Exercising Human Rights investigates why human rights are not universally empowering and why this damages people attempting to exercise rights. It takes a new approach in looking at humans as the subject of human rights rather than the object and exposes the gendered and ethnocentric aspects of violence and human subjectivity in the context of human rights. This book is significant for anyone with an interest in human rights campaigns and in the study of political images.

Part 1: Gender, Agency and Practice 1. Overview 2. The Fallacy of Gender-Neutrality 3. Agency and Practice Part 2: Exercising Human Rights 4. Visual Methodology 5. Visualising Women's Agency: Amnesty International's 2004 Campaign Stop Violence against Women 6. Not in Our Backyard: Visual Agency in the Oka Crisis 7. Reflections

Robin Redhead is Senior Lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University