The Declarations Podcast is the human rights podcast run out of CGHR at the University of Cambridge. Season 8, the latest season of Declarations, is coming out soon.
This season focuses on the 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Here, we are asking: Who are human rights for? Where is the ‘human’ in human rights? What have we learnt about human rights conceptually as well as in practice over the last 75 years? These questions arise from considering and thinking about the current human rights discourse where both rights and their language are being employed to advocate for greater protection, but simultaneously being used to restrict freedom. Modern human rights (at least the dominant narrative), originated post the horrors of the two world wars, but are they still useful in that form and conception 75 years later? We ask how the concept and practice of human rights can remain fit-for-purpose and co-evolve with the changing world order. How can we use human rights to continue to drive a message and practice of hope?
The season’s episodes covers issues such as alternative conceptions of rights, role of politics in advancing human rights, violence against activists, silencing of dissident voices, gender-based violence, technology, human rights in and through culture, rights in revolutions, and monitoring and reporting as implementing human rights in sporting contexts. As always, the podcast team for this season was drawn from across the university with 7 different faculties represented amongst the 10 member team. The interdisciplinary and diverse nature of the team enabled us to explore novel topics with guests from around the world. Our guests came from varied backgrounds in terms of nationalities, gender, identities and ages. This was also a transition year with an entirely new team of students working on the podcast.
Declarations has had over 100,000 lifetime concurrent listeners and downloads across ten podcast platforms in 180 plus countries, with its biggest audience tuning in from the United States. This year the focus is to increase the reach of the podcast in terms of its guests as well as listeners. In future, the attempt would be to collaborate with other podcasts and explore other novel themes in greater detail.
You can find all the episodes on all popular podcast apps (Apple podcasts, Spotify), together with their show notes and links to further material, in case you want to dig deeper into a specific subject. See our website for profiles of season 8’s team.
