Past Events

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From Crisis to Activism: The Human Right to Adequate Food in the 1970s

Posted on October 1, 2022November 10, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

David L Evans is a doctoral candidate in U.S. foreign relations history at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the formulation and global politics of economic, social, and cultural human rights, and specifically the human right to adequate food. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., David earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Before entering academia, he served eight years in the United States Marine Corps where he deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Philippines, and Japan.

Disability Rights & Urban Development

Posted on September 1, 2022September 29, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

Dr. Tina Kempin Reuter will discuss how to transform cities into spaces that reflect fundamental human rights principles and prioritize inclusion and equity, especially for marginalized communities such as people with disabilities. Looking at both the built environment and the current trends towards technologization of cities, she will show how a human rights framework can change the urban discourse and how community-based participatory approaches can influence both research on urban development and smart cities as well as policy processes and empowerment of underserved communities.

Dr. Tina Kempin Reuter is the Director of the Institute for Human Rights and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration and the Department of Anthropology, specializing in human rights, peace studies, and international politics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Her research focuses on human rights with a particular emphasis on the struggle of vulnerable and marginalized populations, including minorities, persons with disabilities, refugees and migrants, women, children, the LGBTQ community, and people dealing with the consequences of poverty. She studies how to use technology to improve access, inclusion, and participation of marginalized communities in society. In addition, she is an expert on ethnic conflict and peace making with a geographical focus on Europe and the Middle East.

Before joining UAB, Dr. Reuter was the Director of the Reiff Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution and Associate Professor of international and comparative politics at Christopher Newport University. She was formerly associated with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Public International Law at the University of Zurich, and the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Dr. Kempin Reuter holds a PhD in International Relations and International Law and an MA in Contemporary History, Economics, and International Law from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is the author of numerous publications in her field and has been awarded multiple prizes and grants to expand her research and teaching.

This event is sponsored by the Research Program on Economic & Rights in collaboration with the Human Rights Institute's Colloquium Series.

The Economic & Social Rights Group (ESRG) is an interdisciplinary monthly gathering of faculty and graduate students who meet to share ongoing research and to discuss current scholarship around economic and social rights. It is the central to the mission of the Research Program on Economic & Social Rights. The Research Program on Economic & Social Rights brings more than a dozen UConn faculty together with over 30 affiliated scholars from across the United States and Canada. Together, we have generated numerous graduate and undergraduate courses, several edited volumes, multiple co-authored articles, and the National Science Foundation-funded Socio-Economic Rights Fulfillment Index (SERF Index).

Upending Capitalism as We Know It? Public Policy Experimentation and Its Implications for Business

Posted on September 1, 2022October 14, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

About This Workshop:

The Business and Human Rights Workshop is dedicated to the development and discussion of works-in-progress and other non-published academic research. Please register before the event for access to Professor Olsen's paper.

Once thought to support democracy, contemporary global capitalism is contributing to its collapse. Despite the powerful systemic forces that propel it forward, though, citizens in many parts of the world are pushing back against systems that perpetuate climate change, corruption, and inequality. Simultaneously, innovative thinkers, alongside companies, citizen groups, and governments are experimenting to redress shortcomings in the status quo. Shifts in the way we define value (Mazzucato 2018), efforts to enact doughnut economies (Raworth 2017) or circular cities, and genuine corporate engagement (Knudsen and Moon 2017) each have important implications for a capitalism that is more supportive of democratic practice. In this paper we develop a framework that helps make sense of the varied implications such experiments have for business, trace how one successful experiment unfolded, and offer lessons it may hold for others. Doing so, we hope, will reinforce this trial, inspire others, and begin to help business leaders understand how they might engage in the various paths to a more democratic and prosperous future.

The Shape of Justice: Spatializing Public Memory

Posted on September 1, 2022October 27, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

Elena joined MASS in January of 2019. Her work with the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab and the Restorative Justice Design Lab focuses on engagement and design that elevates community voices. Her partnerships and projects seek to address the future of Indigenous sovereignty, healing through the arts and education, and decarceration. Prior to joining MASS, Elena worked as part of a Los Angeles-based design-build team. She received her Masters of Architecture from Yale School of Architecture and her Bachelor of Arts from Boston University.

