Description:

Alison Dundes Renteln, Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Public Policy and Law, University of Southern California

"The Human Right to Photograph: Assessing the Impact of Images in Human Rights and Humanitarian Campaigns"

Alison Dundes Renteln is a Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Law, and Public Policy at the University of Southern California where she teaches Law and Public Policy with an emphasis on comparative and international law. A graduate of Harvard (History and Literature), she has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the USC Gould School of Law. At USC she served as Director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politic and also Vice-Chair and Chair of Political Science. In 2005 she received the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (campus-wide).

Her publications include The Cultural Defense (Oxford, 2004), Folk Law (University of Wisconsin, 1995), Multicultural Jurisprudence (Hart, 2009), and Cultural Law (Cambridge, 2010), Global Bioethics and Human Rights (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), Images and Human Rights (Cambridge Scholars 2017), and numerous articles.

For decades she has also taught judges, lawyers, court interpreters, jury consultants, and police officers at meetings of the American Bar Association, National Association of Women Judges, North American South Asian Bar Association, and the American Society of Trial Consultants. Renteln has collaborated with the UN on the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, lectured on comparative legal ethics in Bangkok and Manila at ABA-sponsored conferences, and served on civil rights commissions and a California committee of Human Rights Watch. In Fall 2013 she was a Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences where she conducted research on incentives for civic engagement including the legal duty to rescue. In Spring 2014 she was a Human Rights Fellow at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. She gathered data on the use of images in human rights and humanitarian campaigns. Her current research is at the intersection between sociolegal studies and sensory studies.

Professor Renteln is currently working with colleagues to set up a USC Human Rights Center to sponsor collaborative research, bring speakers (human rights defenders, UN officials, and government officials) to campus and give students internship experiences abroad.

She is married to Paul Renteln, a professor of physics. They have two sons.