Human Rights Violations Through Structural Violence: A Case Study of Human Rights Education in New York City

Introduction

In the United States, discussions around social inequality and structural reform have emerged with new force. The confluence of the COVID-19 health pandemic, economic crisis, and racial injustice and police brutality has brought to light the unequal and structural inequalities along racial/ethnic and class lines (Pinsker, 2020). At the same time, these crises have led to a renewal in civic engagement and activism, as evidence by the mass protests around antiracism and policy brutality, such as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (Buchanan et al., 2020). ¹ Widespread access to information and renewed understanding about how oppression structures persist in U.S. society has mobilized millions to ask for previously unimaginable and radical demands, such as defunding the police, the abolition of prisons, imposing new wealth taxes, and dismantling the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (Joseph, 2020; McMillan Cottom, 2020).

By nurturing and expanding these conversations, schools can play a vital role in transforming society. While scholars have illustrated the way that schools maintain the status quo and reproduce social inequalities across class and race (Apple, 1979; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Young, 1971), critical theorists explore the extent to which knowledge can also represent a site of possibility to activate critical consciousness and inform demands for social change (Freire, 1981; Giroux, 1983). Young’s (2008, 2013) theory of school curriculum claims that all students, regardless of their background, are entitled to powerful knowledge—a form of knowledge that transcends students’ everyday experiences, is grounded in subject communities that value evidence and argumentation, and is specialized and organized. From this perspective, providing students with powerful knowledge gives them a base to build a critical understanding of the world, dare to think the unthinkable, and propose alternatives to the big problems of our times (Young, 2013).

Since its inception, human rights education (HRE) has had the potential to produce knowledge that informs this kind of structural reform and systemic change. In a set of recommendations concerning the role of education for international understanding and cooperation published in 1974, UNESCO established for the first time a formal relationship between human rights and education (Coysh, 2014). These recommendations entrusted member states, including the United States, ² to apply national policies that could orient education toward the establishment of social justice and the “eradication of the prejudices, misconceptions, inequalities and all forms of injustice, which hinder the achievement of these aims” (UNESCO, 1974). By highlighting education as a resource for collective action against injustices such as colonialism and racism, this legal instrument positioned HRE knowledge as a site to name, understand, and reject the same social forces that exclude the most marginalized groups.

Despite this radical past, recent HRE approaches have primarily equated human rights knowledge with a history of the United Nations and its legal instruments (Keet, 2010; Osler, 2016; Tibbitts, 2002, 2017). Responding to this trend, a significant body of critical scholarship within HRE aims to reveal HRE’s transformative potential by questioning its relationship to the U.N. global human rights regime. Aware of the many ways that imperialism, Cold War politics, and American exceptionalism have shaped the global human rights regime (Gibson & Grant, 2017), Ahmed (2017, 2018), Keet (2010, 2012, 2017), and Zembylas (2016) call for a detailed analysis of the problematic relationship between human rights and HRE. These critical perspectives encourage HRE to move away from a legally constrained understanding of human rights and turn toward more in-depth analyses of the social forces and mechanisms that produce and sustain such abuses in the first place. Likewise, Parker (2017) and Barton (2020) have noted the need to strengthen HRE’s knowledge base. Parker (2017) suggests that human rights knowledge “requires additional development and specification before it can secure a stable place in the school curriculum” (p. 476). Similarly, Barton (2020) underlines the need to shape students’ actions toward change by providing them with knowledge about the specific policies and institutional mechanisms that configure society in a particular way.

Our aim in this article is to contribute to the conversation about human rights knowledge and expand the way that HRE approaches the term human rights violations. To do so, we analyze the pedagogical uses of human rights violations in three HRE classrooms through the lens of structural violence. While we acknowledge the justiciable and enforceable dimensions of human rights, we approach human rights violations as manifestations of violence, including structural violence or the unequal distribution of power in society’s fabric (Farmer, 2003). Given that the concept of structural violence points to the connections between everyday interactions with violence and the large-scale social and economic structures that constrain individual and collective agency, structural violence used within HRE has potential to transcend simplistic interpretations of violent events and bring students closer to powerful knowledge (Parker, 2017; Young, 2013).

