Spring 2020 Human Rights Newsletter: COVID and environmental racism; advances in human rights pedagogy; a call to action; and more
Spring 2020
In this edition:
Environmental Racism, Human Rights, and COVID-19
Human Rights Pedagogy: Reducing Bias through Simulation
Introducing our Summer Intensive Cohort
Call to Action: Defending Human Rights during COVID-19
Announcing New Partners
We’ve been busy since you last heard from us.
In the past few weeks, we’ve been preparing for our inaugural summer intensive, advancing innovative forms of human rights pedagogy, exposing how the petrochemical industry is worsening the pandemic, developing institutional partnerships, and designing human rights projects, taking into account the newfound constraints that COVID places on our work. In this newsletter, we’re sharing this exciting work with you.
This pandemic won’t be over in days, weeks, or even months. During this time, it will take the concerted work of all of us to protect our most vulnerable, to advance human rights, and to lift up the voices of directly-affected activists and communities in their fight for social justice. We’re grateful for your support during this time, and we’re glad to have you with us.
Sincerely,
Jim Cavallaro
Executive Director
Environmental Racism, Human Rights,
and COVID-19
Multiple studies have demonstrated that environmental racism and toxic industrial emissions are exacerbating COVID’s toll on communities of color across the United States. In a recent piece published by our partners at Wesleyan’s Fries Center for Global Studies, Joshua Petersen and Ruhan Nagra argue that this pandemic has made one thing clear: in order to protect the rights of communities of color, we must stop the petrochemical industry in its tracks.
You can find their article by clicking here.
Human Rights Pedagogy:
Reducing Bias through Clinical Simulation
As human rights educators, how can we train future advocates to navigate power dynamics, challenges to communication, and intercultural barriers? Jim Cavallaro and Meghna Sridhar put forth an innovative pedagogical solution to this question by drawing on the University Network’s clinical simulation model.
Check out their article in May's edition of Human Rights Quarterly.
Introducing the 2020 Summer Intensive Cohort
This summer, we’ll be hosting our inaugural Human Rights Summer Intensive. Our team selected 11 distinguished undergraduate participants from over 170 applications representing over four dozen universities across the globe. You’ll be hearing more from our trainees in the coming months, but we wanted to introduce them here first.
Beginning June 8, our participants will begin an intensive online training program in human rights practice and then continue to work on University Network projects during the following academic year.
Call to Action: Human Rights during COVID-19
Now more than ever, it’s crucial that advocates support the movements of the communities directly affected by COVID-19. Our COVID-19 Action Portal highlights simple, high-impact actions you can take to help lift up the voices of grassroots activists across the US.
State governors are threatening the autonomy, safety, and health of Native American communities. The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe’s land and political rights are under threat. Absentee voting rights – necessary to ensure equitable access to the ballot box in November – are being curbed across the US. And corporations, with profit in mind, are putting essential workers at risk to accelerate their states’ reopening.
Visit our COVID Portal now to take action on these issues and more.
Announcing New Partners!
The University Network is excited to join the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Consortium. The consortium is composed of world-class human rights researchers and practitioners from the University of Connecticut, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the Max Planck Institute, Yale University, and more. The University Network looks forward to exploring new modes of human rights engagement with our fellow consortium members.
We also want to announce the addition of Josh Petersen to our staff! Josh joined the University Network back in October as an Officer. He works broadly to support the organization on issues related to development, communications, strategy, and advocacy. Josh is a graduate of Stanford University and has worked at the European Parliament and the European Council on Foreign Relations.
