The Visualizing Universalism symposium coincides with the opening of a new exhibition at Columbia University’s Buell Hall publicly displaying the original UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition and its archive for the first time in sixty years. UNESCO’s Human Rights Exhibition from 1949 was the first international event that sought to visually represent the history and meaning of the then-recently adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Using the exhibition as a platform for critical debate on contemporary human rights culture, the symposium explores insights provided by UNESCO’s first attempt to visualize and historicize the UDHR. In three sessions, we will discuss the exhibition’s historical context, its teleological narrative, and the ways in which human rights are represented and disseminated through visual culture – questions pertinent to both the exhibition and to contemporary discussions of human rights.

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