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Human rights are 'struggle' concepts and people engage in this struggle through theory and practice; people encounter prejudice and discrimination as ideas and actions. Although this is often depicted as a dichotomy, our everyday encounters with prejudice and discrimination make it clear that this struggle requires that we dismantle the false divide between theory and practice if we are to truly achieve the rights and freedoms that belong to us. Community education projects that enable people to contribute both ideas and action have much to teach us about how to weave together theory and practice in ways that enable people to contribute to the human rights struggle within local communities. I offer this article as a contribution to this task. In it I analyse participants’ perceptions of their involvement in a method of community education known as The Human Library, and I discuss what these perceptions teach us about community education projects that enable people to contribute their ideas and actions to the human rights struggle.

Living with difference is an unavoidable part of living in Australia. How we live with difference, therefore, impacts how people imagine and reimagine Australia. This paper considers the matter of reimagining Australia as a phenomenon that is located within the microecology of our everyday urban spaces. It is interested in knowing about these spaces and how they can contribute to the reimagining of Australia at the microlevel of society. It considers two examples of spaces that engage people in this task and advances the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection, framing reimagining within Anthony Kwame Appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s vision of coexistence.

Human rights activism often aims to disrupt discriminatory behaviours and attitudes. Situated within the wider context of the human rights culture, such activism is part of the consideration of what it means to be human. Richard Rorty contributes to this discussion via his theory of sentimental education. Activism, however, requires moving beyond discussion to particular responses. One way this can occur is by encouraging community members to gradually recognise the emergence of alternative ways of understanding themselves and their fellow community members. Paulo Freire named this, ‘conscientization.’ The dynamic nature of conscientization brings human rights activists into this experience, which ruptures discriminatory attitudes so that new attitudes may emerge. An example is found in “Human Books” who are persons who have experienced prejudice, discrimination and stereotypes and who volunteer to join the Human Library, a movement that seeks to bring persons who would not normally meet due to prejudice into conversations. These conversations aim to discontinue prejudice by rupturing long-held attitudes that result from lack of understanding of ‘the other.’ This promotes the emergence of respect between individuals. This chapter presents a case study of a group of Human Books and demonstrates how their experience drew them to encounter emergence, discontinuity and rupture.