Funding for Faculty

UConn faculty and staff focused on human rights may apply for research funding from the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute through two programs:

Dr. Fiona Vernal speaking at a podium

Seed Grant for Faculty Research in Human Rights

Our seed grant competition is meant to support and promote faculty research projects on human rights and to facilitate the writing of external grant proposals. We offer one award of $15,000 each academic year. Proposed research projects should make a significant contribution to ongoing scholarly and/or policy debates in the field of human rights. They will be evaluated for overall excellence on human rights issues, understood broadly. All proposals will be reviewed by a multidisciplinary committee chaired by the Associate Director of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute.

2023 Seed Grant Recipient

Sara Silverstein
Assistant Professor, Department of History & Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute

 

"A Place to Exist: Histories of Statelessness from Empire to European Integration"

 

A Place to Exist: Histories of Statelessness from Empire to European Integration considers the history of statelessness and belonging from the perspective of people who were themselves stateless. The project examines how stateless people conceptualized rights and created mechanisms to protect rights during the period in which modern understandings of the state and of citizenship emerged, focusing on the 1910s-1960s. A Place to Exist concentrates on people labeled as minority nationalities who identified as lacking a state to represent their interests – including Ukrainians, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Macedonians, and Roma – in addition to people without citizenship who officially qualified as “stateless” under international law, and people whose identity fell outside any international legal categorization. The focus will start in Europe and will extend from there to individuals and communities who engaged with these stateless Europeans, including anti-colonial activists and American Civil Rights activists. Reclaiming lost voices reveals the same period that saw the rise of the modern nation-state was a time of vibrant thought and action for alternative ideas of sovereignty, statehood, and citizenship, while stateless people also worked pragmatically to develop institutions and procedures to protect their rights. This project makes the case that their work was indispensable to the realization of later international collaborations and organizations, of European integration, and of the theories and practices of human rights.

More about Sara Silverstein

Sara Silverstein is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, and co-director of HRI's Research Program in Humanitarianism. Her work addresses the histories of statelessness, minority rights, internationalism, public and global health, and refugees and migration, with a geographic concentration in Modern and Eastern Europe. Her first book, For Your Health and Ours: The East European History of International Health, explored international health projects and practices of development that originated in eastern European following the First World War. She has published articles and chapters on the histories of internationalism, public and international health, the right to health, and state-building and democracy in post-imperial Eastern Europe. She has been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Yale Jackson School for Global Affairs, a Fox Fellow at Sciences Po, Paris, and a junior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Former Recipients

2022

Manisha Desai
Professor, Sociology and Asian and Asian American Studies
"Women’s Rights, Land Rights, and Climate Justice"

2021

Alaina Brenick
Associate Professor, Human Development and Family Science
"A Right to Housing, A Right to Health: How do Connecticut Constituents View the Homeless Community’s Right to Housing During and Beyond COVID-19"

Eligibility Criteria & Requirements

  1. Open to full-time, permanent UConn faculty in any discipline at any UConn campus
  2. Applicant must be affiliated with UConn during the entire award period.
  3. Applicants may apply for both the Seed Grant and the Small Grant, but the recipient of the Seed Grant will be ineligible to receive a Small Grant in the same year.
  4. Disbursement of funds is contingent upon receipt of any required IRB approval.
  5. The grant holder agrees to:
    1. Submit a progress report (2 page maximum) on the research project by July 30, 2025.
    2. The Grant holder also agrees to present at a public HRI Research Talk in the year following their Grant.
  6. The seed grant may be used to:
    1. Support graduate assistant or undergraduate student labor costs at university-established rates.
    2. Contribute towards course replacement costs, following the model of the Research Excellence Program. This must be approved by your department head.
    3. Pay for direct costs associated with travel for research or research support costs.

How to Apply

Access the application via Microsoft Forms. The application requires the following materials:

  1. Narrative description of the research project (5 pages, double spaced, 12 pt. font);
  2. Brief explanation of plans to apply for outside grants (no more than a half page);
  3. Budget narrative (1 page maximum);
  4. Bibliography for the project (1 page maximum); and
  5. Current CV

Application Deadline for 2024: April 1

Evaluation Criteria

The following criteria will be used in evaluating applications:

  • Significance of the contribution that the project will make to knowledge in the field of human rights
  • Quality of the conception, definition, organization, and description of the project
  • Feasibility of the project, including rationale for the budget
  • Priority will be given to applicants who indicate clearly their plans to apply for external funding.
  • Additional priority may be given to applications from junior faculty and to those faculty who have not received this grant in recent years.
  • Applications that do not follow the guidelines for page length and supporting documents will not be considered.

Questions about the competition? Please email humanrights@uconn.edu or call 860-486-5393.

Small Grants for Faculty & Staff Research in Human Rights

Our research grant competition for the faculty and staff supports and promotes research projects on human rights related questions. Projects should make a significant contribution to ongoing scholarly and/or policy debates in the field of human rights.

Awards will prioritize primary research, including library research, fieldwork, interviewing, historical archival research, pilot studies, data collection, and data set construction. Book preparation requests are permitted and could include copy editing, indexing, and editorial assistance. Requests to provide a subvention for an open access publication or for access to databases for research will be considered.

2023 Small Grant Recipients

Thelma Z. Abu

Assistant Professor, Department of Geography

 

"Understanding and Responding to Issues of Water Security and Gender-Based Violence in
Sub-Saharan Africa"

 

The United Nations (UN) declared access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) a basic human right in 2010. Yet social disparities situated within power imbalances and contextual knowledge gaps impede achieving safe WASH access. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), these challenges typically affect rural and marginalized communities in urban areas. At the community level, the greatest burdens related to water and sanitation fall on women and girls responsible for providing these services. These women and girls are at risk of both physical and sexual violence when searching for WASH services or do not successfully deliver on their domestic responsibilities. In addition, women and men have unequal roles and varied levels of participation in water governance, particularly at the community level. In rare circumstances when women are involved, their participation is typically passive.