To understand how HR courses are organized around human rights violations and how this in turn mediates students’ relation to the class and understandings of their own surroundings, we conducted an in-depth analysis of an enacted human rights curriculum. We draw from six focus groups, 36 semistructured interviews, and more than 100 hours of classroom observations collected over an academic year (2014–2015) in three human rights classes in two public high schools in New York City. Against the backdrop of a series of extrajudicial killings of unarmed Black youth by the police—Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Akai Gurley, Miriam Carey, and Freddie Gray—as well as the rise of the BLM movement, students explored notions of human rights within their own lives. In this article, we ask, How is a HRE course structured around human rights violations? How does this affect students’ understandings and relation to the class material? What consequences does it have on learning more broadly about human rights, given their own experiences? We demonstrate that by the end of the academic year students understood human rights violations as emblematic events not necessarily connected to violence, either in general or as specifically experienced in their own lives. The erasure of history and the social and economic structures that shaped the human rights violations covered in the curriculum prevented most students from linking the social exclusion and institutionalized racism they experienced to broader debates about human rights. Our findings point to the limitations of prioritizing legal frameworks over forms of powerful knowledge, which students could use as tools to interpret their own realities more effectively. Here, we present structural violence as a complementary concept to be used to design curricula and educate students in issues related to human rights and social inequality. This is a crucial step that moves teaching and learning about human rights from the identification of human rights abuses by citing the relevant international human rights convention to a critical analysis of the internal workings of society within which political action could take form (see Love, 2019).

This study provides empirical evidence on how the emphasis on the normative legal terms through which students learn about human rights constrains them from examining the larger historical and structural dimensions that enable and perpetuate human rights violations. That is, students learned language that helped them identify particular violations as human rights abuses but were less likely to learn how to explain the systematic origins of such abuses. While we do not eschew the legal framework that sustains human rights globally (Tibbitts, 2018), we show that legal categories—specifically human rights violations—are limited in their ability to communicate more general knowledge about human rights.

Assessing the Transformative Potential of Human Rights Knowledge

In line with international frameworks that range from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; United Nations, 1948) to the four phases of the World Programme for Human Rights Education (2005–2024; United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2005, 2011), ³ scholars have defined HRE as learning about, through, and for human rights (Bajaj, 2004, 2011; Russell, 2018). HRE aims to empower students ““to contribute to the building and promotion of a universal [human rights] culture”“ (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2019, p. 3). According to the World Programme for Human Rights Education, HRE includes three dimensions: the cultivation of knowledge about human rights and the skills to apply that knowledge; the development of values, attitudes, and behaviors to promote a human rights culture; and the impetus to take action to protect human rights (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2019).

These three dimensions—knowledge, skills, and action—have inspired various HRE models. Tibbitts (2002, 2017) coined the terms Values and Awareness model, the Accountability model, and the Transformative model. The Values and Awareness model aims to promote knowledge about human rights, the Accountability model focuses on training adults and professionals about HRE, and the Transformative model seeks to empower marginalized groups to ameliorate human rights violations and to bring about social change. Similarly, Bajaj (2011) focuses on the “ideological articulations”“ that underlie HRE, including HRE for Global Citizenship, HRE for Coexistence, and HRE for Transformative Action.

In line with HRE models that prioritize change in society, a growing body of literature is concerned with the possibilities HRE offers learners to engage in social justice efforts. Existing literature demonstrates that while human rights learning is mediated by broader political and social structures, human rights knowledge tends to orient students toward direct action and move them away from examining and acting upon broader societal inequalities. We review studies that discuss contextual factors, the international focus on human rights, and the engagement of students around HRE.

Recent studies demonstrate that contextual factors mediate the opportunities for change that students envision through HRE. For instance, in a study in two secondary schools in Hong Kong, Leung et al. (2011) show that the vertical power relations that prevail in schools between educators and students limit students’ opportunities to approach human rights as a transformative tool. In a qualitative study in India, Bajaj (2012) finds that household, school, and community values and practices shape students’ engagement with HRE content, as well as the opportunities available to students to apply what they learn in class. From a comparative perspective and drawing from more than 110 interviews with 14- to 17-year-olds in Colombia, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the United States, Barton (2015) examines how students make sense of the location of human rights and human rights violations finding that students’ understandings are mediated by their social context and pragmatic considerations related to their personal experiences. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted inside and outside school premises in Guatemala, Bellino (2014) finds that how young people interpret human rights’ transformative potential is linked to their understanding of the past, specifically Guatemala’s armed conflict. These studies show that beyond what happens in the classroom, students’ understanding of human rights and radical change possibilities are linked to broader social conditions that vary across contexts.

