Engaging Human Rights in the Academic Space
The Human Rights Certificate program, housed within the Duke Human Rights Center (DHRC) at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI), goes beyond offering undergraduates a credential. The program offers a lens students develop to view, engage with, and contribute to a positive change in the world.
Originally designed to create a structured academic pathway into the study of human rights, faculty intended for the certificate to be accessible to any Duke undergraduate, regardless of major.
“With other faculty, we wanted to create a pathway that any Duke undergraduate could follow to deepen their knowledge of human rights,” said Robin Kirk, Certificate Director at the DHRC and Professor of the Practice in Cultural Anthropology. “Human rights demand not only an interdisciplinary approach but a commitment to putting ideas into action.”
The certificate focuses on a core set of classes, including a Gateway and electives drawn from multiple disciplines. Seniors collaborate on a capstone project or complete a thesis with a human rights focus.
The program’s academic rigor is complemented by engagement with community both in Durham and beyond. Over the years, the DHRC has developed “fruitful relationships with grassroots groups doing human rights work,” Kirk explained.
The program emphasizes critical self-reflection. Students are encouraged to interrogate their own assumptions and “unlearn” deeply held beliefs. Kirk described how this is built into both course assessments and broader program evaluations.
“Certificate students must all take Introduction to Human Rights—at the middle of the semester and the end of the class, we ask what the students have learned and if things about the class moved or surprised them,” she said. “Also, each student must describe what they ‘unlearned’: things they thought they knew but ‘unlearned’ in class.”
As the DHRC welcomes new leadership under Adam Rosenblatt, Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology, the emphasis on human rights as a lived, relational, and evolving practice remains central.
“I am very enthusiastic about the way the vision behind the certificate has grown,” Rosenblatt shared. “A few decades ago, academic discourse about human rights—and thus, human rights education at many universities—tilted heavily towards philosophical debates about universalism versus culture, or positive versus negative rights.”
“These are important themes, but the conversations about them are rarely constructive when they remain abstracted and distant from real sites of human rights activism, or real communities struggling for their human rights,” he explained.
Rather than reducing human rights to abstract philosophical debates, Rosenblatt sees the certificate as encouraging students to grapple with real-world applications—where justice is both fraught and urgent.
“The DHRC teaches human rights not as lofty philosophical discourses, but rather as ideas that serve real purposes—that can be made or unmade in our everyday lives,” he said.
His students, he added, have written about topics ranging from peace-building efforts by Colombian youth to the ethical dilemmas of immigration lawyers, to the radical visual culture of muralists in Chile.
At its core, the Human Rights Certificate prepares students to enter, engage with, and help shape transnational human rights networks. “Above all,” Rosenblatt emphasized, “we seek to have our students not merely study those networks but become embedded in them, if they so choose.”
This influence often stretches well beyond campus and graduation. “I am most interested in the impact over the very long term,” Rosenblatt said, highlighting alumni across a range of fields, from international law to K-12 education.
“How does having the idea of human rights at the core of your undergraduate education—human rights as a set of commitments and invitations to critical reflection, not a fixed answer to every problem—affect our alums in all of these different fields, or even the choices they make in their personal lives?”
Kirk channels Eleanor Roosevelt in capturing the certificate’s core values: “If rights don’t matter in small places, it’s impossible to make them matter internationally.” For Duke students, the Human Rights Certificate isn’t just an academic path—it’s a transformative experience rooted in community, accountability, and action.