WUNRN
Local
Action/Global Change: A Handbook on Women's Human Rights
By Nancy Flowers and Julia A. Mertus
Paradigm Press announces the publication of Local Action/Global Change: A
Handbook of Women's Human Rights by Julie A. Mertus and Nancy Flowers. Each chapter
of this comprehensive book addresses key issues on women's human rights along
with participatory learning activities that encourage integration of these
global issues with personal experience. In addition each chapter offers
statistical information, examples of women's activism, and an examination of
international rights law related to the topic.
Chapter topics include:
• An introduction of women's human rights
• Women's human rights to equality and nondiscrimination
• Women's human rights in the family
• The human rights of young women and girls
• Women's human right to health
• Women's human rights to reproduction and sexuality
• Women's human right to freedom from violence
• Women's human right to an adequate standard of living
• Women's human rights and globalization
• Women's human rights and work
• Women's human right to education
• Women's human rights in politics, public life, and the media
• The human rights of refugee, displaced, and war-affected women
• The road ahead: local action and global change.
A major contribution to the growing field of human rights education, Local
Action/Global Change was written for a global audience both to inform and to
motivate action on behalf of women's human rights.
Local Action/Global Change is available through Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/Local-Action-Global-Change-Handbook/dp/1594515158/ref=ed_oe_p
Nancy Flowers is a writer, editor, and human rights consultant. Recent
publications include Compasito, A Manual on Children's Human Rights Education
(Council of Europe, 2007) and Human Rights. YES! Action and Advocacy on the
Rights of People with Disabilities (Minnesota, 2007).
Julie A, Mertus is Associate Professor and Co-director of the MA program in
Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs at American University. She has worked on
human rights education in more than twenty countries and has authored numerous
publications on human rights. Her book Bait and Switch: Human Rights and US
Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2004) was named "Human Rights Book of the
Year" by the American Political Science Association.
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Julie Mertus and I hope very much that our new publication, "Local
Action/Global Change: A Handbook of Women's Human Rights", will prove to
be a useful tool for human rights educators of all kinds. Although this new
publication bears a similar title as an earlier book (published 1999 by UNIFEM
and the Center for Women's Global Leadership) and maintains the original
format, every chapter has been rewritten in the light of another decade of
women's activism and new chapters have been added, including on globalization,
the right to an adequate standard of living, and women with disabilities.
The original book was translated into many languages and found use many
different settings, from health clinics and refugee camps to high school and
college classrooms. We attribute this success to the fact that it combined a
wealth of factual information with learning activities that made it accessible
to a wide variety of audiences, and we have tried to retain those qualities in
the new book. For example, every chapter is interwoven with learning activities
that require neither technology nor literacy and draw directly upon
participants' personal experience. Furthermore the book makes no assumption
about the participants' culture or context: each chapter offers statistical
information and examples of women's activism drawn from a global perspective.
In addition, each chapter examines the international human rights law related
to the topic.
Because we have learned that most organizations using the book as a training
tool address topics separately, we have designed each chapter to stand alone.
However, there are obvious cross-references among the chapters (e.g., the
chapter on women's health is explicitly linked to those on women's right to the
right to reproduction and sexuality, to young women and girls, to the right to
education, and to women's human rights in the family). Believing that the
ultimate goal of human rights education is the building of a culture of the
human rights, we conclude each chapter with an activity entitled "Speaking
Out for ….," which carries learning forward into action. Our purpose in
writing this book was both to inform and to motivate. If the community of human
rights educators finds it a useful resource, we will have achieved our goal.
Nancy Flowers
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