With some exceptions (see Bajaj et al., 2017; Hantzopoulos, 2016), a significant body of literature has demonstrated that HRE students tend to assume that human rights are an external issue rather than one that has relevance for their daily lives. This tendency has limited their capacity to undertake transformative actions. For example, Barton (2015) and Kim (2019), describe the tendency of students in countries such as the United States, Ireland, and Korea to assume that human rights are an international rather than a domestic matter. To explain this inclination, authors cite national human rights legislation (Branigan & Ramcharan, 2012); the messages propagated by learning materials, the media, and public discourse (Barton, 2015); and the interactions between students and those who facilitate their political socialization (Kim, 2019). With an emphasis on students’ reasoning, Kim (2019) interviewed 22 students at four high schools in Seoul, Korea. By comparing students’ interpretations of national and international human rights issues, this research reveals that students selectively applied causes to explain human rights violations depending on geographical location. Whereas in international settings, they opted to point to structural oppression, in discussions about domestic affairs, students emphasized individual responsibilities to the detriment of structural factors. Drawing on data from high school students in a human rights class in New York City, Russell (2018) demonstrates that students often mentioned examples of human rights violations from non-Western countries rather than examples of violations in the U.S. context. These studies encourage educators to develop more complex and comprehensive understandings of society in HRE classrooms. Yet they still fail to provide concrete pedagogical alternatives.

In instances where students glimpse human rights as a platform for change, studies show that they tend to prioritize direct action on their immediate environments and relationships. For example, Gaudelli and Fernekes (2004) find that while a 4-week HRE unit allowed students to develop empathy for victims of human rights violations in other countries, with few exceptions, their desire for action was limited to the classroom. Similarly, Bajaj (2004) illustrates that young Dominicans were more committed to finding peaceful alternatives to conflict resolution and more willing to intervene in quotidian abusive situations at the end of a 3-month human rights course. In another study conducted in different Indian provinces, Bajaj (2012, 2018) shows that a human rights curriculum based on discussions of children’s rights, discrimination, and examples of social mobilization prompted students to take action in their immediate environment. Through the same comparative study referenced above, Barton (2020) examines young adolescents’ understanding of human rights violations and their perceived capacity to protect human rights. This study finds that while students tend to recognize the relationship between human rights enforcement and certain social institutions, their analysis of how to protect human rights is limited to personal interventions; even in the realm of economic development, the prevailing solutions are those related to charity and volunteerism. In line with ’Keet’s (2007, 2015) critique of HRE’s tendency to organize a human rights curriculum around “declarations, conventions, and covenants,” Barton’s (2020) study explains that the emphasis on legal instruments over the procedures through which human rights are institutionalized limits the repertoire of transformative action that students manage to envision. Despite these important contributions, these studies do not investigate the pedagogical devices that give shape to HRE’s transformative potential.

In line with this line of inquiry, in this article, we reveal the limitations of teaching and learning human rights primarily through the lens of legal definitions of human rights violations. Instead, to enhance HRE’s potential, we propose an expanded definition of human rights violations, by seeing human rights as situated within their historical and social context. We claim that for HRE to become effective in the struggle for rights, we need to position HRE within a legal framework alongside a conceptualization of not only how human rights violations are produced and dismantled but also the historical and sociocultural contexts that foster these violations. By expanding the focus of human rights violations to incorporate structural violence, we lay the ground for an HRE that, based on rigorous historical and critical thinking, elucidates links between apparently disparate events to shape more complex understandings of human rights violations. By including discussions about structural violence through HRE, we seek to provide evidence of the importance of considering broader social and historical structures when teaching and learning about HRE. In the next section, we provide an overview of the discussions related to teaching and learning structural violence from the education field.

Structural Violence in the Classroom

Educational literature has demonstrated the pedagogical potential of incorporating the notion of structural violence in the classroom. The following studies illustrate the value when educators embrace it either as a theoretical stance to select and frame knowledge or as curriculum content developed in tandem with students.

Studies that account for students’ interpretations of race-based inequalities in the classroom show that the concept of structural violence supports students in situating daily experiences of racial discrimination and the social causes that motivate it historically. This body of research analyzes the interpretations that students of color make of their own reality through learning experiences that prioritize a critical understanding of race-based social inequalities. For example, Schensul and Berg (2004) draw from an eco-critical perspective—a critical interpretation of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological model that situates power differentials at multiple levels—to examine how students design plans for action that target the individual, the family, and broader societal arrangements through a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project. Hope et al. (2014) also combine an eco-critical perspective with YPAR methodologies to explore how Black high school students make sense of racial discrimination in their schools. Both studies highlight structural violence as a productive avenue to historicize exclusionary practices and decode personal experiences of racism and discrimination. In racial literacy workshops, McArthur and Muhammad (2020) examine how three young Black women make sense of racism in the United States. Among other points, the study finds that in a space where girls thought and wrote collectively about “power, oppression and privilege” (p. 9), they recognized racism’s historic and systemic dimensions and the direct implications it had over them and people who looked similar to them. In a different educational scenario and through a longitudinal, mixed methods research design with more than 400 adolescents, Seider et al. (2016) reveal that by the end of freshman year, students attending progressive schools with an explicit commitment to social justice ideals demonstrated an increased ability to analyze inequality in relation to race and socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the study shows that students were able to examine the causes of racial inequality, particularly the role of systemic factors in reproducing race-based inequality. Contrastingly, through in-depth interviews with 35 lower secondary school students and a critical discourse analysis of 20 popular textbooks used in the Republic of Ireland, Bryan (2012) finds that curricular silences about racism’s systemic nature create the conditions for students to assume racism results from individual attitudes and traits.

