Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute

North Carolina is suffering extraordinarily high numbers in poverty within our population. The Tar Heel state has been named one of the worst states in the US in its handling of the poor by several studies & a New York Times article earlier this year. Gene Nichol speaks passionately on the need to address this state-wide injustice to our citizens. Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley distinguished professor of law and Director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina. From 2005-2008, he was president of the College of William and Mary. Nichol was Burton Craige professor and dean of the law school at UNC (1999-2005); law dean at the University of Colorado (1988-1995); and Cutler professor and director of the William & Mary Bill of Rights Institute (1985-1988). A widely published author, he is also a monthly op-ed writer for the Raleigh News & Observer.

Lowndes County, AL: A child’s ball is in the trench which is clearly full of raw sewage coming from a mobile home. A dog house sits nearby and a vegetable garden is within fifty feet of the effluent that is being discharged from a toilet. The neat little home is inhabited by a senior citizen, her daughter and grandchildren. Just outside her bedroom one can not only see the effluent from her home, but the toilet paper as well. Near the home sits a trailer that is occupied by her daughter and son-in-law. Underneath the home, the raw sewage is clearly present. The stench fills the air. In another location, the sewage is running across the road. People drive through it and children walk through it unaware of the health issues they could be tracking into their homes. This situation is not in some Third World country, it exists in the United States of America because we refuse to acknowledge poverty and the conditions it is yielding right here. This is America’s Dirty Secret. Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE) Community Development Corporation , presented a talk based on her recent experience representing the United States in international negotiations that determined the final texts of the Summary for Policymakers of each volume of IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report.

Lowndes County, AL: A child’s ball is in the trench which is clearly full of raw sewage coming from a mobile home. A dog house sits nearby and a vegetable garden is within fifty feet of the effluent that is being discharged from a toilet. The neat little home is inhabited by a senior citizen, her daughter and grandchildren. Just outside her bedroom one can not only see the effluent from her home, but the toilet paper as well. Near the home sits a trailer that is occupied by her daughter and son-in-law. Underneath the home, the raw sewage is clearly present. The stench fills the air. In another location, the sewage is running across the road. People drive through it and children walk through it unaware of the health issues they could be tracking into their homes. This situation is not in some Third World country, it exists in the United States of America because we refuse to acknowledge poverty and the conditions it is yielding right here. This is America’s Dirty Secret. Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation (ACRE), presented a talk based on her recent experience representing the United States in international negotiations that determined the final texts of the Summary for Policymakers of each volume of IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report.

Kathryn Libal is Associate Professor of Social Work and Associate Director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. She earned her doctorate in anthropology at the University of Washington. She specializes in human rights, social welfare and the state and has published on women’s and children’s rights movements in Turkey and on international non-governmental organizations’ advocacy on behalf of Iraqi refugees. Her current scholarship focuses on the localization of human rights norms and practices in the United States, including a co-edited volume with Dr. Shareen Hertel on Human Rights in the United States: Beyond Exceptionalism (Cambridge, 2011) and a new project on the U.S. politics of food security and food assistance policy as a human rights concern. She has also co-authored, with Scott Harding, a short text on Human Rights Based Approaches to Community Practice in the United States(Springer, forthcoming) and is co-editor, with S. Megan Berthold, Rebecca Thomas, and Lynne Healy, of the forthcoming volume Advancing Human Rights in Social Work Education (Council on Social Work Education Press). Kathryn Libal gave a talk on “Bringing Economic and Social Rights ‘Home’: A View from an Interdisciplinary Human Rights Classroom” on Monday, September 22 at 4pm in the FHI Garage, Smith Warehouse, Bay 4. Her talk was sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center@FHI, the Pauli Murray Project and Humanities Writ Large.

Human rights lawyer, activist, and scholar Juan E. Méndez reflects on the 30th anniversary of Argentina’s Nunca Más report and its impact on the origins and development of transitional justice. Submitted to the Argentine people on September 20th, 1984 , Nunca Más was the first time a government authorized an independent entity to investigate those formerly – and often currently – responsible for its decisions and actions. Juan E. Méndez is a Visiting Professor of Law at the American University – Washington College of Law. Mendez has also served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Special Advisor on Prevention to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and as UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide. He worked with Human Rights Watch for 15 years, and he has served as the President of the International Center for Transnational Justice (ICTJ). Juan Mendez will be placing his historical papers in The Human Rights Archive at Duke’s Rubenstein Library.

