It is my pleasure to welcome you back to FXB after a very full summer. It’s been wonderful to hear from many on our team about the research, travels, and other endeavors they have undertaken during this break. There is a new report on child trafficking. The Palestine program successfully launched the inaugural social medicine summer course, hosted by Birzeit University in the West Bank. In November, we will again welcome students in the child protection program. And this fall, FXB is welcoming several new fellows and visiting scholars such as Sawsan Abdulrahim, Stefano Angeleri, Catharina Giudice, Rita Issa, Faramarz Jahanbeen, and Emily Wright. 

FXB completes 30 years since its founding in 2023. We are taking a moment to mark this milestone, acknowledge the breadth of activities in our community and the continued importance of work that shows how violation of rights harms health. Our programs, from racial justice to distress migration, to our Roma and Palestine programs, are all connected to the idea that we all need both health and rights as a resource for our lives. I wish that I could say that we expect fewer challenges to health and to rights, but all around us is the evidence that the need for our efforts is growing. We therefore seek to create an environment in which scholar activists feel that they have a home and where scholarship is connected to the world in which we live and to the communities that struggle with the burdens of unfair treatment.

The Weatherhead Research Cluster on Migration, which is co-chaired by FXB Director of Research Jacqueline Bhabha, JD, MSc, will join the Contemporary Ethnography and Inequality Workshop (CEI) for their September 28th book talk on Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (California, 2022) with its two authors, Mario L. Small and Jessica Calarco. The CEI showcases scholarship that uses ethnographic methods to address social, economic, and political inequality. The workshop offers a venue for leading scholars and graduate students to present ethnographic research and work-in-progress. Attendance is open to faculty and students from across Harvard, nearby universities, and throughout the country and globe.

Join at 12:00pm - 1:30 EDT on Thursday, September 28, 2023 either in-person at William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Room 1550 or via Zoom.

More information about the Migration Cluster in general can be found here. 

Date and Time: Thursday, September 28 at 12:30pm - 1:45pm ET

Location: Zoom or in person (food will be provided). HUID holders are invited to attend the discussion in person at WCC 2004, Harvard Law School. Registration is not required for in-person attendance.

Join the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University for the discussion “Affirmative Action after SFFA: Is the US in Violation of International Human Rights Law?”   

Many are concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) decision, which invalidated affirmative action in public and private college admissions, could open the door to similar challenges in other areas such as employment, public procurement, federal grant recipients, and voting rights. Affirmative action has been an important, though insufficient, tool in the struggles to overcome the consequences of chattel slavery and legally enforced systems of segregation and more recent discrimination.   

In addition to eroding the capacity of the United States to tackle de facto inequality, the SFFA decision may also result in failure to meet U.S. remedial obligations under international human rights law. Specialized human rights bodies of the United Nations and the regional body, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have previously expressed concern over the systemic nature of racial discrimination in the U.S. and commended its use of special measures including affirmative action to overcome the legacy of racial discrimination. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has already issued a statement under its early warning and urgent action procedure calling on the U.S. to take effective measures to address the adverse impacts of the SFFA decision.   

Join Satchit Balsari, MD, MPH and a panel of data scientists, public health practitioners and humanitarian responders at 5:00pm on Thursday, September 28 at the Harvard University Center for the Environment to learn how new data and novel analytic approaches are helping communities prepare for an uncertain future.

CrisisReady, a research and response platform based at Harvard University and Direct Relief, leverages novel data sources and new analytic approaches to improve public health response and humanitarian relief in impacted communities around the world.

Join this work in progress (WIP) seminar to hear from FXB Visiting Scholar, Sergio Aguayo, PhD, MA a scholar, human rights advocate, and political analyst from Mexico. Through his dedication and experience, Dr. Aguayo has spent his career shedding light on social justice issues, human rights violations, and democratic governance in Mexico. Dr. Aguayo is a professor and researcher for El Colegio de México, a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a member of the Mexican Researchers National System (Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, SNI). 

This event is part of a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which will be celebrated on December 10, 2023.

We are accepting applications for the 2023-2024 Child Protection Certificate cohort. Harvard graduate students across all schools and degree programs may apply, but admission is limited to 30 individuals.

We are pleased to announce that applications for the 2024 G. Barrie Landry Child Protection Professional Training program are open. This program, which is held on the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health campus in Boston, is for mid-career professionals who work to protect children from abuse, violence exploitation and neglect, whether at an international organization, a local NGO, or a government agency. 

Applicants must apply as country teams of three, and admission is limited to 10 country teams. Tuition scholarships for all selected participants are being offered through the generous support of the G. Barrie Landry Fund for Child Protection Professional Training and UNICEF USA.

Please email Rebecca Shin, Director of the Child Protection Program and FXB Center Strategy Officer, at rebeccashin@hsph.harvard.edu to request an application for your organization/team.

