Tag Archives: human rights

Peace and Conflict Studies Student Paris Shan ’23 Shares Internship Experience With Advocates For Human Rights

Paris Shan ’23 is a Peace and Conflict Studies minor student at Swarthmore College. This summer, she was actively engaged with the Advocates for Human Rights in an internship. She describes her internship experience with ties to interviews, research, data analysis, and importantly the education she received at Swarthmore and in Peace & Conflict Studies.

Paris Shan ’23 Peace & Conflict Studies Minor

“This summer, I was able to engage in meaningful work as an International Justice and Women’s Human Rights intern with the Advocates for Human Rights. Through my role, I worked with prosecutors to collect evidence of gender-based war crimes in Ukraine to submit to the International Criminal Court. This work is extremely important as it can be used to hold perpetrators of violence accountable and allows victims to share their stories. The most impactful moment of this internship for me was an interview with a Ukrainian father who had never had the opportunity to share his pain and struggle with anyone before. He spoke about the burden he felt to protect his family, the fear of the unknown, and his gratitude for the work of the legal professionals at the Advocates for Human Rights. His interview brought him to tears as he came to confront his experience and emotions for the first time. It is easy to feel like your work as a human rights defender is so small, but experiences like this remind me that change-making can exist at various levels.”

“With the Advocates, I also worked with a team of students to research international human rights instruments and country laws on violence against women. The work I did helped bring attention to gender-based violence around the world and aid prosecutors representing victims of violence in court. I was able to build and update the www.stopvaw.org database for other organizations and victims to use as a resource. On the website, I included research and writing reports on sex trafficking and domestic violence, weekly updates on women’s rights around the world, a data tracker on the far-right movement, and updated information on gender-based violence and resources for victims. My research showed me the importance of documentation in the foundation of legal work. As a pre-law scholar, these skills are extremely valuable to my education and future goals.”

“My work this summer helped me further develop my data analysis, professional writing, and knowledge learned through my coursework as a political science and peace & conflict studies student at Swarthmore. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to apply many of the concepts that I have learned through my education at Swarthmore into real-world experiences and projects. I am grateful to the Lang Center for Social and Civic Responsibility for the Social Summer Impact Scholarship that allowed me to pursue this summer opportunity. My growth this summer is a huge step towards my goal of attending law school and becoming an international human rights lawyer.”

“Abolishing the Death Penalty with Sister Helen Prejean: Justice, Dignity and Faith”

Sister Helen Prejean Flyer.png

All are welcome this Wednesday, 2/24, 7-8:30 pm EST for
“Abolishing the Death Penalty with Sister Helen Prejean: Justice, Dignity and Faith” a talk and Q&A with one of the country’s leading advocates against capital punishment. Immediately afterwards you can join a conversation with Swarthmore students who provide academic tutoring to incarcerated youth through the Petey Greene Program, event co-sponsors.

Use this Zoom info for both events:

Meeting ID: 832 2476 7883
Password: K16de6

You can stream Dead Man Walking, a film about the work of Sister Helen, through Tripod with this link.


This event is sponsored by the Interfaith Center, the Petey Greene Program, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Peace and Conflict Studies and the Urban Inequalities & Incarceration Program at the Lang Center.

Conversation with Max Elbaum, longtime left organizer and author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che.

iu
Conversation with Max Elbaum, longtime left organizer and author
of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che.
Tuesday April 16th, 7pm
Kohlberg Hall, Scheuer Room
Swarthmore College (free and open to the public).

The third edition of Revolution in the Air was published in 2018 with a new forward by Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. Garza writes: “We can use this book as a tool to begin charting a path towards what a vast, vibrant Left can and should look like in the United States.” And Elbaum says: “Today revolutionary sentiments are spreading once again as we face exceptional dangers from the white nationalist-driven Trump presidency. I look forward to working [to] do our best to defeat the racist, sexist and authoritarian right; strengthen mass movements for peace, social justice and a sustainable environment; and make revolutionary politics not just a sentiment filling the air but a powerful political force on the ground.”  Max will give a short-ish talk on his book and its lessons for today’s activists, then open up for a Q&A.