Aligned with current conversations about structural violence, studies have also analyzed the influence of structural thinking on curriculum. For instance, Lopez et al. (1998) investigate the ability of an undergraduate course, explicitly devoted to teaching first-year college students about the structural sources of group inequality and intergroup conflict, to increase students’ capacity to identify and think about structural causes. The authors show that course content that deals with historical patterns of inequality and engages with active learning enhanced students’ capacity to examine social inequality’s structural dimensions. Emphasis on structural thinking generated a decrease in individualistic thinking and an increase on students’ understandings of how structural arrangements reinforce social inequality. Furthermore, Seider et al. (2018) show that students attending schools where racism and racial inequality are central curricula goals tend to demonstrate positive increases in their sociopolitical consciousness.

This body of literature reveals that a structural violence framework has great potential to shape inquiry. Through guided and explicit conversations young people can delve into theoretical concepts and use them to make sense of society’s systemic arrangements and participate in society’s most crucial conversations (Bernstein, 2000).

Human Rights Violations, Structural Violence, and Powerful Knowledge

Our purpose here is to offer a conceptual framework that allows human rights violations to be analyzed through a structural violence lens and enter the powerful knowledge repertoire.

The term structural violence was coined in 1969 by Johan Galtung, in his article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Galtung defined the term as a form of indirect violence that “is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (1969, p. 171). Galtung affirmed that structural violence could be observed in differential morbidity and mortality rates and in the lack of opportunities for the most marginalized groups. According to his definition—and unlike other direct forms of physical violence that are more easily identifiable—structural violence operates through frameworks that distribute resources unevenly in society. Because structural violence is embedded in how society is organized, it tends to be more stable than those forms of violence that result in bodily harm. Furthermore, because the ethical systems in place, such as the international human rights regime, are oriented toward intended violence, that is, violence targeted and inflicted with a purpose, the violence produced by societal arrangements tends to be overlooked.

More recently, critical anthropologists have expanded the analytical tools used to understand structural violence. Building on Galtung’s initial definition, Farmer (2004b) situates structural violence as a historical product enabling us to denaturalize inequality. In this way structural violence emerges from the decisions that social actors, mobilized by specific interests, make to design a society that serves their interests while at the same time inflicting pain on the bodies of others. By placing the blame and responsibility on individuals, structural violence erases the origins of social inequalities (Dutta et al. 2016). To counteract this effect, history is positioned as a tool to uncover structural violence as a human construct; ignoring it creates accomplices of the “hegemonic accounts” (Farmer, 2004a, p. 308) that eliminate the responsibility of those who have benefited from an unequal social order. In our study, we understand structural violence as a kind of violence that is systematically exerted over long periods of time by members of a particular social order over those made vulnerable and marginalized (Farmer, 2003, 2004a). This form of violence and its multiple manifestations—poverty, racism, and sexism, among others (Dutta et al., 2016; Farmer, 2003)—blocks individuals and groups from reaching their full potential. This definition unravels the relationships of complicity that consistently produce long-term winners and losers in society (Farmer et al., 2006).

To pay attention to structural inequality, HRE needs tools that help teachers and students comprehend but also critique the world. The need to address structural violence in HRE is evident in the four phases of the World Programme for Human Rights Education (2005–2009, 2010–2014, 2015–2019, and 2020–2024; United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019) established by the General Assembly in 2004. In the principles that outline human rights pedagogical activities, the four phases of the program explicitly encourage the “analysis of chronic and emerging human rights problems (including poverty, violent conflicts and discrimination), which would lead to solutions consistent with human rights standards” (p. 14, para. 8). For this reason, here we follow Farmer’s (2003) argumentative line and define human rights violations not as unanticipated events but as “symptoms of pathologies of power” intrinsically linked to the same social conditions that unequally distribute resources in society (p. 7).

