The chapter considers strengths and potential limitations of the human rights framework for education research and practice, addressing, in particular, questions of universality and recognition, questions central to debates about intersectionality.

Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix understand the concept of intersectionality as:

In this chapter, I explore the possibilities offered by combining the concepts of intersectionality and human rights to provide a framework to analyse and enable social justice in and through education, focusing on concepts, language and legal frameworks. Recognising that the concepts of human rights, child rights and human rights education are infrequently discussed outside the specialist literature, I begin by focusing on human rights, identities and education, noting the over-nationalistic focus of many school curricula and problems arising from this. I then examine rights, educational scholarship and multiculturalism in the United States and Europe, exploring some similar and some divergent trends. It would appear that in both contexts the complexity of the issues involved and the wide range of identity questions require a framework of analysis which is both comprehensive and sensitive to the interplay of these various factors.