Stitching a rights narrative: How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice

Abstract

AbstractHuman rights can be seen as a means to improve people's lived realities. Yet the language and practice of human rights are not always moored in these realities. What happens to the meaning of human rights when these are expressed in (partly non‐verbal) ways that are deeply rooted in lived—embodied, material, and cultural—realities, and how does that practice transform ideas about rights? In this article, we describe how women from Syrian refugee communities living in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut use the skilled practice of embroidery to express and negotiate what they consider to be their rights and what they are entitled to. In doing so, they foreground a deeply indivisible, multi‐layered, and multi‐perspectival understanding of justice and more specifically of how they understand their rights. These perspectives, we argue, are intrinsically rooted in the embodied, material, and cultural practice through which they emerge, and offer avenues for enriching human rights debates.