Monthly Archives: January 2009

How to Find Full Text Articles on Human Rights

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Looking at the stats for this blog, it looks like many people who come here do so after googling “full text human rights articles” or something similar. 

For those looking for full text articles on human rights, there is good news and there is bad. 

First the bad:  Using Google, Yahoo!, or any other internet search engine is going to provide very limited results.  You may come up with a random article that someone cut and pasted and added to their website.  You may come up with essays on human rights that people have written on personal blogs.   Unfortunately, neither of these results are appropriate for academic human rights research. 

Instead, you need to find articles in peer-reviewed journals.  Examples of peer reviewed journals include titles like The Journal of Human Rights and Human Rights Quarterly, While there are a few journals freely available online, such as the Harvard Human Rights Journal, the bulk of them are only available through subscription databases such as Academic Onefile (formerly InfoTrac), Proquest Research Library, J-STOR, Academic Search, etc.

But now the good news!  University students only need to go to their school’s library website to access subscription databases for their research.  UConn students have a number of tools available to them for finding journal articles.

The Human Rights Research Guide, http://classguides.lib.uconn.edu/humanrights, has an entire page devoted to databases and finding journal articles on a variety of human rights subjects.    For UConn students, all you have to do is click on the database links.  (If you’re off campus, login to the UConn Virtual Private Network (VPN) first.)

Once you’re inside the database, many of them have ways to search for full text articles only.  But what if the perfect article for your paper comes up and it isn’t available full text?

For example, this citation, taken from the PAIS International database.  The article does not come up as full text.

Global Challenges: Climate Chaos and the Future of Development.
Sachs, Wolfgang
IDS Bulletin, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 36-39, Mar 2007
… development issues including economic growth & equity, human rights & wellbeing. He argues that the growth of the West was made possible by unsustainable exploitation of carbon resources & the colonies, & this can never again be repeated. The …
View Record | InterLibrary Loan |

But, don’t despair! 

Click on the button at the bottom of the citation.  When you do this, a new window opens telling you that UConn does in fact have this article available full text in another database. 

If you find an article that isn’t available full text in any of UConn’s databases, you can request the article through Document Delivery/Inter-Library Loan (DD/ILL) and a pdf copy will be emailed to you within 2-5 days.

For human rights articles in particular, here are a couple of databases that I recommend.

Academic Onefile

Includes most disciplines (multidisciplinary) with good coverage of both popular and scholarly publications.  Click on the boxes to limit to peer reviewed articles.  Can also limit search to full text only.

Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO)

Articles and reports on international affairs. Includes scholarly articles, papers from university research institutes and non-governmental organizations, foundation-funded research projects, and conference proceedings.

International Human Rights Exchange (IHRE) for Undergraduate Students

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International Human Rights Exchange (IHRE)
Johannesburg, South Africa
June 28 – November 16, 2009

IHRE is the only study abroad program to offer a fully integrated, liberal-arts-style curriculum in human rights open to both U.S. and South African (as well as other international) undergraduate students. The semester program promotes a critical understanding of human rights as a part of a broad intellectual and social movement, not simply as a code or set of laws, but a discourse in transformation and often in contest, extending to the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences. The program is run by Bard College in partnership with the University of Witswatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg and offers 16 credits of human rights-related coursework as well as the opportunity to participate in a fascinating internship with a local NGO in Johannesburg.

The IHRE program consists of two core courses: Human Rights: Perspectives from the Disciplines and Engagement in Human Rights. Students may also choose from 11 different electives on a wide range of human rights topics, such as Gender and Human Rights; Human Rights and African Literature; Human Rights and the Media; and Philosophy of Human Rights, among others. Students also have the potential to take regular Wits courses offered by the Humanities department. The internship option is an especially attractive and unique component of the IHRE program. As one student who recently interned at Zimbabwe’s Action for Conflict Transformation Center notes: “My internship experience provided a platform for me to practice what I am learning in the human rights course and acted as a stepping stone for me towards promoting human rights to achieve sustainable development.”