In response to inequities in WASH access, several global initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals (2000- 2015) have been implemented, however, achieving the WASH-related goals is challenging (UN, 2015). In 2015, the world transitioned to sustainable development goals (SDGs). The focus of the world today is to achieve the 17 SDG goals and 169 targets to ensure that the distribution of resources for life around the world happens equitably such that, by 2030, there is health and life for all. SDG 6 conveys the need for ensuring access to water and sanitation for all. Targets 6.1,6.2 and 6.b further address the gendered dimensions of accessing and participating in WASH decision-making. In addition, recent studies indicate the role of access to WASH in empowering women and ensuring gender equality in SSA.

This proposed research takes a feminist political ecology approach to document and investigate the WASH and empowerment narrative expressed through oral histories of women in Uganda and Ghana. This approach helps identify the points in history where things could have changed or could have been done differently– knowledge could have changed outcomes, attitudes could have changed behaviours, and practices could have changed lives. This study will enhance our understanding of WASH inequities, Gender Based Violence (GBV), and empowerment, all vital for responding to social inclusion in a changing climate. This research will further generate foundational knowledge for a long-term study on Sustainability in climate interventions in Ghana.

Jane Pryma

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology

 

"Slow Rights: Trauma and Disability Rights"

 

The 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities called for disability rights to be interpreted, globally, through a social model rather than a medical model of disability. However, disability rights, in practice, are still commonly granted based on a claimant’s medical diagnosis and implemented through a standard menu of reasonable accommodations. In the wake of COVID-19 and recent social movements for racial and gender justice, some organizations have begun to move beyond the focus on biomedical diagnoses to recognize impairments caused by social trauma like gender-based violence and housing insecurity. Approaching social trauma as disabling challenges prevailing sociolegal definitions of disability as a stable condition inherent to an individual rather than the product of an interaction between an individual body and a social environment. What makes a potentially traumatic experience disabling in some cases but not others is not easy to evaluate with the medical tools and objective measures favored by bureaucracies to efficiently “diagnose” and accommodate impairment. Developing disability rights that eschew medical diagnoses and one-size-fits-all standard accommodations takes additional time and labor. I term these rights “slow rights.” My project compares the implementation of disability rights in the United States and France from the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities through the COVID-19 pandemic asking: (1) how do universities and employers attempt to assess and manage the lasting effects of social trauma through a disability rights framework; (2) what are the consequences of responding to social injustices in this way; and (3) what sociolegal opportunities and challenges do organizations in each country face as they seek to implement a “slow rights” approach to impairment caused by social inequality?

Catherine Masud

Assistant Professor, Department of Digital Media & Design and Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute

 

"Justice Stories / Our Stories"

 

“Justice Stories/Our Stories” is a collaborative research, documentation, and archiving project that will look at three movements for justice in Bangladesh: the Rana Plaza disaster (workers’ justice and accountability), the Kansat Movement (rural electricity access) and the Road Safety Movement (road safety, justice, and accountability for road crash survivors). Partnering with Bangladeshi legal aid organization BLAST, I will work with a team of young research assistants to conduct oral histories and collect and catalog archival assets relating to the three main focal points of the project. These materials will form the basis of an online archive that will include a searchable database with short biographies of key actors in various justice movements, contemporaneous articles, legal records of cases, copies of relevant laws and policies or their extracts, video testimonies and photographs of key actors, an infographic setting out a chronology of the milestones, and a summary of key events and developments for each of these movements. We hope this archive will be a resource for students, teachers, researchers, legal professionals, and visual storytellers, and will serve as a model for similar projects in future.

Former Recipients

2022

David Richards
Associate Professor, Political Science & Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute

Jeremy Pressman
Professor, Political Science & Director, Middle East Studies

“Evaluating Israel’s Claim of Exceptional Negative Treatment About Human Rights Violations”

2021

Gary M. English
Distinguished Professor, Dramatics Arts
“Theatre and Human Rights: The Politics of Dramatic Form”

Sandra L. Sirota
Assistant Professor in Residence, Human Rights Institute
“Shaping an Education System that Works for Us: Youth-led Movements to Disrupt Systemic Racism in Education”

Eligibility Criteria & Requirements

  • Open to UConn faculty, staff, and post-docs in all disciplines at any UConn campus.
  • Applicant must be affiliated with UConn during the entire award period.
  • Disbursement of funds is contingent upon receipt of any required IRB approval.
  • Applicants may apply for both the Seed Grant and the Small Grant, but the recipient of the Seed Grant will be ineligible to receive a Small Grant in the same year.

How to Apply

Access the application via Microsoft Forms. The application requires the following materials:

  • Intellectual rationale for the project, list of expected project outcomes, and methodology (three pages, double spaced, 12 point font);
  • Budget narrative of research-related expenses (typically not to exceed $2000) (no more than a half page)
  • Current CV

Application Deadline for 2024: April 1

Evaluation Criteria

Proposed research projects will be evaluated for overall excellence of the proposed research project on human rights issues, understood broadly. All proposals will be reviewed by a multidisciplinary committee chaired by the Associate Director of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute.

  1. Significance of the contribution that the project will make to knowledge in the field of human rights
  2. Quality of the conception, definition, organization, and description of the project
  3. Feasibility of the project, including rationale for the budget
  4. Additional priority may be given to applications from junior faculty and those faculty who have not received this grant in recent years.
  5. Applications that do not follow the guidelines for page length and supporting documents will not be considered.

Questions about the competition? Please email humanrights@uconn.edu or call 860-486-5393.