CBC Ideas Week: Brave New Worlds

How do we create a better world? How do we articulate the kind of future we want to live in, something that has never been tried before? This five-part series, moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed, explores efforts throughout history to imagine new possibilities and make them real by focusing on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

Born out of the devastation of the Second World War, the Universal Declaration sought to set the world on a new course. The rights it sought to uphold have evolved over the decades since, at times widely upheld, at others eroded and denied. Each panel charts the state of one of these human rights through the years. What kind of new world were these rights supposed to create? What do they mean in the 21st century, and can their ideals be reimagined in the service of new utopias? What’s the relationship between rights and realities, between calling for a more just world - and actually bringing it into being?

The Rights to Freedom of Thought and Expression: Articles 18 and 19

The guarantee to freedom of thought, as well as the freedom to express those thoughts, is especially resonant in our own time. In his novel 1984, Orwell proposed a future of “thought-crime” and in many places that day has arrived; freedom of opinion is under even greater threat - social media everywhere exposes and places individuals under threat for what they say and do.