The IHRE application deadline is March 1, 2009. Applications for semester study are competitive and processed on a rolling basis. For more information on the program, please visit the following website: http://www.ihre.org  

Graduate Student Human Rights Conference at UConn

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CALL FOR PAPERS:  “Human Rights: Ideals and Realities”

Saturday, April 4, 2009

UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT, STORRS

* DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: FEBRUARY 16, 2009 *

The second annual multidisciplinary Graduate Human Rights Conference will be held on Saturday, April 4, 2009 at the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. The conference aims to bring together graduate students interested in human rights, from multiple disciplines, to present and share their research interests. The conference will include a keynote address as well as complimentary breakfast and lunch.

Keynote Speaker: Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA and Associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Eurasian and Russian Studies. 

Panel Themes: The conference encourages interdisciplinary social science, law, and humanities approaches to understanding human rights issues. Panel themes may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

  • Economic Rights
  • Education and Human Rights
  • Environmental Rights
  • Foundations of Human Rights
  • Gender and Human Rights
  • Group Rights
  • Human Rights and International Law
  • Humanitarianism

If you would like to present a paper, please submit the following information to the Human Rights Institute at humanrights at uconn.edu by February 6, 2009:

– YOUR FULL NAME

– INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION

– E-MAIL, POSTAL ADDRESS, and TEL. NO.

– PAPER TITLE

– 300-WORD PAPER ABSTRACT

Please feel free to contact humanrights at uconn.edu if you have any further questions regarding the conference.

Changes to UConn Library Website

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Happy Spring Semester!

You’ve probably noticed that the UConn Libraries website has a whole new look– http://lib.uconn.edu 

Since some things have moved around, I wanted to take a moment and point out the links to some human rights resources:

The Human Rights Research Guide:  http://classguides.lib.uconn.edu/humanrights

The Human Rights Research Guide is redesigned for the Spring semester, and has information on how to find human rights journals, databases, reference books, archival collections, films, websites and more!

The Human Rights Research Database Locator: http://rdl.lib.uconn.edu/subjects/2096

The Research Database Locator for Human Rights provides links to the most popular databases for finding arcticles on an array of human rights themes.

50 Human Rights Blogs Worth Checking Out

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Laura Milligan of e-Justice has created a list of The Top 50 Human Rights Blogs, broken down into categories such as Civil Liberties, Capital Punishment, Children’s Rights, International Outreach, General, Religion, Whistleblowers, and Politics.

A few Human Rights Blogs included in the list:

ACLU Blog of Rights: The American Civil Liberties Union posts about legislation, issues and campaigns that protect, influence and threaten civil liberties and freedom.

Labor is not a Commodity: This international labor rights blog covers child labor, underpaid workers and more.

Human Rights Now: The Amnesty International USA blog reports on global and regional conflicts, torture, progressive legislation and a lot more.

AlterNet: AlterNet’s Rights and Liberties blog covers everything from current political events to everyday human rights violations in lesser known areas.

Stop Genocide: Stop Genocide is a well-organized resource that shares news stories, tips for teaching about genocide, commentary and predictions about the state of human rights.

PhD Studies in Human Rights: This blog is designed for PhD students but is a great resource for anyone wanting to find news and reference material related to human rights issues.

New UNESCO Report on Historical and Contemporary Slavery

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A New UNESCO/WISE publication: Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery

 

By Dr Joel Quirk, Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), University of Hull. 

 

The full report is avaliable as a free pdf download at

http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=38451&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

 

 

Abstract:

 

Interest in contemporary slavery has increased dramatically over the last ten years, but there remains a widespread tendency to view slavery in the past and slavery in current society as independent fields of study. This publication moves beyond this artifical divide, providing the first ever comparative analysis of historical slave systems and modern forms of human bondage. From this standpoint, recent concerns over human trafficking, debt-bondage, child labor and other related problems are analyzed in view of the historical strengths and weaknesses of the legal abolition of slavery. By bringing together a range of studies on different aspects of slavery, both past and present, this publication provides an innovative platform for promoting dialogue about ways of addressing both contemporary slavery and the enduring legacies of historical slave systems.

New UDHR Website

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The United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library has launched a new web site, Universal Declaration of Human Rights : An Historical Record of the Drafting Process (http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/udhr/) as part of the commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Declaration.  The site provides access to early United Nations documents related to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The new web site is a joint digitization project of the UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the Library of the UN Office at Geneva.