The visiting professor of peace, justice, and human rights on his book, Digging for the Disappeared, and considering human rights through the examination of mass graves.
Adam Rosenblatt, a visiting professor in peace, justice, and human rights, spends a lot of time pondering the dead. In his 2015 book, Digging for the Disappeared (Stanford University Press), he looks at forensic investigations of mass graves, using case studies from Argentina to South Africa; the rise of the global human rights movement; and the many ethical questions that arise when the desires of different constituents (family members, war crimes tribunals, governments) conflict. Besides the dead, Rosenblatt studies topics as diverse as animal rights and autism, and he has taught such courses as "Human Rights and the Dead," "Children’s Rights/Children’s Liberation," and "Organizations, Missions, Constraints" since joining Haverford last year. Before pursuing his doctoral degree, he worked at various nonprofit groups, including the International Forensic Program of the New York-based nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights.
Lini S. Kadaba spoke with Rosenblatt about Digging for the Disappeared, which received the American Library Association’s 2016 Outstanding Academic Title Award, and his varied research interests.
You have experience both in the field and in academia. How has that informed your research?
Adam Rosenblatt: It’s certainly given me a very real sense of the constraints these organizations are under. There’s a lot that is out of their control, whether it’s that there are landmines near the grave and you can’t get to it safely, or there isn’t enough funding to locate every grave…The overall theme of my book is that investigating the dead raises a whole bunch of really complex ethical questions that don’t get answered very well by armchair philosophy. They need to be answered in ways that take practice into account and then help build dialogue between scholars and practitioners. All of that emerges from the fact that I started in the field and went back to study it as a scholar.
How did you get interested in looking at human rights through the lens of forensic investigations of mass graves?
AR: Three of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. I witnessed them growing old, my family burying them in places with marked tombstones, where we can go and leave flowers. But much of my family tree has disappeared in mass graves, forests, or ashes throughout Poland. I’ve witnessed in my own family history the difference it makes in terms of dignity, in terms of care, to have a place where the body is laid to rest by people who mourn it. I’m also always trying to ask questions that initially seem abstract and philosophical but actually have to be negotiated by real organizations and real people. Mass grave investigations are full of these questions. How do you spend resources? Who gets to decide if a grave is exhumed or not? Is it a geopolitical or scientific decision?
What’s the common thread among your many research interests?
AR: The link between children, animals, autism, and the dead is that I’m interested in human rights, and these are all categories that have either troubled the idea of the human—of what is considered a human person, with the rights and considerations that entails—or been written out by people who didn’t want to think about them in moral terms, as part of our wider moral community. There’s this really great quote from [American writer] Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals that says sometimes to see something clearly you need to look just off to the side of it. One of the best ways to look at the strengths and weaknesses of human rights is to squint really hard at the places people have treated as the edges of the human.
