UConn Library
BlogsThe editors of the “New Books Network” (http://newbooksnetwork.com) are seeking one or more hosts for a new channel, “New Books in Human Rights” (http://newbooksinhumanrights.com). The channel will feature regular podcast interviews with authors of new books on human rights, conflict resolution, genocide studies, and peace studies.
The “New Books Network” is a not-for-profit consortium of academic podcasts aimed at disseminating discipline-specific information about new books to wide audiences.
Please join us for the 2011 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Human Rights.
“International Justice, Transitional Justice: What Have We Learned about What ‘Works’?”
Diane Orentlicher
Deputy, Office of War Crimes Issues, U.S. Department of State
Thursday, April 21 4:00 PM
Konover Auditorium, Dodd Research Center
Diane F. Orentlicher is serving as Deputy, Office of War Crimes Issues, in the Department of State while on leave from American University’s Washington College of Law, where she is a Professor of International Law. She has served in her current position, on appointment by Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton, since October, 2009. The Office of War Crimes Issues advises the Secretary of State and formulates U.S. policy responses to atrocities committed in areas of conflict and elsewhere throughout the world.
Described by the Washington Diplomat as “one of the world’s leading authorities on human rights law and war crimes tribunals,” Professor Orentlicher has previously served in various public positions, including Special Advisor to the High Commissioner on National Minorities of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Professor Orentlicher is also co-director (on leave) of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law of American University. From 1995 to 2004, she served as founding director of the law school’s War Crimes Research Office, which provides legal assistance to international criminal tribunals and courts established jointly by the United Nations and national governments. Professor Orentlicher has presented congressional testimony on a range of issues of international criminal law, including U.S. legislation on genocide.
Sponsored by the Human Rights Institute and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center
Thursday, March 24 – Friday, March 25, 2011
Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut, Storrs
Flame outside the Kigali Memorial Center, Kigali, Rwanda. Photograph by Valerie Love, 2009.
The first day of the conference will consist of a day-long workshop for academics and practitioners currently engaged in oral history work on human rights themes.
On the second day, selected participants will present their work to a larger audience of students, faculty, librarians, and interested members of the public. (Non-UConn affiliated attendees are requested to register.) The Thursday workshop is now full, but space is available for the Friday sessions.
Schedule for Public Presentations on Friday, March 25, 2011:
9:30 – 10:00 AM: Tea and continental breakfast
10:00 – 10:05 AM: Welcome: Valerie Love, Curator for Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections, University of Connecticut
10:05- 10:10 AM: Opening: Bruce Stave, Director, Oral History Office, University of Connecticut
10:10 – 11:00 AM: Presentation by Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, and co-founder of the of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM: Presentation by Daniel Rothenberg, Professor of Practice and Executive Director, Center for Law and Global Affairs, Arizona State University, and former head of the Iraq History Project, which collected over 8,000 testimonies from Iraqis following the US invasion
12:00-1:00 PM: Lunch Break
1:00- 1:45 P.M: Presentation by Lee Ann De Reus, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Penn State Altoona, and 2009 Carl Wilkens Fellow with Genocide Intervention Network, who has interviewed women survivors of rape in Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
1:45-2:30 P.M: Presentation by Socheata Poeuv, Founder, Khmer Legacies, which documents stories from the Cambodian genocide
2:45- 3:15 P.M: Closing: Emma Gilligan, Professor of History and Human Rights, University of Connecticut
More information is available on the Dodd Research Center’s website.
Grace Lile at WITNESS has written a great post on their blog about Activism and Archives. It’s definitely worth a read.
From the post:
In 1970, at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, gadfly historian Howard Zinn gave a seminal speech* in which he challenged one of the core foundational principles upon which modern archives practice was built, that of neutrality. The whole notion, said Zinn, was a “fake,” a cop-out, a dangerously passive avoidance of the inherently political nature of the archival endeavor. Neutrality allowed the archivist to perpetuate the status quo, to reflect and reinforce society’s economic and political disparities, and to preserve the interests of the rich, powerful, literate, or otherwise privileged, at the expense of the less so.
“The existence, preservation, and availability of archives, documents and records in our society are very much determined by the distribution of wealth and power. That is, the most powerful, the richest elements in society have the greatest capacity to find documents, preserve them, and decide what is or is not available to the public. This means that government, business, and the military are dominant.”
Zinn challenged his audience to question their own unwitting acquiescence to entrenched power, to campaign against government secrecy, and to acknowledge and confront the societal biases that ignore the marginal, the poor, the non-literate, and even the ordinary; in essence, to embrace an activist rather than passive mindset.
This generated a considerable amount of controversy at the time, but in the 40 years since, numerous writers and participants in archival discourse have invoked the word activist in calling for new approaches to a range of archival concepts and practices, including ownership, diversity, non-textual cultural heritage, information rights, community archives, the definition of the record, user participation, ethical codes, and the responsibilities of the archivist. Author and former SAA President Rand Jimerson wrote:
“Archivists should use their power—in determining what records will be preserved for future generations and in interpreting this documentation for researchers—for the benefit of all members of society. By adopting a social conscience for the profession, they can commit themselves to active engagement in the public arena. Archivists can use the power of archives to promote accountability, open government, diversity, and social justice. In doing so, it is essential to distinguish objectivity from neutrality. Advocacy and activism can address social issues without abandoning professional standards of fairness, honesty, detachment, and transparency.” [emphasis mine]
Read the rest over at the WITNESS blog: http://blog.witness.org/
The UConn Honors Council is organizing a screening of the documentary, “The Day After Peace,” which chronicles Jeremy Gilley’s 10-year journey to establish an annual Peace Day on September 21, and his attempts to convince countries around the world to recognize the day with nonviolence and ceasefires in their conflicts.
