Legacy Lecture: "Teaching the Human Dimension", Legacy of Human Rights

In the first presentation by Gabby Rivera (co-leading in the discovery series), she discussed the highlights and results of co-teaching the Legacy of Human Rights Course.

She began by discussing the similarity between individuals from different ethnicities and continued on to talk about making the topic of human rights personal to each student. To do this, they required personal journals be written, present music that was meaningful to them. In journals, they asked the students to report on whether they experiences any human rights abuses, and then reflect on their own morality and consistency with human rights treatment.

They also required students to come up with hypothetical solutions to current immigration issues in our country and Mexico as well as Germany and Syria to "be sent to the UN".

Further, they also had to participate in very political debates that required them to consider both sides of a given topic (typically revolving around cultural background and legal issues).

Phoebe Cummins, another honors major, focused on the misrepresentation of Latin America in the United States because of "Breaking Bad".

With an underlying interest in drug trafficing, she noticed that dealers are always unfairly depicted as Latino/Latina individuals. With this in mind, she chose "Breaking Bad" to analyze the consequences of the shows representation.

"Representation in the fictional world signifies social existence. Absence means symbolic annihilation."- George Gerbner

Phoebe discusses the lack of representation of the Latino population in television, despite being a great portion of the consumerism, and stated that when they are presented, they account for 50% of the criminals in television.

She noted that Caucasian characters in television fall into drug trafficing while Latino characters are inherently in bad business. When analyzing the Latino characters in the show, she sees that they appear less, are presented as incredibly morally corrupted, and unintelligent.

Why is this important to New Mexico?

• 48.8% of population is Latino, but the show represents primarily Caucasians (only 3.1% if speaking roles are played by Latinos in the U.S., despite being 18% of population and 24% of ticket buying power)
• residents of Albuquerque asked if drug involved if hispanic/male
• residents of Albuquerque asked if feel safe if hispanic/male
• show does bring in a lot of tourism/business/fees paid for film production
• dehumanization of hispanics and Latinos at large

Implications for Tolkien: 

All in all, both of these students combined brought my attention, yet again to the notion of diversity in Tolkien, negative representation or representation at all, and empathy...

I think because of Tolkien's inclusion of varying species, and the conversations he wrote between Orcs and between Elves and Dwarves, readers are at least somewhat expected to question their own beliefs and explore the potential for empathy for the Orcs, since they are used as slaves. In particular, this reminded me of one of our classmates creative project (Paul's), in which he writes about warfare from the perspective of Orcs. I think Tolkien would have really appreciated that.