Walking, sitting, eating, listening: on creating liminal/third spaces for transformatory learning in Human Rights Education

This paper contributes to recent thinking about how learning in third spaces and spaces of liminality can enable transformatory Human Rights Education. Our particular concern is for developing ethical research relationships. Drawing from work on the social production of space, and Indigenous perspectives on learning, we consider how affordances of particular places, such as walking outside, or preparing and eating food, can be used to construct ‘other’ spaces in which human rights researchers’ response-ability, and new relationships, to others emerge. Our theorisation is grounded in the experiences of a 1st year Japanese law student, Yotaro, on a human rights programme in Sydney. We explore how different spaces of learning help Yotaro to empower himself in his relationship with human rights experts. We then suggest that an ethical Human Rights Education also involves transforming positions of researcher privilege, looking at how taking up affordances – or not – enables or constrains this transformation.