“Engaging and lucid, Seeing Human Rights offers a vital analysis of the institutions and collectives that mobilize video in the fight for human rights, tackling key issues of our times.”
Lisa Parks, Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Ristovska transforms an older conversation on humanitarianism and photography by investigating the uses and limits of video technologies for human rights campaigning. Her focus on attempts to mediate visually between activists and institutions is original and productive.”
Samuel Moyn, Yale University; author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
“Ristovska has written a definitive book on how human rights activists use video technologies globally. As she closely examines experiences and tactics, she has produced a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich analysis.”
Silvio Waisbord, Director, School of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University; coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights
“Professor Sandra Ristovska's illuminating book about human rights video activism offers fresh interdisciplinary insights important across several fields, including law, human rights, political science, journalism, and information science. Drawing on extensive original research, Seeing Human Rights offers a superb account of how networks of human rights activists and media players deploy video activism, creating new possibilities for human rights work and visual evidence. This vital book charts fresh pathways in human rights activism and appeals to scholars, activists, practitioners, and general readers from diverse domains.”
Mary D. Fan, Jack R. MacDonald Endowed Chair in Law, University of Washington and author of Camera Power: Proof, Policing, Privacy, and Audiovisual Big Data
“An engrossing examination of human rights' media politics that will make a valuable contribution to journalism studies, critical legal and human rights scholarship, and media studies of distant suffering.”
International Journal of Communication
“This book is a superb guide to the ever-important and fast-evolving work of this 'proxy profession.'”
International Affairs
“Anyone studying visual communication in institutional contexts, video activism, or media's impacts on human rights would greatly benefit from Ristovska's expansive, unique research in Seeing Human Rights.”
Human Rights Quarterly
“The impressive richness of nuanced observations makes Seeing Human Rights an important source for everyone interested in understanding how human rights videos from the grassroots are integrated, processed, and chewed up in the machineries of power and decision-making as video activism is turned into a proxy profession.”
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly
Outstanding Book Award, ICA, 2022