To approach human rights violations through the lens of structural violence creates space for students to understand the historical conditions that produce human rights violations and move away from the disproportionate focus on legal aspects. More important, and in relation to the concept of powerful knowledge, by approaching human rights violations as manifestations of violence, including, crucially, structural violence, students gain the opportunity to cultivate knowledge that expands and helps them conceptualize their everyday experiences in relation to society. In line with the three central characteristics of powerful knowledge, structural violence is an abstract and generalizable concept not traditionally discussed in the family setting and transcending common sense (Young, 2009, 2013; Young & Muller, 2014). Even in contexts where human rights are not explicitly discussed, this concept allows students to identify, name, and explain the conditions that index human rights violations. Unlike the rote memorization of human rights legal instruments, this pedagogical approach creates the conditions for students to enter current discussions in the field of human rights and related disciplines. Finally, studying human rights violations in light of discussions on structural violence requires students to develop a network of concepts that captures more than merely the content of human rights legal instruments. Through this approach, students recognize human rights violations as the absence or abuse of human rights while also developing the tools to situate human rights violations historically, to identify key actors and the interests that guide their decisions, and to explain how these decisions privilege certain groups over others. In short, students will have the tools to explain why and how human rights violations prevail, thereby developing a critical awareness of the forces that structure their own lives (Parker, 2017).

Research Methods

A research team collected data during the 2014–2015 academic school year in two New York City public high schools participating in an HRE course led by a local nongovernmental organization (NGO). Founded in 2005, the NGO HumanRightsOrg ⁴ worked through direct partnerships with teachers from economically disadvantaged New York City public high schools to provide students with HRE classes and training around advocacy and community organizing. ⁵ The course aimed to teach human rights advocacy while at the same time providing students with opportunities to exercise their rights to participate in influencing change. Students were assigned to a human rights course, which met during a normal class period several times a week.

Data and Method

Both schools in the study were composed of 99% minority students (primarily Black and Latinx), with more than 85% of the students categorized as economically disadvantaged (NYC Department of Education, 2015). Students participating in this research identified primarily as African American/Black (87% of students) or Hispanic/Latinx (10%); the school population included first- and second-generation students from Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, and West Africa.

The data used in this study come from a larger sequential mixed-methods study (see Russell, 2018) that gathered survey, interview, and observation data over the academic school year. The research team, consisting of the primary investigator (second author) and three doctoral research assistants (including the first author), conducted six focus group interviews and 36 individual interviews across the three classrooms (see Table 1, for more details on participants). This article focuses on the qualitative interview and observation data.

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Table 1

Student Participants

Student	School	Class	Gender	Age	Grade	Race/Ethnicity
Makhi	1	Class A	Male	17	11	African American/African/Black
Alisha	1	Class A	Female	16	11	African American/Black
Chloe	1	Class A	Female	16	11	African American/Caribbean/Black
Jerome	1	Class A	Male	16	11	African American/Black
Joe	1	Class A	Male	16	11	West Indian/Guyanese
Davon	1	Class A	Male	16	11	Latinx
Jimmy	1	Class A	Male	15	11	African American/Black
Jayla	2	Class B	Female	15	10	African American/Caribbean/Black
Lara	2	Class B	Female	15	10	African American/African/Black
Mariah	2	Class B	Female	15	10	African American/Caribbean/ Black/Native America
Tisha	2	Class B	Female	15	10	African American/Black
Kiara	2	Class B	Female	15	10	African American/Caribbean/Black
Lachie	2	Class C	Male	14	10	African American/Caribbean/Black
Trevon	2	Class C	Male	14	10	African American/Black
David	2	Class C	Male	16	10	Latinx
Kahawai	2	Class C	Male	15	10	African American/Caribbean/Black

Note. Students represented in the article are from a larger sample of both individual and group interviews.

Each team member introduced herself as a researcher (PI) or student-researcher (RA) who wanted to learn more about students’ experiences in the human rights class. To bridge the distance between the research team and the students, the team deliberately asked to be called by their first names—some students still insisted on calling us “Miss”—and made a conscious effort to have our own chair and desk in the rear of the classroom, next to students, and to engage with them in one-on-one conversations and during group activities. However, the inherent power dynamics and positionality of the research team, which included white and Latina women from an elite university, likely influenced how students interacted with researchers or answered interview questions. To address the authors’ positionality and lived experiences, the research team reflexively examined their own racial and cultural awareness throughout the research process of data collection and analysis (Milner, 2007). Despite differences in backgrounds, the research team consciously sought to connect with the students and understand their lived realities. For example, one of the research assistants (first author) lived in the Bronx two subway stops away from the school at the time of the research and was thus familiar with the social context where the students lived and how it informed their narratives of everyday violence. Moreover, the research team focused on listening to and learning from the students and revised the interview protocol at multiple points during the project to address new ideas emerging from the initial interviews with students.

