Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute

The Corporation and the Public Interest: The Environment, Diversity, and Human Rights

Environmental, social, and governance issues have brought the roles and responsibilities of the contemporary business corporation to the forefront of the public agenda and have changed the nature of legal practice. This symposium will gather a select group of leading experts to discuss issues of corporate sustainability and societal impact. It will consist of three panels on topics that lie at the intersection of corporate activity and the public interest: the environment, diversity, and human rights.

Schedule (exact times are subject to change):

RSVP HERE!

When it comes to voting, the United States lags behind other democracies, with barely over half of all eligible voters participating in most major elections. The 2024 presidential election saw around 64% of voter turnout, and smaller local elections saw even lower numbers. Meanwhile, twenty-six countries around the world require all eligible voters to participate in elections by law. Australia, for instance, has required citizens to cast a ballot since 1924 and had over 90% voter turnout in their last major election. Some advocates around the United States are calling for ’100% Democracy’, or universal voting.

This is an election process where every eligible citizen has the right to vote and full opportunities to do so—but also the duty to vote, a requirement to participate in our national choices. If Americans must pay taxes and serve on juries, why not require every eligible American to vote as well? Could this be the next step in our great democratic experiment? How would universal voting work in our country? And what would be the results? Join us for an informed and collaborative exploration of these critical and fascinating questions!

Encounters programs dive deep into subjects through facilitated, small-group dialogues followed by a question-and-answer style conversation with University faculty and community partners. Resources are provided beforehand to encourage informed and informal dialogue. The aim is to develop a forum for respectful and challenging dialogue. Coffee and lunch will be provided.

This event is sponsored by Connecticut’s Old State House and UConn’s Democracy and Dialogues Initiative

About this Event

This event is hosted by the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute and co-sponsored by UConn Asian and Asian American Studies. The Human Rights Lunchtime Colloquium hosts guest speakers who present and discuss their research exploring emerging ideas, theories, and practices on the frontiers of human rights.

We welcome you to join us over lunch in Conference Room 162 of The Dodd Center for Human Rights. Simply register below.

Abstract

Studies about port cities in the Global South extensively discuss their development and planning during the colonial, postcolonial and neo-liberal periods. Some of them focus on the development and uniformity of infrastructure in urban spaces across the world. However, the many contentions and protests that shape postcolonial urban spaces in relation to race, caste, gender and environmental issues find little space in urban studies scholarship. Filling this gap, my research on the Indian subcontinent’s port city of Kochi takes into account of people’s struggles and belonging with the water-world as crucial to shaping and sustaining postcolonial port cities. I demonstrate these struggles as efforts to democratize the otherwise deeply segregated and hierarchical urban space on the basis of caste and gender, as well as championing the need to preserve the seashores and marine life for our collective eco-futures. Specifically, I illustrate an island community’s struggles to preserve their marine ecology in the port city of Kochi. Their protests, actively led by women from the caste-oppressed shore communities, demonstrate embodied and decolonial ways of being in the saline and fresh water worlds that surround them. The women protestors reinstate the peripherized islands’ geographical prominence along with the need to protect the seashores, not only for their life on the delicate coastal land but also for the wider land systems that thrive in rhythm with the water-world.

About the Speaker

Carmel Christy K J is a cultural studies scholar interested in the politics and affective manifestations of gender, environment, caste and urban space in South Asia. She is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research associate at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut. She has published on the intersectionality of caste, gender and environmental justice in South Asia, the interrelationship between land, caste and gender; caste bias in Indian higher educational institutions as well as on displacement, religion and urban space-making in India. Her first book Sexuality and Public Space in India: Reading the Visible (Routledge, 2017) discusses the new-found hyper-visibility of women’s sexuality in Indian media, after the 1990s-globalization, through the lens of caste. Carmel is working on her next monograph Fading shores, forging life: Caste, gender and ecology in a South Asian port city about urban space-making in coastal India which examines the question of gender, caste, spatial and environmental justice.

FREE.

FREE.

About this Event

A central defining feature of deeply divided societies is binary division – “us” and “them.” These binary fault lines can arise from class, caste, religion, language, race, ethnicity, clan, or political identity. These divisions breed walled communities of fear and isolation, not only dividing populations but also uniting them in their fear of the “other.” Grounded in a global comparative analysis of the literal and figurative notion of “walls” in deeply divided societies, this presentation will analyze physical walls of social separation, symbolic walls of identity separation, and hidden or invisible walls of geographical separation. The presentation will conclude by emphasizing the need for more integration in deeply divided societies and suggesting specific strategies to address the physical, symbolic, and hidden or invisible walls that separate and wound the lives of people in such societies.

About the Speaker

James Waller, Ph.D., is the inaugural Christopher J. Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice and director of the Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs for the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. In addition to his faculty appointment in the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Waller also is a Visiting Scholar at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast and serves as Director of Academic Programs for the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, an international NGO devoted to atrocity prevention.

Waller is the author of six books, most notably his award-winning Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed., 2007), Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2016), and A Troubled Sleep: Risk and Resilience in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2021). In addition, he has published more than thirty articles in peer-reviewed professional journals, contributed over twenty chapters in edited books, and is a co-editor of Historical Dialogue and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities (Routledge, 2020).