Categorization and Context: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach to Human Rights

This first issue of the Universal presents five articles that examine human rights issues from various disciplines and that span different global contexts. Together, the articles illustrate the potentiality of both multi-disciplinarity and inter- disciplinarity in human rights scholarship; a core concern of The Universal: Annual Human Rights Review. In their own way, each of the five articles speaks to the chosen theme of this issue, namely attribution and categorization. Five articles provide unique observations and examinations of these di erent processes with each revealing the di erent ways such operations a ect the granting and/or denying of rights. In addition, the contributions present comprehensive analyses of the intersection between global understandings and classifications of rights with local dynamics and categories of people. Generally, to a greater or lesser extent, each addresses the ways in which the attributions and identities of certain groups render them categorized, the ways in which ascriptions and membership within these categories have certain local and global human rights implications, and the ways in which those implications impact the local strategies chosen to address domestic contextual experiences. Whether categorization processes (and their subse- quent rami cations) are examined with regard to the Dalit class in India or street children in Tanzania, the contributions reveal how classification within distinct groups has contextual dimensions. Such classification is shown to not only a ect the strategies selected by categorized groups to ght for their human rights, but to also have broader implications when those contextually-grounded groups are confronted with global understandings of their identities.

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