The purpose of this essay is to articulate and defend the epistemological foundations of international human rights education from the perspective of a hermeneutical interpretive methodology. Fuad Al-Daraweesh and Dale Snauwaert argue here that this methodology potentially alleviates the challenges that face the cross-cultural implementation of human rights education. While acknowledging the necessity of global human rights awareness, the authors maintain that local cultural conceptualization is imperative to the negotiated, local embrace of human rights. A critical, interpretive pedagogy emerges from (...) grounding human rights education in a hermeneutic methodology. Thus, Al-Daraweesh and Snauwaert advocate taking a hermeneutical approach in order to enlarge the scope and meaning of international human rights education. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to revisit Brown as a paradigmatic understanding of social justice and its barriers, by reconsidering Brown in light of the three moral pillars of democracy identified by Cornel West (2004). West maintains that authentic deep democracy is grounded in three fundamental capacities and dispositions, or pillars: (a) Socratic questioning, (b) a prophetic commitment to justice, and (c) tragicomic hope. West's articulation of these pillars constitutes 20 a philosophical framework for the exploration of the basic (...) demands of justice in a democratic society. These moral pillars can also offer useful insights into this phase of living exploration of Brown and its central place in educational studies. (shrink)