Usually the interviews were individual; however, on two occasions when students asked to participate in the interview with one of their peers, the interviewer agreed. During the interviews, students were asked open-ended questions about their knowledge of human rights issues, attitudes about human rights, opinions about other groups, and civic engagement. During the first round of interviews and in classroom conversations with students, violence emerged as a topic, so we subsequently added questions to address violence and its connection to human rights in the interviews conducted at the end of the year. We interviewed a purposively selected sample of boys (n = 10) and girls (n = 8; from students who participated in the survey) across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, grades, and family origins at both the beginning and the end of the year. Pseudonyms are used to protect students’ identities. ⁶ To complement the interviews, the research team observed the weekly HRE classes carrying out more than 100 hours of classroom observations during the academic year. By consistently attending classes with the students several times a week and interacting with them, the research team was able to gain trust and build a relationship with the students.

The research team recorded and transcribed the interviews verbatim. Once interviews were completed, the team met to develop the coding protocol, which emerged from initial rounds of coding. Coding entailed predetermined etic codes from the literature (e.g., human rights violations, human rights documents) as well as emerging emic codes (e.g., violence, police brutality, and racial discrimination; see Table 2, for examples of codes). We used both concept coding, aimed at representing broader ideas, and descriptive coding, which describes and summarizes the data (Saldaña, 2016). For example, we first coded the data for our main conceptual themes around human rights and human rights violations, which emerged from the initial focus of the project. We then did a second round of descriptive coding, focusing on the emic codes around direct and structural violence that emerged from the data; these included, for example, fighting, drug violence, and police brutality. The research team coded the qualitative interview and classroom observation data using NVivo software.

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Table 2

Examples of Codes

Category	Code	Subcode	Definition
Citizenship-state			Code when students use the specific term or when they refer to institutions or persons that constitute the state
	Government
	Police
	School
	Voting
Human rights
	Definition of human rights		Code students’ answer to the question—how do you define human rights?
	Universal human rights		Code when students either name a universal right or use the expression “universal human rights”
	Economic, social and cultural rights		Code when students either name an economic, social or cultural right or use the expression ““economic, social and cultural rights”.”
	Miranda rights		Code when students either name a Miranda Right or use the expression “Miranda Rights.”
	HR documents		Code when students cite human rights documents.
	HR knowledge		Code when students describe what they know about human rights.
	HR violations		Code when students either mention a human right abuse or use the expression ““human rights violation”“ or ““human rights abuse”.”
	Cultural relativism		Code when students mention cultural differences to explain a particular action.
Violence
	Drug-related violence		Code when students mention an event that involves the production, commercialization, or consumption of psychoactive substances and some form of violence.
	Gang-related violence		Code when students describe a violent event that involves the participation of gangs.
	Physical violence
		Bullying	Code when students mention the term or when they describe actions that harm or intimidate an individual or a group.
		Fighting	Code when students mention the term or when they refer to events when individuals displayed physical force.
		Police brutality	Code when students mention the term or when they refer to the use of unnecessary or excessive force by the police.
	Structural violence
		Colonialism	Code when students mention the term or when they refer to the subjugation of a human group to another.
		Nationalism	Code when students mention the term or when they refer to emotions, ideas, practices, and events that show they care about a particular national identity.
		Racism	Code when students mention the term or when they refer to the systemic oppression of a racial group to the advantage of another
		Sexism	Code when students mention the term or when they refer to the systemic oppression of a group to the advantage of another based on the idea that some are inferior because of their sex.

In biweekly meetings, the team reviewed the coding and resolved any discrepancies across coders. Additionally, at the end of the coding process, the PI merged and reviewed the final coding files. Drawing from this NVivo file, the first author wrote descriptive memos for each participant. The purpose was to trace each student’s learning path, to identify patterns and disruptions in students’ responses in the interview responses and observational data. Once the results from the interviews and the classroom observation notes were found to be consistent and trustworthy, preliminary findings were shared with the full research team. Informed by this collective feedback, the authors wrote analytic memos comparing students’ learning trajectories. In line with the research questions that guide this article, these memos answered the questions: What do students learn in a course structured around human rights violations? How does the curriculum content affect what students understand about human rights? What ideas are left behind?

