The Human Rights & Social Literacy Syntax Project is a part of a field project for the Master of Arts in Human Rights Education (HRE) program at University of San Francisco. It, and its Twitter account @syntaxproject, focus on developing materials for learning about human rights, through human rights, for human rights—and to make your research life easier if you are studying human rights, are generally curious about human rights, or are looking for information on how social syntax works.
The vision of the Human Rights & Social Literacy Syntax Project is to reframe the way that human rights are conceptualized in the United States. By addressing HRE through multiple spaces and vernaculars, the project seeks to facilitate the translation and integration of human rights concepts through the use of 1) language, 2) visual communications. At this intersection, HRE is combined with media & information literacy (MIL) to consider redefining and expanding parameters for literacy (as defined as conceptual skills) beyond the scope of reading and writing.
Theory & Information on the formal aspect of the project
This framework considers universal human rights standards as a complementary element to MIL through thinking about influences and the basic syntax of human communication. If the goal of MIL is to raise literacy in the languages of media and information (film, television, advertisements, news, literature = information/messages) then human rights is considered in this context as the standard with which to reference and decode information. One must decode to something, not just from it. To address the diversity that exists in the United States, and to focus on setting standards to those at the international level, the project looks at both of these areas to create the intersection of social literacy through syntax breakdown.
For more information on the academic half of this project, you can download the 42-pages of theory and analysis that inform this project & the accompanying workshop on syntax analysis from: http://repository.usfca.edu/capstone/265
Information on the project compiler
The Human Rights & Social Literacy Syntax Project was developed by Jazzmin Gota as part of her thesis project in Human Rights Education (HRE) @USFCA_SOE. The project was developed by combining her background as a new media/multimedia designer & producer with her graduate studies in HRE. After searching for HRE materials to explain human rights persons outside of the field (general public), she developed this project to address the gap between the international law-based system of human rights and present-day public vernaculars.