Application deadline: December 1, 2023

Program dates: June 3-7, 2024

The FXB Center, in collaboration with the Refugee and Migration Studies Hub at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and with the support of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece and the U.S., offered a three-week intensive, interdisciplinary course on migration and refugee studies for the second year in a row from July 7-30, 2023. The course is designed to offer participants both conceptual and practical engagement with key issues related to contemporary forced migration. Revisit the course through the eyes of some of the participants.

Information regarding applications for the 2024 cohort will be announced on our website.

The Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights—a partnership between the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University—hosted its first annual Palestine Social Medicine Course in July 2023. This three-week intensive summer course is designed to introduce students to the social, structural, political, and historical aspects that determine Palestinian health ‘beyond the biological basis of disease.’

Applications for the summer 2024 cohort will open in late Fall 2023. Read the 2023 course overview here

We are pleased to announce that Margaret (Maggie) Sullivan, FNP-BC, DrPH, has been selected to be a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (Academy). The Academy is a policy organization and an honorific society that recognizes nursing's most accomplished leaders in policy, research, practice, administration, and academia to advance equitable solutions to the nation’s most complex health care challenges. Academy Fellows, from over 40 countries, hold a wide variety of influential roles in health care. Induction into the Fellowship represents more than recognition of one's accomplishments within the nursing profession. Fellows contribute their collective expertise to the Academy, engaging with health leaders nationally and globally to improve health and achieve health equity by impacting policy through nursing leadership, innovation, and science. Maggie and the 2023 inductees will be recognized for their substantial, sustained, and significant contributions to health and health care at the Academy’s annual Health Policy Conference, taking place on October 5 – 7, 2023 in Washington, DC. Read the press release here.

FXB International's Climate Advocates program, aims to inform, empower, and mobilize youth to implement climate solutions. It has now directly reached 650 students from over 50 countries, with an indirect reach in the many thousands, while 175 active climate action projects have been launched as a result of the program across areas such as waste management, conservation, community education, sustainable agriculture, green technology, and financial solutions, reaching almost 200,000 people.

Learn more about the FXB Climate Advocates here: https://www.fxbclimateadvocates.org/

Study Contributors: Digidiki, V., J. Bhabha, K. Connors, H. Cook, C. Galez-Davis, C. Hansen, M. Lane, S. Laursen, and L. Wong, 2023.

The study assessed the factors that drive vulnerability to trafficking, and revealed trends for the trafficking were mostly gendered, informed by education and income levels of the victims (and their families). For instance, boys were almost twice as likely to be trafficked as children than girls and had 39 per cent less likelihood of being trafficked internationally than domestically, as compared to girls. Victims with little or no education were more than 20 times more likely to be trafficked than victims who had attended high school while children from low-income countries were five times more likely to be trafficked as a child (rather than as an adult) when compared to victims from high-income countries. Read the full report here.

Every year, the American Public Health Association (APHA) honors excellence in public health leadership and innovation, from state and local health officials to those speaking up for public health from the halls of Congress.

This year, Harvard Chan Professor of Social Epidemiology and FXB Faculty Affiliate Nancy Krieger, PhD, MS, was awarded the Sedgwick Memorial Medal for Distinguished Service in Public Health, APHA's oldest and most prestigious award, for "her activism and research surrounding health equity and social science. Widely published, Krieger is known for her study of the social determinants of health—how where one is born, lives and works affects their well-being—and how structural racism affects health, especially since the onset of COVID-19. She continues to educate public health professionals on how social inequality affects health as the co-founder and chair of APHA’s Spirit of 1848 Caucus."

Read the APHA's press release here and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health announcement here.

FXB Roma Program Director Margareta Matache, PhD, writes in The Funambulist:

"Across eras, political regimes, and civil and political society, Roma people have endured the challenges of overlapping peripheries: an absolute periphery of a people labeled forever inferior and criminal outcasts in all societies; an auxiliary periphery of a dispersed people that cuts across and gets amplified within hierarchies established between superpowers, semiperipheral, and peripheral states; and a shunned periphery as an uncharted racialized people in global spaces of periphery and solidarity against whiteness." Read the full article here.

Image: Sisters, 2019 / Photo by Marcin Tas. Artwork by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.

On April 6, 2023 the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights hosted a free, in-person conference in partnership with the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard Chan School of Public Health, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Romani Studies Program at Central European University, the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University, and the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University. This constituted the Roma Program’s 11th Roma conference marking the annual International Roma Day which is celebrated worldwide every April 8th. This past April 8th, we marked the 52nd anniversary of the First World Roma Congress. For more information about International Roma Day, click here.

This annual Roma conference initiated a series of conversations and research efforts on anti-Roma racism as a structural determinant of health inequalities and as a health stressor in itself in order to improve data, research methods, and practice-oriented research and inform policy design. It was accompanied by the exhibition "We Are Not Alone": Legacies of Eugenics.