Brandon Bibby AIA, ASID, NOMA, NCARB, WELL AP is a Senior Architect with MASS Design Group. Bibby joined MASS in 2021 as a Space and Society Fellow and currently works and manages research, engagement, and design across various Public Memory and Memorial Lab projects. Raised in the plains of Arkansas, where the Delta meets the Ozarks, Bibby is an artist, activist, and architect motivated by movement, culture, and familiarity in contemporary black and southern spaces. His work is rooted in preserving and developing architecture and dignified design in marginalized communities of color to address the lack of representation and access to equitable and quality design in the built environment. His diverse portfolio includes design, programming, and project management on over 100 preservation, arts, educational, commercial, and healthcare projects. Celebrated for his design leadership and community activism, Bibby was named a 2022 Ones To Watch Scholar with the American Society of Interior Design, recipient of the Alpha Rho Chi Bronze Medal, and was named the Arkansas Business' 20 in their 20s New Influential 2019 Class. He has lectured, and moderated panels with the American Institute of Architects, Architecture and Design Network, AARP, and currently serves as a Health Equity Advisor with the International Well Building Institute.

Morgan O’Hara is a cultural historian of cities and the built environment. She has worked at MASS Design Group since 2018, where she conducts research to support built projects and exhibitions, and crafts written work alongside strategy for business development. Her backgrounds in cultural research, public history, and collaborative design have informed her approach to socio-spatial research to develop human-centered histories of urban space and infrastructural systems. For the Fringe Cities project, Morgan conducted longitudinal analyses of small cities in the United States that participated in mid-century urban renewal, and while at the Hudson Valley Office, she was embedded in the public engagement work necessary to craft meaningful community design solutions in Poughkeepsie. Her passion lies in elevating creative and community-driven expressions of lesser-known histories in public space. Morgan studied anthropology at Reed College and graduated from Columbia with a Masters in Historic Preservation. She has served as co-faculty for Studio II in Historic Preservation at Columbia GSAPP since 2021.

This event is sponsored by the Research Program on Arts & Human Rights.

The Research Program on Arts & Human Rights explores how the arts can promote the full exercise of human rights and the consolidation of a democratic culture. The arts not only make human rights visible. They also advance democratic thinking as they help us imagine new futures and open unique spaces for dialogue and debate, ushering us into novel modes of experience that provide concrete grounds for rethinking our relationship to one another. Thus, the arts can act as a powerful means of sustaining individual and collective reflection on human rights, and of linking individual and collective public experience, social belonging and citizenship.

Swords into Ploughshares? Why Human Rights Abuses Persist After Resistance Campaigns

Posted on September 1, 2022October 5, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

In this Human Rights Research and Data Hub Workshop, Dr. Chris Shay will present his research on human rights abuse in the context of national crises. Human rights abuse tends to increase during national crises, such as civil wars and mass nonviolent uprisings. Under what conditions does this abuse abate or persist? Shay argues that violent challenges provoke much more coercive state responses – exposing more personnel within the security forces to extreme forms of repression and priming them (both leaders and followers) to reproduce these behaviors after the conflict has terminated. This effect is mitigated or avoided when challengers rely on nonviolent tactics instead of violence, leading to less post-conflict abuse. I test this argument with several quantitative methods, showing that nonviolent resistance campaigns lead to fewer post-campaign political killings and extrajudicial executions than violent campaigns. This effect is partially – but not fully – mediated by democratization: nonviolent methods reduce repression by promoting democratization, but the effect is present even in the absence of democratization (the majority of cases). Results also suggest that democratization cannot fully counteract the repressive legacies of violent conflict. By choosing to specialize in nonviolent tactics, therefore, resistance leaders avoid a repression trap that not even democratization can fully disarm.

Dr. Christopher Wiley Shay is a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute and an International Security Program Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. His research focuses on armed insurgencies, civil resistance movements, and their effects on societies and governments. Drawing on a diverse array of quantitative and field-based methodologies, Shay's doctoral research shows how domestic civil-military dynamics and international institutions influence post-conflict human rights outcomes. In other words, this research explains why surprisingly few countries (including new democracies) manage to break out of the "repression trap." His work has been featured in venues such as the Journal of Global Security Studies, the Journal of Peace Research (forthcoming), and Political Violence at a Glance.

