“You Talk Of Terrible Things So Matter-of-Factly in This Language of Science”: Constructing Human Rights in the Academy

How does the everyday politics behind scientific inquiry impact what we come to know about the world? Here I consider this question in the context of my own fieldwork on the human rights response to children born of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. First, I reflect on how the academy functions to direct researchers' attention and skill sets to certain types of human rights problems in certain ways, inevitably affecting what we can know about our subject matter. Second, I consider the practical politics by which human rights scholars interface with policy-makers, the media, and the public, and the extent to which members of the human rights scholarly community constitute nodes in the wider networks we are studying.