Screening of “The Day After Peace”
11:30 AM,
Class of 1947 Room
Homer Babbidge Library
Refreshments will be served.
The International Day of Peace was envisioned as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, an invitation to all nations and people to honour a cessation of hostilities.
The UN website for the International Day of Peace has information about peacebuilding events and news, and ways you can get involved.
Human Rights Education Associates (HREA) has a resource guide for the International Day of Peace, with links and learning materials for educators and students.
Peace One Day, created by filmmaker Jeremy Gilley, is also celebrating the day, with ways you can take action, and information about his documentary film, The Day After Peace.
In the words of Albert Einstein, ”Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be acheived by understanding.”
Album cover by praCh, who will be performing at the Dodd Research Center on September 16 at 4 pm.
The Cambodian American rapper praCh will be giving a lecture and performance at the Dodd Center on Thursday, September 16 at 4 pm in Konover Auditorium.
Named by Newsweek as the “pioneer of Khmer Rap” and the “first Cambodian rap star” praCh first received international acclaim with his debut hip hop album, Dalama…The End’n is Just the Beginnin’ (2000). Over the course of a decade, he has emerged as a multimedia force, releasing two sequels to Dalama, in 2003 and 2010. Currently the CEO of Mujestic Records, praCh has been featured in international media outlets, including Cambodia Daily, Phnom Penh Post, Time Magazine, ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, NBC, FOX, PBS, Press-Telegram, LA Times, Hmong Times, OC Weekly, 562 Magazine, Asia Week, and Khmerconnection.com.
Born in the farmlands of Cambodia but raised on the mean streets of America, praCh is a committed transnational activist. He battles oppression via rhyme and lyrics, and by example, and makes clear the reasons why hip hop is global and will continue to matter.
For more information, go to the Asian American Studies Institute website.
The Human Rights Initiative at the University of Connecticut is seeking proposals for human rights events for the 2010-2011 academic year.
In the past, the Human Rights Initiative has funded speakers, films, workshops, art exhibits and theatrical productions. Applications will be accepted from university departments, faculty, student groups, institutes and cultural centers from all UConn campuses. The Human Rights Initiative is supported by the Office of the Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs.
Criteria For Funding Funding Available: Funds for UConn Human Rights Initiative: From Ideas to Action events will normally be limited to a maximum of $2,500.
Under exceptional circumstances, the committee may approve a higher amount depending upon the significance of the speaker or event.
Types of Events Eligible for Support: Funding is available to pay for speaker’s honoraria, speaker travel and meals, for group performances, round table discussions, programs, or promotional materials.
Who May Apply: Funding will be available to representatives of university departments, schools, colleges, student groups, institutes, and cultural centers.
Criteria For Selection: A faculty and student review committee will consider the following criteria when selecting what organizations will receive funding:
The criteria and application for funding are both available electronically.
Application Deadline is March 31, 2010
Please contact Rachel Jackson at 860-486-5393 or via email at rachel.jackson@uconn.edu, if you have questions.
Happy first day of classes at UConn, and welcome back!
For those who are new to this blog, it is designed to be a resource for human rights students and faculty with updates on events, collections, new resources and research tips. Feel free to comment or email me with questions and research topics that you’d like explored.
For the next couple of weeks, I’ll also be updating about my participation in a human rights delegation to Rwanda this summer, and those updates will all be labeled with a Rwanda tag.
Happy reading, and enjoy the first day of classes!
All the best,
Valerie
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Human Rights Film Series
Screening of The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2005)
4 PM
Class of 47 Room, Homer Babbidge Library
Professor Emma Gilligan from the Department of History will provide a brief introduction to the film.
The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2005), directed by Pirjo Honkasalo, is an award-winning, stunningly beautiful documentary that reveals how the Chechen War has psychologically affected children in Russia and in Chechnya. Divided into three episodes or ‘rooms,’ the film is characterized by an elegantly paced, observational style.
“A beautiful, moving, mysterious film. A prodigious, almost spiritual experience, a luminous, challenging art movie out of the Tarkovsky school that happens to be about a real war and its effects on real children. It was also a daring cinematic enterprise; while the Western media had trouble getting any independent footage from Chechnya, this Finnish art-film director took a film crew there and captured the breathtaking devastation. Put this on your must-see list!”—
Thursday, February 12, 2009
A Panel Discussion: “Documenting Peruvian History and the Visual Arts”
with presentations by:
Jose Falconi, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University
Michael Orwicz, Department of Art and Art History, UConn
Kimberly Theidon, Anthropology, Harvard University and Exectutive Director of Praxis Institute for Social Justice
The panel discussion is being held in conjunction with the exhibit, Yuyanapaq: To Remember, at the William Benton Museum of Art from January 20 – March 6, 2009
Yuyanapaq: To Remember is a witness, in words and images, to the extreme political violence that consumed the Peruvian nation between 1980 and 2000. These two decades saw an outbreak of violence that involved insurgents, state armed forces, paramilitary groups, and peasants’ self-defense organizations. It was instigated by the Maoist organization, known as “Shining Path,” and justified as a revolutionary uprising against the Peruvian state. While Shining Path rejected, in general, the idea of human rights as “bourgeois, reactionary, counterrevolutionary rights, [which] are today a weapon of revisionists and imperialists, principally Yankee imperialists,” the government likewise committed human rights violations, although fewer in number and on a lesser scale. In 2003 the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued a report that estimated that 69,280 Peruvians lost their lives during this period. As part of the Truth Commission’s effort to document the history of this period and depict the ways in which violence impacted on Peruvians’ daily lives, an exhibition of 250 photographs was created from more than 90 archives belonging to different media outlets, news agencies, military institutions, human right organizations, and private collections. A traveling exhibition of 40 photographs was organized in 2004 and has been shown in Mexico, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.
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