Shay also manages the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO 2.1) data project with Dr. Erica Chenoweth and involved in the research team that maintains the Socio-Economic Rights Fulfillment Index with Dr. Susan Randolph. In the past, he has provided analysis on India's long-running Maoist insurgency (the "Naxalites") to the International Institute of Strategic Studies. He received his Ph.D. (International Studies) from the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School and a master's degree (Peace and Conflict Studies) from Uppsala University.

Prior to his graduate studies, Christopher was an outdoor educator and (for brief periods) a wildland firefighter. He holds a bachelor's degree from Hanover College.

Stigma & Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Black September, Ethnic Enclaves, & New Venture Performance in Jordan

Posted on April 1, 2022April 26, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

About This Workshop:

The Business and Human Rights Workshop is dedicated to the development and discussion of works-in-progress and other non-published academic research. Below find the abstract for a preview of the paper. Please register for a link to read Prof. Ryan Cole's paper, the focus of this workshop.

Prior research on immigrant entrepreneurship has largely overlooked the difficulties faced by stigmatized immigrant groups and the strategies that such immigrant groups can undertake to improve new venture performance. To address this issue, we examine immigrant entrepreneurship in Jordan. We find that stigmatized immigrant entrepreneurs in Jordan are more negatively affected by government practices than native and non-stigmatized immigrant entrepreneurs. Moreover, we find that stigmatized entrepreneurs can partially mitigate these effects by founding their ventures in established ethnic enclaves where entrepreneurs can access brokers with social ties that can help overcome discrimination. Empirically, we examine this phenomenon using data on new venture performance of 8756 entrepreneurs in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan from 2003 to 2013 and supplemented with 60 qualitative interviews.

Theatre & Human Rights: The Politics of Dramatic Form

Posted on April 1, 2022April 22, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

Join us for a presentation of research that develops a theoretical foundation and methodology for how theatre and human rights intersect, and demonstrates how various dramatic forms interrogate human rights questions from within the specific perspective of Theatre as a discipline. 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. The use of Theatre will be positioned as a method of examination rather than emphasize the more limited, however important purposes the arts serve to raise consciousness or offer commentary that accompany other, often considered more primary, modes of analysis.

New for 2022, the Research Program on Arts & Human Rights explores how the arts can promote the full exercise of human rights and the consolidation of a democratic culture. The arts not only make human rights visible. They also advance democratic thinking as they help us imagine new futures and open unique spaces for dialogue and debate, ushering us into novel modes of experience that provide concrete grounds for rethinking our relationship to one another. Thus, the arts can act as a powerful means of sustaining individual and collective reflection on human rights, and of linking individual and collective public experience, social belonging and citizenship.

Our guiding concepts:

Art makes visible human rights, and their violation, helping us combat injustice;
Art strengthens mutual recognition, opening new spaces for dialogue and debate;
Art forges new potential futures, helping us envision a more moral and just society.

Coupling & Coupling Compromises in Supplier Factories’ Responses to Worker Activism

Posted on March 1, 2022June 5, 2023 by Branzell, Alex

About This Workshop:

The Business and Human Rights Workshop is dedicated to the development and discussion of works-in-progress and other non-published academic research. Read below for the abstract of Prof. Jodi Short's upcoming paper, the focus of this workshop.

Many companies have adopted corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies in response to activist pressure, but ensuring the implementation of these policies is challenging. Recognizing the paucity of research on the effect of contentious activism on companies’ coupling of CSR policies and practices in the private politics and (de)coupling literatures, we posit that companies engage in “coupling compromises” when faced with such institutional pressure—improving their practices and more tightly coupling them with CSR policies in the domain contested by activists, but relaxing the coupling of policy and practice in competing CSR domains. Furthermore, we theorize that the nature and extent of coupling compromises can be explained by the interaction of activism with organizational structures that construct managerial perceptions of issue salience and internal frictions to change. We test our theory in the context of global supply chain factories’ compliance with CSR policies on working conditions when they face local worker activism. Analyzing 3,495 audits of 2,352 factories in 114 Chinese cities from 2012 to 2015, we find that worker activism over wages-and-benefits issues pushes factories to improve their wages-and-benefits practices and couple them more tightly with CSR policies, but these factories concurrently loosen the coupling between policy and practice in the domain of occupational health and safety. Both effects are stronger in factories with organizational structures that foreground the salience of wages and benefits issues and mitigate friction to changing organizational practices. These findings make significant contributions to the literatures on private politics, (de)coupling, and global supply chain labor practices.

