The Duke Human Rights Center brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and students to promote new understandings about human rights, terror, political violence and the politics of forgiveness, accountability and reconciliation. Our objective is to create a synergy that will position Duke as a leader in cutting-edge, creative scholarship and teaching on these themes.
The DHRC seeks to promote collaborative, cross-disciplinary and critical thinking, education and research at Duke about human rights issues. As a group and as individuals, we meet regularly to discuss and plan events and develop new courses and areas of research, making connections between faculty, students and practitioners. Over the past eight years, the DHRC has sponsored dozens of rights-related events. We have also helped develop a number of new human rights-related courses for undergraduates, with the intention of creating an undergraduate certificate in human rights and provide undergraduates with increased opportunities for mentored research, internships and course-related practice in the human rights field.
One of our key aims is to bridge the existing gap between civil rights and human rights communities, emphasizing a global view that connects advances in human rights abroad with emerging challenges to human rights at home. Duke is favorably positioned in this regard, able to contribute original research and thinking on the civil rights movement to human rights debate and vice versa. As one example of how this can work, in the Fall of 2005 Duke undergraduates sponsored by the DHRC interned for the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first US-based effort to apply the lessons of South Africa to the American experience. Also that fall, we sponsored a conference on labor rights, drawing the experiences of the past into new perspectives for unions, immigrants and the unfulfilled promises for economic justice of the civil rights era.
As we grow, we envision the center as dynamic, multivocal crossroads where scholars, writers, artists, officials, literary critics, filmmakers, journalists and human rights activists will present, exchange and sharpen ideas about human rights issues including women’s and children’s rights; rights with respect to poverty and racism, religious freedom and fundamentalism; artistic and journalistic freedoms; refugees and exile; the place of human rights in the war on terror; and the politics of justice, forgetting, and accountability in the shadow of mass violence.