Max Elbaum was a member of Students for a Democratic Society and a leader of one of the main new communist movement organizations. His writings have appeared in the Nation, the US Guardian, CrossRoads, and the Encyclopedia of the American Left. He lives in Oakland.

co-sponsored by the departments of Sociology & Anthropology and Peace & Conflict Studies.  Contact dlauris1@swarthmore.edu.

Humanitarian Predicaments: Protracted Displacement and Palestinian Refugee Politics

Please join us on Wednesday, February 6th for a lecture by Ilana Feldman (Anthropology, George Washington University), who will be visiting campus as part of the “Contending Visions of the Middle East” series. Ilana’s lecture draws from her recently published book “Life Lived In Relief” (University of California Press, 2018).
life lived in reflief
February 6
4:30 – 6:00 PM | SCI 101
Humanitarian Predicaments: Protracted Displacement and Palestinian Refugee Politics
Ilana Feldman (George Washington University)

Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of humanitarianism today.

Sponsored by the President’s Office Andrew W. Mellon Grant, The Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, and the Departments of Political Science, History, Sociology / Anthropology, and Peace and Conflict Studies. For a full schedule of spring events, please consult our website: https://contendingvisions.wixsite.com/mysite

Border Walls and the Politics of Becoming Non-Human

“Border Walls and the Politics of Becoming Non-Human”

Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility at the New School.

Friday, April 21st
2:30 – 4:00 pm
Science Center Room 199
Swarthmore College (directions)

Abstract: “In this talk I am concerned by the ways in which border walls and zones come not simply to *defend* (i.e. certain territories), but to *define* — that is, to shape or alter categories of natural and human kinds. I will suggest that borders walls, and all the surrounding and auxiliary technologies they harness, work by shifting how we understand different kinds of beings, ultimately rendering certain kinds killable.”

Ticktin on border walls

Sponsored by the Departments of Sociology and  anthropology, Political Science, The Environmental Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies Programs, The Global Affairs Program at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, and the Center for Humanities at Temple University

Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard

From our friends at Haverford and including our own Prof. Krista Thomason

Upcoming GPPC / Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium event:

Author Meets Critics:

Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard

Saturday, February 25, 2017,1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Philipps Wing, Magill Library, Haverford College
Jill Stauffer's Ethical Loneliness cover

Speakers:

  • Macalester Bell (Bryn Mawr)
  • Robert Bernasconi (Penn State)
  • Yannik Thiem (Villanova)
  • Krista Thomason (Swarthmore)1:00:  Welcome, cookies, coffee and tea.
    1:15:  Krista Thomason, Swarthmore College
    1:45:  Yannik Thiem, Villanova University
    2:15:  short break
    2:30:  Macalester Bell (Bryn Mawr College)
    3:00:  Robert Bernasconi (Penn State University)
    3:30:  Jill Stauffer (Haverford College)
    4:00:  Q&A
    4:30:  Wine and cheese reception
    5:30:  End

    Event sponsored jointly by the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium and Haverford College’s Peace, Justice and Human Rights Program.

Enforced Disappearance and Ayotzinapa Testimonials

From our friends at Haverford College:

Talk: “Enforced Disappearance and Ayotzinapa Testimonials” By Paula Mónaco Felipe and John Gibler

Tuesday, October 4

Multicultural Center (Stokes Hall 106)
4:15-6:00PM

From dozens of books already published about Ayotzinapa’s disappeared students, John Gibler’s An Oral History of Infamy. The attacks against Ayotzinapa student’s (Spanish) and Paula Mónaco’s Ayotzinapa: Eternal Hours (Spanish) are by far the more accurate, mindful and committed to human rights. Writers will be addressing issues of violations of human rights, ethics and journalism in Latin America and Mexico. Live streaming 4:30PM (EST).

Paula Mónaco Felipe, journalist and writer, joined at a very young age the organization HIJOS (Sons and Daughters for Identity, Justice and Against Oblivion and Silence). As a daughter of disappeared people in Argentina under the dictatorship, Mónaco has been an activist for human rights in Argentina and Mexico. Her recent book Las horas eternas (2015) recovers the identity of 43 disappeared students, their families and their lives before they were taken away by the state. She has collaborated with different journals in Argentina, Ecuador and Mexico, as well as she has been correspondent for TeleSur. She also has participated in audiovisual productions for Al Jazeera, TeleSur and Encuentro Channel in Argentina.

