Environmental Justice and Indigenous Rights Series: What is a Resource Curse?
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By Miranda Gershoni, ’22
The Duke Human Rights Center@FHI welcomed the second speaker for our Environmental Justice and Indigenous Rights series, “What is a Resource Curse: Energy, Infrastructure, and Climate Change in Native North America,” by Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the UNC-Chapel Hill...
Curley discussed what he calls “a development paradox” in communities that are rich in profitable resources but suffer poorer standards of living. He called out the common misunderstanding of the resource curse, which tends not to address the violent colonization that precluded poor or underdeveloped circumstances. He takes a close look at indigenous communities like the Navajo Nation that live on reservations with significant coal and methane fields and have spent decades fighting for their sovereignty...
read more
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Human Rights Research Grant Applications Due March 1
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Currently enrolled Duke undergraduate and graduate students are invited to apply for summer research funding from the Duke Human Rights Center@FHI. The goals of the grants are to strengthen research opportunities for students interested in developing, implementing and working in human rights. Special consideration is given to students whose research projects contribute to a senior thesis or project. Grants are available of up to $2,000. Read
more
.
Eligibility and Criteria:
Students from all backgrounds and academic disciplines are encouraged to apply. Graduating seniors or graduate students in their final year at Duke are not eligible. You can also read more about the past recipients and their projects
here
.
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Student Rights Under Attack: An Interview With Yael Bromberg
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Miranda Gershoni:
How did you get into community organizing? How did that lead you to become a constitutional rights attorney?
Yael Bromberg:
My parents immigrated to the United States when I was a baby, and my grandparents and ancestors suffered from antisemitic fascism abroad. Community organizing gave me an outlet to work in collaboration to build a better world. This naturally led to my practice and scholarship in constitutional law. I work alongside and represent people who have somehow been hurt by anti-democratic practices. When we challenge those practices, we are better for it individually and as a nation...
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Submit your paper or project for the 2020 Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize Due April 1
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Current undergraduates are invited to enter essays or projects related to human rights in our annual Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize competition. The Duke Human Rights Center@FHI awards one $500 prize to the winners in each category.
Please send submissions to
Emily Stewart
by April 1, 2020
. For a glimpse into the stories of the recipients of the 2019 Oliver W. Koonz Prize, read more
here
.
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Why the Human Rights Certificate? Interviews with Gino Nuzzolillo and Sonali Mehta
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Miranda Gershoni
: Why did you decide to pursue the human rights certificate?
Gino Nuzzolillo:
I decided to pursue the human rights certificate because, fundamentally, I care deeply about reshaping our world. I want to live in the kind of society where no person faces housing insecurity, lack of access to food or quality healthcare, the violence of incarceration and policing, pollution and toxins, discrimination, or systemic poverty — and where each person has the freedom to live comfortably and unlock the best in themselves. And I felt I needed rigorous instruction to grapple seriously with how structural inequality – generated and enforced by the global intersection of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism – prevents this new society from coming into being. The human rights certificate is the home for that kind of education at Duke. I also love Robin Kirk and Emily Stewart and wanted the excuse to learn as much from them as I could. Read more
here
.
Miranda Gershoni:
Why did you decide to pursue the human rights certificate?
Sonali Mehta:
I took a class called Human Rights and World Politics during my first semester at Duke as part of the FOCUS program and really loved it. I thought the Human Rights framework was a really interesting one, if imperfect, to think about justice around the world. Read the rest of her interview
here
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Interview with Rights and the Humanities Lecturer Dr. Joseph Slaughter
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This interview was conducted over email with Columbia professor Dr. Joseph Slaughter by Miranda Gershoni.
Joseph R. Slaughter teaches postcolonial literature and theory, human rights, and narrative approaches to international law in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His book Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, won the René Wellek Prize for Comparative Literature and Cultural Theory. His talk, “Naming the Crisis: The Language of Human Rights and the Neoliberal Turn” was the second in DHRC and FHI's Rights and the Humanities series.
Miranda Gershoni:
How did you get into the fields of human rights and literature? What do you think is their relationship with each other?
Dr. Joseph Slaughter:
As a graduate student pursuing a PhD in comparative literature, I was simultaneously working on human rights and taking public international law courses. I had the good fortune to have a dissertation director, Barbara Harlow, who wrote a book on Resistance Literature and who shared deep interests in literature and social justice. Literature, and other forms of cultural expression more generally, have various relationships to human rights. The most obvious relationships are those where a work of literature explicitly depicts human rights themes or advocates for an ideal of social justice...
