Remaking Women’s Human Rights in the Vernacular: The Resonance Dilemma

The question of how norms developed in one place are adopted or appropriated in another is often described in terms of diffusion or travel. However, the process is better understood in terms of the relationship between the social situations in which norms are produced and those into which they are absorbed. Norms do not remain fixed in this process, since they are embedded in social relationships, identities and subjectivities, and are transformed by the social context into which they move. This chapter reconsiders these ideas, which we have earlier referred to as vernacularisation, within the framework of a situated approach to norm engagement.