Majority rights and minority responsibilities: young people’s negotiations with human rights ISSN 2535-5406 Vol 4, No 3 (2021) http://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.4606 Date of publication 29-10-2021 © 2021 the author(s). This is an OpenAccess publication licensed under terms given in: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (CC-BY 4.0). https://www.humanrer.org Editorial Theorising and contextualising human rights education Audrey Osler University of South-Eastern Norway, Norway & University of Leeds, United Kingdom, a.h.osler@leeds.co.uk Christian Stokke University of South-Eastern Norway, Norway It is a cause for celebration and an indication of a journal’s development and maturation when a growing number of strong submissions enables the editors to increase the annual number of issues. We are proud to confirm, with the publication of volume 4(3), that Human Rights Education Review is moving from two to three issues per year. This development takes place alongside other initiatives. In cooperation with the World Educational Research Association (WERA) International Research Network on Human Rights Education, this summer HRER launched a dedicated YouTube channel that shares recordings of the WERA/HRER webinars that have taken place throughout the past year. Our YouTube channel also features an invited international symposium on HRE at the 2021 WERA Virtual Focal Meeting hosted in Santiago de Compostela, Spain with contributions from Japan and Europe that include presentations from members of the HRER Editorial Team and International Editorial Advisory Board. We are grateful to the many volunteers who have given us both practical support and expert advice, and to Line Jenssen, HRER Managing Editor, for the work they have put into this initiative. We invite readers to take a look and subscribe at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSVmqibUYD77i2wjWIVvvxw Importantly, we welcome the additional Editors and Associate Editors joining our core team this autumn: Suzanne Egan, Rachel Shanks, Marta Stachurska-Kounta, Sylvie Condette, and http://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.4606 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://www.humanrer.org/ mailto:a.h.osler@leeds.co.uk https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSVmqibUYD77i2wjWIVvvxw Human Rights Education Review – Volume 4(3) 2 Helen Hanna. We look forward to strengthening partnerships with you and your universities. As HRER matures, so does the field of human rights education research and, with this, a closer focus on theorising and contextualising work in the field. This issue features two such contributions. Contributing to the discussion on human rights knowledge initiated by Parker (2018) and since explored by Jerome et al. (2021) as well as discussions of coloniality and decoloniality in human rights education explored in this journal (Becker, 2021; Blanchard & Nix, 2019) and elsewhere (for example, Coysh, 2014; Keet, & Zembylas, 2019; Moghli, 2020; Osler, 2015a, 2015b), Rebecca Adami considers how we might ensure epistemic justice in human rights education by retelling the history of the United Nations to include the contributions of Indian and Pakistani freedom fighters and Latin American feminists who were obliged to negotiate human rights against the colonial, patriarchal and racist discourses of the post-World War Two era. She asserts the possibility of a pluralistic universalism of human rights and argues that the monistic universalism that is today critiqued can be avoided by extending the knowledge of human rights scholars to include the counternarratives of postcolonial subjects whose positive conception of rights centred on reducing injustice. In an article that also draws on feminist scholarship, Iida Pyy makes the case that political compassion is a necessary disposition for engaging with human rights principles such as racial injustice. Pyy draws on Martha Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions, stressing the need to understand compassion as connected to cognition and practical reasoning. Pyy further draws on Nussbaum’s concept of narrative imagination, drawing on critical HRE scholarship, including that of Adami, that stresses the importance of counternarratives, multiperspectivity and reflective interpretation of stories. In situating Nussbaum’s work on compassion and narrative imagination alongside that of critical HRE scholars, Pyy offers fresh insights into the relationship between human rights, emotions and social justice that might inform HRE theory and practice. This issue also illustrates how HRE practices might be developed in innovative ways, so as to protect children and enhance school safeguarding. Building on earlier scholarship in HRER asserting that for child rights education to be effective it must recognise and respond to children’s lived injustices (Lundy & Martínez Sainz, 2018), Alison Struthers explores the potential of HRE to protect children and enhance school safeguarding practices. Observing that the current safeguarding training and delivery processes for adults working with children in England assume the child to be a somewhat passive subject, Struthers highlights how HRE for adults built into mandatory safeguarding training might support and enable children to better recognise violations of their human rights and reorientate a safeguarding model that currently relies overly on a passive system of adult observation. A. Osler & C. Stokke 3 Authors Nassia Choleva, Antonis Lenakakis and Myrto Pigkou-Repousi explore the potential of educational drama as a vehicle for human rights education. Both HRE and drama have a restricted place in the contemporary Greek primary school curriculum, with drama included for children in the first four grades and human rights incorporated into the curriculum for citizenship and democracy in the upper primary school. The study focuses on a teachers’ drama-training workshop, where participants engage in role-play to practice intercultural dialogue skills such as empathy, expression of feelings, and taking others’ perspectives. Drawing on questionnaire data and statistical analysis, the authors conclude that the workshop significantly enhanced teachers’ knowledge, readiness and skills concerning human rights and refugees. They assert that drama’s focus on active, participative learning makes it a ready arena for learning about, through and for human rights. In the final article in this issue, Kerenina Dansholm investigates Norwegian tenth-graders’ perceptions of human rights in relation to ethnic minorities. She analyses data from group discussions about inclusive citizenship, rights and responsibilities, among middle school students with a majority background. The study finds that these students tend to equate human rights with national values and with the rights of Norwegian citizens, and that they draw a dichotomy between the rights of the majority and the responsibilities of minorities. Dansholm concludes that this indicates a need for a deeper level of human rights education in Norwegian schools. References Becker, A. (2021). Decolonial human rights education: Changing the terms and content of conversations on human rights. Human Rights Education Review, 4(2), 49–68. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.3989 Blanchard, L., & Nix, M. (2019). Creating spaces for radical pedagogy in higher education. Human Rights Education Review, 2(2), 65-83. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.3363 Coysh, J. (2014). The dominant discourse of human rights education: A critique. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 6(1), 89–114. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/hut033 Jerome, L., Liddle, A., & Young, H. (2021). Talking about rights without talking about rights: On the absence of knowledge in classroom discussions. Human Rights Education Review, 4(1), 8–26. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.3979 Keet, A., & Zembylas, M. (2019). Decolonial strategies and pedagogical/curricular possibilities. In M. Zembylas & A. Keet (Eds.), Critical human rights education. Advancing social-justice-oriented educational praxes (pp. 131-147). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27198-5_10 https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.3989 https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.3363 https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/hut033 https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.3979 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27198-5_10 Human Rights Education Review – Volume 4(3) 4 Lundy, L., & Martínez Sainz, G. (2018). The role of law and legal knowledge for a transformative human rights education: Addressing violations of children’s rights in formal education. Human Rights Education Review, 1(2), 4-24. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.2560 Moghli, A. M. (2020). Re-conceptualising human rights education: From the global to the occupied. International Journal of Human Rights Education, 4(1). https://repository.usfca.edu/ijhre/vol4/iss1/5 Osler, A. (2015a). Human rights education, postcolonial scholarship, and action for social justice. Theory & Research in Social Education, 43(2), 244–274. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2015.1034393 Osler, A. (2015b). The stories we tell: Exploring narrative in education for justice and equality in multicultural contexts. Multicultural Education Review (1-2), 12-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/2005615X.2015.1048605 Parker, W. C. (2018). Human rights education’s curriculum problem. Human Rights Education Review, 1(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.2450 https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.2560 https://repository.usfca.edu/ijhre/vol4/iss1/5 https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2015.1034393 https://doi.org/10.1080/2005615X.2015.1048605 https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.2450