This international conference will showcase the “Connecticut School of Human Rights,” a contextual approach to human rights that has been advanced at the Human Rights Institute of the University of Connecticut over the last ten years. Despite the predictions of some that the era of human rights had ended, interest in human rights has expanded beyond law schools and mushroomed throughout the academy, and in particular in the social sciences and humanities. The panels of this conference—evaluating the idea of human dignity, affirmative action policies, humanitarianism and visual media, the enforcement of economic rights, refugee camps, health and human rights, historical memory and transitional justice, and the future of the European Court of Human Rights—cut distinct routes through the human rights terrain while remaining steadfastly rooted in rigorous social science and humanities methods of inquiry. These conversations, along with those inspired by the wider lens of the Keynote Address, point toward new horizons for the Institute and for the interdisciplinary study of human rights for decades to come.

Founded in 2003, the Human Rights Institute has fostered an empirical and historical approach to human rights teaching and research that subjects universal moral values and legal rights to rigorous scrutiny. Today’s HRI is a vibrant intellectual community, with seven joint faculty members in five different departments and several dozen associated faculty across the University, three established research programs, annual external and internal faculty fellowships, a graduate certificate program, the first undergraduate major at a public research university, and funding opportunities for faculty and student research. HRI has provided a meeting place for scholars across disciplines, instigating and supporting collaboration across conventional academic boundaries. Situated at the intersection of academic inquiry between the legal, social science, and humanities traditions, the University of Connecticut is a place where the promise and claims of human rights are interrogated through empirical research into institutions and process, both global and local. Human rights are not simply academic subjects, however, and we seek to inform and shape policy decisions through our empirical investigations. This conference, with panels rooted in the Institute’s research programs, demonstrates the multidisciplinary nature of the human discourse field, as well as the important ongoing interchange between human rights scholarship and human rights practice around the world. Beyond the University of Connecticut, the Human Rights Institute has fostered a distinctive and lively global network of human rights scholars—an accomplishment we intend to both celebrate and build on with this international conference. The Institute has served as a meeting place and a place of departure for the emergent field of human rights studies. Since 2003, HRI has hosted five major international conferences and eight faculty workshops, bringing together a diverse range of human rights scholars, advocates, and artists to meet, discuss, and discover. Each focused on a distinctive facet of the human rights field, from human rights and terrorism (2004) to human rights in the early British Empire (2011), from the quantification and promotion of economic rights (2005) to human rights, humanitarianism and the media (2010). This conference will continue this tradition, drawing scholars and practitioners from around the world to renew ongoing conversations and to inspire new ones about the latest challenges in the field.