This year-long project will provide an ethnographic alternative to understanding human rights through the dominant universalist/cultural relativist paradigm. Set in Thailand, it will build on six months of preliminary fieldwork and language training in Bangkok in 2002 and 2003, and take the National Human Rights Commission, the Health System Reform Organization, and the Community Development Department, Ministry of the Interior, as its primary sites. It will employ interviews to collect professional biographies of NGO leaders in order to study the intersection of personal biographies and institutional histories in new social movements, participant observation to learn about the everyday functioning and institutional protocols of the NHRC and HSRO, and archival research to track the development and crafting of specific human rights cases.