While the findings are not generalizable beyond the students who participated in our study, the evidence provides insights into how students understand human rights violations as disconnected from structural violence. Moreover, since the study focused on students, we have limited data on the teachers and facilitators, aside from what we could glean from the classroom observations.

Findings

Our findings show that throughout the year, students learned about human rights often in relation to human rights violations. The way students understood human rights violations evolved over the year, from thinking of them as rules broken to identifying them more accurately as violations of rights. However, most students viewed the notion of violence as separate from human rights violations. In the rare cases where they did connect violence and human rights violations, such as in the case of police brutality, they often focused on physical violence and individualized responsibility rather than on broader notions of structural violence.

This section starts with an analysis of pedagogical practices and facilitator-student interactions that position human rights knowledge as knowledge about human rights violations. We then explain the students’ tendency to dislocate human rights from violence-related issues; in closing, we provide an analysis of the limitations embedded in teaching police brutality as removed from broader historical and social contexts.

Discussion

In this article, we analyze the case of a HRE curriculum that emphasized knowledge about human rights as knowledge about human rights violations. Our findings reveal that through exposure to a human rights course, students understood the importance and relevance of human rights frameworks. In addition, students were able to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning of human rights violations, evolving from rules to actual violations of rights. Nonetheless, we also find that aligned with the curricular content, students generally conceptualized human rights vis-à-vis human rights violations, pointing to the tendency to dichotomize human rights rather than explore the social and historical context that gave rise to specific human rights violations.

This research sheds light on the challenges students faced linking two concepts that could complement each other: human rights violations and violence. Despite the importance of different forms of violence in shaping students’ everyday experiences, through a curriculum that approached human rights violations as a series of isolated cases, they struggled to establish connections between this concept and the different forms of violence they experienced daily. Violence was prevalent in these students’ communities and schools; however, only a subgroup of students (8 of 18) directly related violence to their understanding of human rights and human rights violations. While studies in the field of HRE have demonstrated students’ tendency to assume that human rights violations are distant or international events (see Barton, 2015; Branigan & Ramcharan, 2012; Kim, 2019), this research illustrates that the proclivity to introduce human rights violations as emblematic and ahistorical cases spread across the curriculum, directed students’ attention toward the physical violence inflicted on the human body rather than on structural issues.

Although by the end of the year almost all students were able to identify human rights violations correctly, they often viewed violence as a separate phenomenon, one unrelated to human rights violations. When linking human rights to violence in their own lives, they often framed this in terms of physical violence related to gang activity, drugs, or police violence, which is especially salient in the context of urban schools (see Astor & Meyer, 2001; Dupper & Meyer-Adams, 2002; Meyer-Adams & Conner, 2008). Students’ testimonies showed a general tendency to provide definitions of violence that prioritized the physical and psychological dimensions over the invisible forces that shape the unequal distribution of power in society.

In contrast to recent work that demonstrates the capacity of structural thinking to increase students’ ability to historicize exclusionary and violent practices (see Hope et al., 2014; Schensul & Berg; 2004) and make sense of how society is organized (see McArthur & Muhammad, 2020 Seider et al., 2016), this research shows that the curriculum offered little feedback or opportunity to expand students’ understanding of the structural and social conditions that produce human rights abuses. The curriculum did not support instruction related to the current systems of oppression—capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, nationalism—that connect apparently isolated events across time and space. Subsequently, students learned how to identify but not necessarily how to explain the eruption and persistence of human rights violations or understand human rights violations as manifestations of deeper societal issues. Simultaneously, it overlooked the actors and decisions that configure the conditions for human rights violations to take place. This study illustrates that teaching human rights abuses outside a historical and political context limits students’ potential to capture those indirect forms of violence that generate the inequalities they navigate daily. To teach human rights through local issues makes the curriculum more relevant to students’ everyday experiences but not necessarily more conducive to critical analyses.

In the case of police violence, which most students identified as a clear example of a human rights violation, students generally focused on the physical manifestations of violence and the individual responsibility to prevent this violence rather than on the historical and social structural conditions that gave rise to it. The facilitators’ emphasis on self-protection reduced the widespread racial inequalities across the U.S. criminal justice system to a particular version of police brutality. This pedagogical approach detaches police brutality from the long history of segregation, racial bias, and state-sponsored violence in the country (Alexander, 2012). It separates it from related phenomena such as the school-to-prison pipeline and the mass incarceration of young men of color. The historical and racialized roots of police brutality were neglected, and the focus was placed on best-practice personal responses to police brutality. Although it did not aim to place the onus of police violence onto potential victims, the curriculum did not help students render visible and denounce the violence that perpetuates institutionalized racism. Similarly to Kim’s (2019) findings in Korea where students focused on individual responsibility over an structural analysis of domestic human rights abuses, in these three classrooms, students, in general, failed to connect such instances of violence to societal arrangements linked to structural violence (Farmer, 2004a; Galtung, 1969) or connect a history of racial discrimination and injustice in the United States to the violations they identified. Although students were taught practical knowledge to help them navigate encounters with the police and help reduce the danger of those encounters, powerful knowledge, as knowledge that would help the students understand the prevalence and structural origins of police brutality, was neglected.