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2020 AFSCME Union Scholars Program
The American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is pleased to partner with Harvard University's Labor and Worklife Program to sponsor the Union Scholars Program. AFSCME is one of the nation’s largest labor unions, representing public service employees and retirees across the country. Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program, located in the Harvard Law School, is the university’s center for research, teaching and creative problem-solving related to the world of work.
The Union Scholars Program is a 10-week summer internship for students of color who are passionate about social justice, with an emphasis on workers' rights. Entry to the Union Scholars Program is competitive. Students will take part in a hands-on organizing experience with AFSCME members, and will enjoy an opportunity to travel and receive valuable, resume-building experience – all while getting paid. For details and the application, read
here
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Apply for a Bass Connections Student Research Award by March 6.
Bass Connections creates opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to work alongside faculty to explore societal challenges through interdisciplinary research teams. The Bass Connections Student Research Award provides funds of up to $3,000 (for one to two students) or $5,000 (for groups of more than two students) to support student-directed research projects that meet one of the following parameters:
Undergraduate and graduate students who have completed (or are completing) a Bass Connections year-long project team or summer program may propose to continue some aspect of the team’s work through a faculty-mentored research experience. Such research experiences may be either individual or collaborative although collaborative projects are preferred. Read more
here
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Arts and the Anthropocene: Crisis and Resilience in North Carolina Waterways (2020-2021).
This Bass Connections project team will explore how visual, theatrical and sonic arts can play a role in educating various publics, provoking action and developing resilient futures in the Anthropocene. Team members will explore how scientists and artists have sought to address social and ecological crises and entanglements, and construct art interventions aimed at illuminating the symptoms of the Anthropocene in North Carolina. The team is concerned with climate justice and the uneven impacts of environmental change on human and ecological communities. They aim to answer critical questions about rights to clean and safe water. This project team is currently recruiting additional student team members.
Applications
are open and will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Read more about the project
here
. The deadline to apply is March 6 at 5:00 p.m.
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“We Cried Power”: The Story of the Poor People’s Campaign
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The documentary will be screened by the Student Advisory Board to the Duke Human Rights Center.
The Poor People’s Campaign is a movement founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and revived by Reverend William Barber II. The movement has a large base in North Carolina and is devoted to fighting against five evils: poverty, racism, militarization, ecological devastation, and the distorted moral narrative. After the screening, representatives from the NC Poor People’s campaign will speak and answer any audience questions.
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White Supremacist or Philanthropist? Julian Carr and Durham’s Commemorative Landscape
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Adam Domby argues that the Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. This was not only an insidious goal, but was founded on falsehoods, including those peddled by one of Duke’s primary early benefactors, Julian Carr. As a graduate student, he resurfaced from archives the speech Julian Carr delivered at the inauguration of UNC-Chapel Hill’s “Silent Sam” statue, helping spur protests and the statue’s ultimate removal. Domby is an assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston His new book is The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020). Copies will be available for sale after the talk.
This event is sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center@FHI and Duke University’s History Department.
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Méndez Award Winner: Carolyn Forché’s "
What You Have Heard Is True
", a reading and book signing
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A reception will follow the talk
Carolyn Forché’s timely book, “
What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
” (Penguin Press, 2019), is the winner of the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.
“
What You Have Heard is True
” is an account of a poet’s engagement with a country going through violent change, in part funded and propelled by U.S. foreign policy. Forché first visited El Salvador in the 1970s, brought there by an enigmatic stranger who then helped her witness the struggle of peasants and the poor for peace. Forché chronicles how she transforms from a young writer with an unfocused “urge to do something in the face of some wrongdoing or injustice inflicted against another” into the lifelong activist and a “poet of witness” as she has called herself since.
Her call to awareness and political action is as timely now as it was when she travelled to El Salvador in the 1970s.
Forché will accept the Méndez award at a March 2 reading at Duke University. “Forché’s book captures the episodic, confusing, and developing nature of events, in beautiful and highly personal prose,” said Robin Kirk, the chair of the selection committee and co-director of the DHRC@FHI...
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The Duke Human Rights Center @ the Franklin Humanities Institute brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, staff and students to promote new understandings about global human rights issues.
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