Human Rights Radio launched in Spring of 2014 as an auditory platform exploring contemporary topics and issues in human rights. Among other things, we’re interested in exploring the politics of voice and how we think of questions of agency, authenticity, and affect in relation to “public” voices. Human Rights Radio is also interested in the story of (terrestrial) radio transmission and its role in political struggles in many parts of the world, and how international and national regulatory frameworks play a role in governing these transmissions.
Human Rights Radio produces episodic shows featuring sound pieces created by students, edited talks from the Human Rights Project lectures series, interviews with human rights scholars, practitioners, activists, and artists, and, occasionally, stories from Bard’s network campuses around the world.
In the fall of 2014, Human Rights Radio initiated collaborations with faculty to develop rubrics for sound-based assignments for their courses. Students in these courses create, with extensive technical support from HRR, audio essays for their final class projects. Selected projects are then assembled into publicly-available episodes. Active collaborations in Fall 2021 include Labor and Migration in Arabic Literature and Contagiousness, Vulnerable Environments: Architecture as Research. Past class collaborations include Radio Africa: Broadcasting History (Historical Studies), Voice in the Machine (Anthropology), Solidarity as World-making (Literature), Gig Life: Anthropology of the “Sharing Economy” (Anthropology), and Utopias (Architectural History.)
Danielle Riou is the director of Human Rights Radio, and member of the Center for Experimental Humanities’ Sound Cluster, She can be reached at [email protected].