Environmental Rights in Cultural Context – Perspectives from Law and Anthropology

Posted on March 1, 2022March 23, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

Environmental rights, such as the right to a healthy or clean environment, are experiencing increasing recognition within domestic constitutions as well as international human rights instruments and institutions. In parallel, more ecocentric approaches promote so-called rights of nature. Using methods of law and anthropology, this talk will assess to what extent such rights respond to environmental stress of local communities exposed, for instance, to large scale mining, hydro dams or climate change.

Dirk Hanschel studied law at the Universities of Marburg and Heidelberg, Germany, as well as the London School of Economics (LSE), before taking his doctoral/post-doctoral degrees at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He furthermore holds a Master of Comparative Law (Mannheim/Adelaide). After working as a reader at the University of Aberdeen for around two years, he became a professor of German, European and International Public Law at the University of Halle, Germany, in 2015. His research focuses inter alia on topics of environmental law and human rights, topics of comparative constitutional law (such as federalism), the law of international organizations, as well as law and anthropology. In 2019 he became a Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, where he conducts an interdisciplinary project on "Environmental Rights in Cultural Context", together with a group of doctoral and post-doctoral scholars. In autumn 2021 he was appointed Martin Flynn Global Law Professor at UConn Law School.

Suffer the Children: A Theoretical Foundation for the Human Rights of the Child

Posted on March 1, 2022August 16, 2022 by Branzell, Alex

Join us for a talk by longtime member of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights Richard P. Hiskes, whose widely acclaimed new book addresses the centrality of social and economic rights within a broader discussion of why taking children's human rights seriously turns conventional human rights theory upside down. The book establishes the theoretical foundation for prioritizing social and economic rights in the name of children’s human rights. Read more about the book here.

Richard P. Hiskes is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. As a founding faculty member of the Human Rights Institute (HRI) he served as Associate Director and Director of Undergraduate Programs, including the Human Rights Major. He was Editor of the Journal of Human Rights for many years, and twice selected as President of the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA).

He is the author of many books and articles in political theory generally and human rights theory in particular. His human rights work focuses on the theory of environmental human rights and on the human rights of children. His 2009 book, The Human Right to a Green Future: Environmental Rights and Intergenerational Justice (Cambridge), won the 2010 award for the best book in human rights from the American Political Science Association. His most recent book is Suffer the Children: A Theoretical Foundation for the Human Rights of the Child (Oxford, 2021).

The mission of the Collaboratory on School and Child Health (CSCH) is to facilitate innovative and impactful connections across research, policy, and practice arenas to advance equity in school and child health. CSCH is committed to anti-racist work that prioritizes inclusion, reduces disparities, and creates systemic change.

CSCH serves as a central resource to University and external partners engaged in efforts that inform healthy, safe, supportive, and engaging environments for all children. The Collaboratory strives to create a positive environment that supports communication, knowledge sharing, and collaborative work among a diverse network of members in pursuit of this shared aim. Our collaborations intentionally use an inclusive, team- and relationship-based approach to broaden capacity for interconnected and cross-disciplinary projects that tackle the most pressing and complex issues in school and child health.

The Department of Human Development & Family Sciences (HDFS) focuses its research, teaching, and public engagement on a multidisciplinary understanding of 1) healthy development and wellbeing of individuals and families over the lifespan, 2) interactions and processes within families, and 3) individuals and families in societal and cultural contexts.

We are committed to excellence in research, teaching, and public engagement through our core values of individualized mentoring, innovation and leadership, diversity and equity, and applied/translational science.

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