ÌÇÐÄTV

Abstract: At least two things are self evident: Human rights have become the predominant conceptual language of modernity, and around the globe, one is witnessing multitudinous struggles over rights and human rights. But, how useful is the human rights framework and ‘global human rights’ scholarship for thinking about the stakes and struggles over rights and human rights, and, more importantly, how do we conceptually capture rights struggles in what Partha Chatterjee has called ‘most of the world’? In order to conceptually capture the ethical dynamism, ideational energy and intellectual innovativeness of this language and activism around rights, I argue that we need yet more complex and different kinds of thinking. I propose the framework of vernacular rights cultures to theorise and empirically document the rights politics in ‘most of the world’. Through ethnographically tracking ‘vernacular rights cultures’ mobilised around grassroots citizen movements in South Asia, I will argue that this a key epistemic and political project in thinking about human rights politics and one consisting of a two fold challenge: to produce scholarship that will produce a shift in the epistemic centre of human rights, and to generate conceptual work supportive of those involved in challenging complex inequalities and the intersectional nature of oppression at the frontline.