ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Standardizing the Universal: Human Rights, Statistics, and the U.N.’s International Institute of Aging in Malta

• In Event: Data Visualization and the History of Statistics 2

English Abstract

Claims of universality linger in postwar conceptions of human rights. Some scholars have traced this claim of universalism to enduring Enlightenment-era discourse surrounding the “rights of man” while others have argued that the coupling of human rights and universalism in the twentieth century is instead attributable to the ways in which decolonization and the tenets of international law has unfolded in the postwar period. This paper takes a different tack to explore the ways in which claims of universalism were supported by the history of statistical standardization. To do so, I use the history and visual productions of the United Nation’s International Institute for Aging in Malta (INIA). First proposed in 1969 and inaugurated in 1988, the justification for the creation of the INIA as a hub to collect and disseminate information relied on two strands of authority: first, organizers of the initiative argued that the right to the particular kind of care required by older people be embedded within the existing framework of universal human rights; second, diplomats and experts rested their case on statistical depictions of social bodies that enrolled numerical and aesthetic traditions of the past and present to generate alarm about the future. Along with probing the relationship between postwar universalism and statistical standardization, this paper further gestures towards the ways in which seeing with state-generated statistical graphics reinscribed the contours of the nation-state within the context of postwar (decolonizing) internationalism and begins to assess how the statistical model of human development assumed in the materials of the INIA that was aimed towards the inclusion of aging people simultaneously registered that category as outlier.

Author

• Brianne Wesolowski, Leiden University