April 4, 2024 
‘Künü: A Space for Dialogue’ with Filmmaker Francisco Huichaqueo Pérez 
Co-sponsored by the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights, the Buen Vivir & Collective Healings Initiative, El Instituto, the Departments of Anthropology and Digital Media & Design, Native American & Indigenous Studies, and Native American Cultural Programs.
Francisco Huichaqueo joins the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights for a screening of Künü, a documentary that captures the collaborative efforts of 80 Mapuche communities to reclaim part of their ancestral lands from a large transnational forestry company in Chile.

March 25, 2024 
‘Sama in the Forest’ with Coralynn V. Davis 
Co-sponsored by Human Rights Film & Digital Media Initiative and the Department of Art & Art History.
Join the Human Rights Film+ Series for a screening of Sama in the Forest with film producer and academic Coralynn V. Davis. This community-based production delves into the subversive role women’s folktales can play in a patriarchal society. Set in the region of Mithila, in India, Sama in the Forest explores the power of stories to shape, challenge, and change our understanding of the world.

February 16, 2024 
An Inventory and Index for Political Apologies: Memorial Architecture as Moral Transformation? 
Nicholas Smith, Professor of Philosophy and Justice Studies (University of New Hampshire) joins the Research Program on Arts & Human Rights for a talk on the question “How do examples of memorial architecture score on metrics for political apologies?”

February 16, 2024
Berlin: The Guilt Environment
Valentina Rozas-Krause, Assistant Professor of Design & Architecture at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellow, discusses Berlin’s built environment with a focus on its postwar memorials. In memorials, she finds a ‘cult of apology’ embedded within the cityscape, offering insights into the role memorials play in symbolic and material reparation after political conflict.

November 30, 2023
Artist’s talk: Odette England, “Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face From Flash”
Hosted in conjunction with UConn’s Contemporary Art Galleries.
Odette England discusses her current photograph exhibition which illustrates a complex relationship between guns, cameras, and violence against women.

April 19, 2023 
Human Rights & Cultural Resistance through Theatre 
Nabil Al-Raee, a prominent director and playwright from the West Bank presented images and spoke about several Palestinian productions including, The Siege, The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter, I Am My Own Enemy, a deconstruction of the Medusa Myth, and Suicide Note, based on Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis.

April 19, 2023 
Stubborn Negativity: On Willy Retto’s Uchuraccay Massacre Last Image 
José Falconi discusses the last film shot by photographer Willy Retto who captures the killings of himself and several journalists by villagers in Uchuraccay, Peru in 1983, during the country's internal conflict. Despite the photographic evidence, many remained unconvinced. This talk reflects on the power of images to provide testimony of the past, while also resisting the linear progress of time. It considers the internal logic,  desynchronization between word and image, and fog of mythology surrounding historical events.

April 4, 2023 
The Fate of Human Beings: A Documentary Film Reframing the Narrative of Institutionalization through Mental Institution Gravesites 
Heather Cassano discusses The Fate of Human Beings, a documentary film uncovering the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States. Through a multiple narrative approach utilizing archival and present-day material, the film unpacks the ramifications of these cemeteries, seeking to understand our past and present relationships with the “otherness” of those interred.

March 9, 2023 
Subverting Statues: Race, Space, Performance, and the Arab American National Museum 
In 2005, the Arab American National Museum (AANM) opened on the site of a former furniture store, opposite the former city hall of Dearborn, MI, a city often referred to as “the heart of Arab America.” At its founding, the museum sat across the street from a statue of the former, long-serving, Dearborn mayor Orville Hubbard who explicitly referred to Arabs as “n******”. Drawing on his fellowship at AANM this academic year, Asif Majid asks: what performative, racial, and political power does the geography of the museum carry, particularly in reference to Dearborn’s racist history and spatial politics?

November 30, 2022 
Ordinary Curators at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial 
Christine Sylvester explores the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington as a "museum" site where "ordinary curators" authorize themselves to re-curate the war to put mortality --not state, honor or soldier heroism –at the heart of it. The piece mixes elements of new museum thinking with consideration of object assemblages composed and left at the Memorial, as well as the personal memories Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk curates into a museum to lost love in his novel The Museum of Innocence (2008). It challenges a field known for abstract theory to humanize its knowledge base by noticing ordinary civilians re-curating inherited versions of war.

October 25, 2022 
The Shape of Justice: Spatializing Public Memory 
Members of MASS Design Group will speak on their transformative practice of "spatializing memory.” In projects such as The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Alabama) and the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial (Boston), MASS Design explores new ways to shift narratives, serve as a catalyst for truth-telling, and advance collective healing through the built environment.

June 26, 2022 
From Theory to Practice (and back): Lessons for the Arts in Contexts of Transitional Justice 
In collaboration with the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights and the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College. 
De la teoría a la práctica (y viceversa): lecciones para las artes en contextos de justicia transicional is an event by lumbung members Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR). Drawing from cases in which art has intervened effectively in transitional justice contexts, the participants in this workshop will be encouraged to envision and plan their own interventions.

June 25, 2022 
The Day After: The Art of Transitional Justice 
In collaboration with the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights and the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College. 
How can art be useful in cases of transitional justice? At The day after: Transitional Justice and the Arts, an event by lumbung member Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, human rights experts and humanities scholars join in conversation about working at the intersection of legal and artistic approaches to address justice, victims’ rights, reparations, and non-repetition.

June 24, 2022 
Meeting Ground: The Intersection of Human Rights and The Arts 
In collaboration with the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights and the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College.
Human rights and the arts is a new field of study. lumbung member Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt’s (INSTAR) Meeting ground: The intersection of human rights and the arts introduces programs pioneering this approach.

June 24-26, 2022 
Documenta 15 
Ruangrupa is the Artistic Direction of the fifteenth edition of documenta. The Jakarta-based artists’ collective has built the foundation of their documenta fifteen on the core values and ideas of lumbung (Indonesian term for a communal rice barn). lumbung as an artistic and economic model is rooted in principles such as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation, and is embodied in all parts of the collaboration and the exhibition.

April 21, 2022 
Theatre and Human Rights: The Politics of Dramatic Form 
This presentation of research develops theory and methodology for how theatre and human rights intersect, and demonstrates how various dramatic forms interrogate human rights questions from within the discipline of Theatre. While human rights research and programming often employ the arts as "representations" of atrocities--abusive political, social and economic practices--this study focuses on the various types of dramatic form and structure as uniquely positioned to investigate important questions in human rights theory and practice.