Conclusion

We argue that while grounding HRE in an international legal framework is foundational (Tibbitts, 2018), teaching human rights only through legal instruments decontextualized from the local historical and social context renders invisible existing structural inequalities, inequalities that continue to have grave effects on marginalized populations in the context of the United States. Although learning about human rights implies learning its legal origins, we propose that HRE and the study of human rights violations must be situated historically and connected to how society is structured in order for students to grasp how individual and collective histories intersect and influence current conditions, including social inequality. For HRE to become effective in the struggle for rights, we need to provide students with conceptual tools that help them better understand how human rights violations are produced in the first place—that is, their root causes. By integrating structural violence into the distinctive discourse of human rights, we argue that students could gain new opportunities to approach and understand human rights violations as instances where local events are connected to national and global dynamics and where concrete everyday experiences respond to wider structural arrangements.

In this context, we situate powerful knowledge as a productive avenue to strengthen HRE’s knowledge base. First, we consider it essential to structure the curriculum so that the human rights discourse and the human rights case studies commonly used as examples are historically situated. This shift implies naming and explaining the social and economic forces that incubate forms of violence in relation to the role that different actors play, their purposes, and interests. This step can create learning opportunities for students to account for those who benefit and lose in situations where human rights violations are palpable. In dialogue with Tibbitts (2002) and Kim (2019) who argue for a conceptually complex understanding of human rights, we suggest incorporating complementary concepts from different disciplinary fields. Expanding HRE’s conceptual framework can help students explore the human rights discourse’s potential and scope as it has been formulated thus far. In this case, we advocate for the use of structural violence as a means to expand students’ understanding of what constitutes a human rights violation. This strategy can also help them transcend the bare description of human rights legal instruments and shed new light on their everyday experiences. Although we recognize that incorporating a broader conceptual repertoire might imply addressing the ambiguous relationships between related concepts, this study’s findings demonstrate the importance of making connections across abstract ideas tangible and obvious for students. Based on these premises, we propose that rather than situating the notion of human rights violation as an end in itself, educators approach it as a platform of inquiry. As such, it can help reveal the social forces that shape our societies, including both the physical and the more subtle manifestations of violence. Finally, we argue that it is vital for students to engage critically with the possibilities for political action each social milieux affords. We concur with Barton (2020), that the curriculum should offer plenty of opportunities for students to acknowledge and experiment with the social mobilization strategies and institutional mechanisms that make long-term change possible.

By bringing the notions of structural violence and powerful knowledge (Parker, 2017; Young 2013) to the examination of human rights violations, we aim to expand HRE’s transformative potential, specifically the knowledge students need to engage in an active and critical analysis of their own conditions. In line with Bajaj et al. (2017) and using ’Young’s (2013) notion of powerful knowledge, we sustain that the curriculum can use everyday practical experiences as hooks to engage students and show them the relevance of the content to come. However, a powerful HRE curriculum should do more than this: it should go beyond common-sense knowledge and incorporate concepts that support students in moving beyond the specificities of their personal experiences (Young, 2012). Although human rights violations is a term normally used within the human rights global regime to index actions—abuses of power—that go against human dignity, in HRE this same term is used to define educational goals, prescribe curriculum content, and inform class didactics. Findings from this work problematize this trend. By describing human rights violations as manifestations not only of violence but of structural violence, we offer a conceptual and pedagogical alternative that not only recognizes human rights abuses as catalysts for legal and humanitarian action but also provides students with explanatory tools to produce new, critical interpretations of their surroundings. By examining the pedagogical use of human rights violations in HRE, this study shows that the equivalency between human rights and human rights violations constrains how students integrate this educational content into their lives.

To support students in developing forms of political action rooted in critical analysis of society and thus amplify ’Love’s (2019) call to embrace education as a path to radical change, we present the notions of structural violence and powerful knowledge as conceptual and pedagogical tools to support educators in moving beyond the legalistic formulations prevailing in HRE. Future research is needed on the pedagogical strategies necessary to teach about structural violence within a human rights framework in a way that spearheads students’ willingness to engage in transformative action.