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Introduction:
Helen Chauncey likens their work in acheiving an appreciation of diversity and coexistence
to the work of early human rights activists.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Coexistence and Human Rights
Helen Chauncey
The Coexistence Initiative
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Let's talk a little about tools, or more specifically about processes and
arenas of activity if you are interested in coexistence. Where do you work? With
whom do you work? To my knowledge no one yet has one single simple tool kit. As
in, here are the four things you should do and if you do them we absolutely
guarantee you that coexistence will be a positive experience for everybody.
Everyone will be free from fear about loss of identity and so on. It isn't out
there yet. In some ways there is a good parallel here to the human rights
movement.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written in 1948. If you
read that document thinking of yourself as being in the late 1940's, the
document basically spelled out a set of goals that no one could possibly achieve
in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years or 50 years if you take that declaration as the
base line for the human rights movement. They have done what in some ways we are
going to try to do also because by now human rights really has become something
of an embedded value. People do not only hope for that but call for that. Given
that, where do the arenas in which someone interested in making coexistence a
positive experience, making the world not only safe for diversity, but having
people want to reach out and embrace diversity go to?
With whom do you work? How
do you go about doing that work? This is one of those goals that requires that
you work at a number of different levels.
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