Robert Walker, currently a professor of Social Policy at the University of Oxford in England, is the author of The Shame of Poverty, a two year qualitative investigation of the nature and consequences of shame associated with poverty conducted in seven settings located in rural Uganda and India; urban China, Pakistan, Korea, the United Kingdom and Norway. His work examines the way in which the pain of poverty extends beyond material hardship. Rather than being shameless, as is often claimed by the media, people experiencing poverty almost invariably feel ashamed at being unable to fulfill both their personal aspirations or societal expectations due to their lack of income and other resources. This reduces personal efficacy and contributes to the duration and prevalence of poverty, a process that may be aggravated by policies that stigmatize recipients of social protection. Walker calls this a key global challenge and advocates a new response to poverty based on global human rights legislation. Walker is also an adviser to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty.

What is the importance of human rights studies to university faculty and students? The Duke Human Rights Center@FHI is examining what it means to study human rights at the university level in a new project titled RightsConnect. RightsConnect hosts a series of lectures and workshops on rights teaching and practice, with noted outside faculty and practitioners who face real world challenges to rights campaigns. Michael Geyer of the University Chicago is the latest in this series of speakers brought to Duke by the Duke Human Rights Center@FHI to explore that issue. Geyer discussed ”Human Rights Education After Human Rights Idolatry” in Bay 4 of the Smith Warehouse on Feb. 24, 2014. Geyer is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of German and European History and the faculty director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago.

The Duke Human Rights Center@FHI is examining what it means to study human rights at the university level in a new project titled RightsConnect. RightsConnect hosts a series of lectures and workshops on rights teaching and practice, with noted outside faculty and practitioners who face real world challenges to rights campaigns. Rachel Morello-Frosch is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley working in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management. Her research focuses on environmental health and justice, centering on air pollution’s increased effects upon races and classes already vulnerable to other health issues due to disparities. Her work focuses on these community-based health issues and the policy-making around these issues. This talk was given at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University on Feb. 20, 2014.

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Duke University have named Jonathan Katz’s book "The Big Truck that Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) as the winner of the 2013 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award. On November 6, 2013, Katz did a reading from his book at the FHI Garage at the Smith Warehouse, Bay 4 on Duke's campus. Katz, who currently lives in Durham, NC, was a correspondent for the Associated Press on January 12, 2010, when the deadliest earthquake ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere struck the island nation of Haiti. "The Big Truck that Went By" recounts Katz personal experience when the earthquake hit, and—drawing on his groundbreaking reporting during the period that followed—traces the relief response that poured from the international community and where those efforts went tremendously wrong. Award judge Roger Atwood states that “Katz’s book brings together everything a winner of this award should have: brave and groundbreaking research, lucid writing, freshness in both form and content, and (best of all) genuine policy applications.” Started in 2008, the WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award is a joint venture of Duke University and WOLA, a leading advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. The award honors the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America. The books are evaluated by a panel of expert judges drawn from academia, journalism, and public policy circles.

Purvis, chairs Healing Through Remembering, a cross-community project working on the legacy of the past as it relates to the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. Purvis represented the East Belfast constituency as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly from March 2007-May 2011, first as a member of the Progressive Unionist Party and subsequently as an independent.

South African Constitutional Court Justice Edwin Cameron will speak about his country’s post-apartheid efforts to guarantee rights for gay, lesbian, trans-gendered and queer citizens, referring to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow Nation: Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Activism in South Africa,” a 2008 article by Ryan Richard Thoreson published in the Journal of South African Studies. Cameron has served on the Constitutional Court, South Africa’s highest on constitutional matters, since January 1, 2009. He was also a Supreme Court of Appeal judge, a leading human rights lawyer, a prominent critic of former President Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS-denialist policies, and author of Witness to AIDS. In 2002, the Bar of England and Wales gave Cameron a special award for his ‘contribution to international jurisprudence and the protection of human rights.’

Dorothy Q. Thomas will speak about recovering a legacy of progressive Americanism for contemporary women’s rights activists, drawing on her on-going research for a book that chronicles the lives of some of her female ancestors, including descendants of former presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams and mother of the American Revolution Dorothy Quincy Hancock. Thomas is currently a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She was previously a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and was founding director for the Human Rights Watch Women’s Division. The lecture is cosponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center, the Archive for Human Rights, Women’s Studies, the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the Program in the Study of Sexualities, and the Franklin Humanities Institute. Generous support was also provided by the Trent Foundation.

John Hope Franklin Center

John Hope Franklin Center

John Hope Franklin Center

John Hope Franklin Center

John Hope Franklin Center