John Gibler, journalist and writer, has been reporting last decades about social movements and politics in Mexico. His major non fiction works are: Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt (2009), To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (2011), Tzompantle La fuga de un guerrillero (2014), and his last book Una historia oral de la infamia (2016). Gibler has been working in human rights and social justice organizations in California, Peru and Mexico, he has taught in Hampshire College and University of California at San Diego (La Jolla), as well as he has delivered talks in various universities in US, Canada, Colombia, and Mexico.

For info on both events, contact Assistant Professor of Spanish at Haverford College, Aurelia Gómez Unamuno

Sponsored by Department of Spanish, Distinguished Visitors Program, and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.

Visit our blog: http://blogs.haverford.edu/disappeared-students/

Ethical Loneliness – New Book by Jill Stauffer

Congratulations to our colleague, Dr. Jill Stauffer, Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at Haverford College on the publication of her new book!

Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard

Ethical_LonelinessEthical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being heard. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice.

Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the needs of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed.

Jill StaufferStauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jill Stauffer is associate professor of philosophy and director of the concentration in peace, justice, and human rights at Haverford College. She is the coeditor (with Bettina Bergo) of Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God” and has published widely on issues of responsibility within and beyond legality.

 

John W. Thompson

Science and Compassion: John W. Thompson’s Trajectory From Swarthmore to the Nuremberg Trials

Science and Compassion: John W. Thompson’s Trajectory From Swarthmore to the Nuremberg Trials

A lecture by Paul Weindling
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Kohlberg Hall, Scheuer Room
Swarthmore College (directions)

John W. Thompson

John W. Thompson taught as professor of Physiology and Anatomy from 1929 to 1932.

Paul Weindling’s lecture will focus on his research contained in his new book, John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust (University of Rochester Press) is the biography of a doctor whose revulsion at Nazi human experiments prompted him to seek a humane basis for physician-patient relations. As a military-scientific intelligence officer in 1945, Thompson was the first to name “medical war crimes” as a category for prosecution. His investigations laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg medical trials and for the novel idea of “informed consent.” Yet, Thompson has remained a little-known figure, despite his many scientific, literary, and religious connections. Thompson has a connection to Swarthmore College having taught as professor of Physiology and Anatomy from 1929 to 1932.

Paul Weindling is Wellcome Trust Research Professor for the History of Medicine at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He has served on historical commissions on Nazi science including the Max Planck Society’s Presidential Commission for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, and is a Trustee of the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA) which originally rescued many scientists from Nazi persecution.

book cover

Sponsors: Sesquicentennial Events, Peace and Conflict Studies, Department of Biology

Peace in the Balance: The Struggle for Truth and Justice in El Salvador

A presentation by SHARE El Salvador, Tutela Legal María Julia Hernandez, and the Pro-Historical Memory Commission

Wednesday, March 26, 2014 4:30 p.m.

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

Swarthmore College (map)

El_Salvador

Twenty-two years after the Peace Accords and U.N. Truth Commission Report, Salvadorans struggle to build true peace in a society steeped in violence and impunity. While victims of human rights violations have worked tirelessly for truth, justice, and reparations, accompanied by the Pro-Historical Memory Commission, the struggle has been uphill all the way.

The last six months have brought an ongoing series of chilling and exciting surprises for the Salvadoran human rights movement. In September, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court admitted a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 1993 Amnesty Law, which could open the door to justice for human rights violations committed during the Salvadoran civil war. Just two weeks later, the Archbishop of San Salvador suddenly closed Tutela Legal, the Archdiocese´s human rights legal aid office.

Join Latin American Studies for presentations by Wilfredo Medrano, a lawyer with Tutela Legal for over 20 years who accompanied the victims of the El Mozote massacre and many other cases of human rights violations; and Bethany Loberg, a native of Salem, Oregon, has lived and worked in El Salvador for over four years and currently accompanies SHARE’s human rights work.

Sponsored by Latin American Studies.

El_Salvador_mural