It’s also about being human; what it is to be human in a modernising and globalising world; how, in responding to the circumstances of their times, different groups define, redefine, and attempt to put into practice their understandings of the good and of what constitutes a good life. And it’s about how human rights have come to be not abstract universal principles but a practical source of consciousness and practice for real people.

Drawing on the author’s experience as an anthropologist, the book examines different groups over the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first:

• Thai factory workers over a period of two coups in the 1970s
• Spanish nuns in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the end of the Franco dictatorship
• Aboriginal people in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia dealing with the impact of late colonialism and moves towards self-determination, from the 1980s to the present.

Light refreshments will be served.

Dr Mary Edmunds is a Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre

The book, A Good Life: Human rights and encounters with modernity is available from ANU e-Press