This project examines a coalition of women's social movement organizations to both explain the shift toward use of human rights by US-based organizations and to explain and effects of the shift on participants' human rights consciousness and therefore interpretation of their status and agency within the U.S. rights system. The rejection of human rights by the US state may explain why marginalized women of color are using the concept to build a domestic social movement for reproductive justice that challenges narrower reproductive rights analysis. The lack of human rights law in the US should result in fewer opportunities to mobilize human rights discourse, which would result in weakened belief in the utility of human rights. Yet, since its founding in 1997, the coalition has grown from 16 to over 80 organizations, with hundreds of additional individual members.
Drawing on interviews, observation, archival analysis and a survey, this research seeks to understand why the coalition chose to integrate human rights when US social movements generally do not engage with this discourse and the state generally rejects it. This project also aims to understand how the coalition's integration of human rights discourse impacts individual members'sense of self and other people as rights bearers. This interdisciplinary project engages with scholarship on human rights, legal consciousness, social movement framing and collective identity, and intersections of marginalized identities to explain the coalition's anomalous choice and success. This coalition's path shows that current literature fails to address these new possibilities for raising consciousness and mobilizing around human rights. This study will increase socio-legal understanding of shifts in understanding of rights due to increased global dialogue at both the institutional and individual level. Further, the findings will illuminate the "vernacularization" of human rights discourse, adding to the scholarship in multiple disciplines including law, sociology, political science, and gender studies, ultimately increasing the interdisciplinary dialogue necessary to understand how law and legal discourse permeates social life and social movements.
