Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize

GUIDELINES FOR ESSAY SUBMISSIONS

• Maximum length: 25 double-spaced pages excluding notes & bibliography
• Identification of the relevant human right(s) principles
• A clear topic sentence explaining the essay impact
• An explanation of the methods used and an evaluation of relevant research
• A conclusion – addressing the “so what” question

EXAMPLES OF PROJECTS:  a photographic essay, a play script or short story, visualization of data, 15-20 min video, web page, an app, or other creative approach to confronting a human rights issue.  

• Each submission should include a paragraph about the pertinent human right(s) issue discussed
• Each submission should have a title page. If created for a course, the submission should note the instructor, semester taken, and course name
• The project much be submitted while the author/creator is an enrolled student at Duke (the project may be submitted at any time during a student's time at Duke, including after the project was created). 

2024 Best Essay
Alexandra Bernstein-Naples, "Reserving the Right to Deflection: A Quantitative Analysis of States Logging Reservations to the Genocide Convention"

Alexandra Bernstein-Naples’s essay, “Reserving the Right to Deflection: A Quantitative Analysis of States Logging Reservations to the Genocide Convention,” is a rigorous, sophisticated, and quantitative analysis about a supremely important issue: the ways that states have expressed reservations to the Genocide Convention, sparing them the possibility of prosecution in the International Court of Justice. In an era of continued state repression, and headline-grabbing genocide investigations by the ICJ, this topic could not be more timely.

2024 Best Essay
Madeleine McLean, "Beyond the Headlines: How the North Carolina Black Press Advocated for Racial Equality in the Asylum Setting"

Madeleine McLean provided a local study of race, journalism, and human rights in North Carolina in her essay, “Beyond the Headlines: How the North Carolina Black Press Advocated for Racial Equality in the Asylum Setting.” She studied the divergent interpretations that white and Black newspapers gave to a local mental health institution, showing that Black newspapers adopted a more critical perspective on the matter, tying their journalism to broader issues of human and civil rights. This focus on the press is crucial, too, given the many attacks on press freedom that we see around the world today. 

2023 Best Essay
Anushri Saxena, “Sex Testing of Intersex Women in Sport: History, Controversies, and Health Implications”

The issue of intersex participation and sports has attracted a great deal of attention in recent months. In her pioneering and subtle essay, Anushri Saxena plunges into the issue by using history to show that ambiguity about sex and gender originated during the Cold War, when the supposedly “un-feminine” bodies of Communist women were figures of concern. Using the tools of intersectional analysis, Saxena shows how sporting associations have raised alarms most frequently about the bodies of track and field athletes who represent the Global South. The current hysteria over these issues, therefore, manifests a much deeper set of anxieties about race and femininity. It is not clear what is to be done, and Saxena does not pretend to have the answers. Her beautifully written essay, though, does help us to ask the right questions.

2023 Best Alternative Project
Olivia Canter, Cultural Understanding in Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: An Educational Program for Investigative and Treating Professionals

Olivia Canter has done remarkable, interdisciplinary work about the practice of female genital mutilation/cutting [FGM/C]. About three million girls in 30 countries are at risk annually. While FGM/C has been heavily studied, Canter takes a novel approach, seeking to educate healthcare providers about the practice and its cultural background. Her work seeks to aid the 513,000 girls and women who experienced or are at risk for FGM in in the U.S. Canter does this by educating the healthcare providers these girls and women will encounter. The committee was impressed by Canter’s humility and her zeal to bring her academic knowledge to a wider audience. Her prepared lecture on the theme was remarkably thorough, nuanced, and culturally sensitive. One of the most pressing challenges of our time is to bring academic knowledge of human rights, culture, and religion into medical spaces. Canter shows us how it can be done.

2022 Best Essay
Cydney Livingston, "Between the State and the Science: The Eugenic Impulse of the Human Betterment League of North Carolina, 1947-1988"

Livingston deals with some of the most pertinent human rights issues today: health, reproduction, and bodily autonomy by analyzing them during four decades of eugenics, sterilization, and science in North Carolina. Drawing on extensive archival research, she shows how, in the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust, physicians and experts in North Carolina extended the eugenics project by transforming its goals from involuntary sterilization to population control based on genetic counseling, which was popularized by public relations campaigns. In this study, written for the History Honors Seminar, Livingston shows how violations of reproductive rights persisted by taking on new forms under the veneer of scientific neutrality.

2022 Best Alternative Project
Kulsoom Rizavi, "This is the Year"

Rizavi’s prizewinning multimedia project combines audio, photographic and archival data into an articulate and thoughtful short documentary, showcasing  queer history and life in Durham. It elegantly reveals the creation of a welcoming refuge in spaces such as the gay pride movement and the inclusive events of LGBTQ centers. Most dramatically the video celebrates the groundbreaking initiatives of Vivica C. Coxx who not only advocates for, but lives loud in the identity of their choice. The project includes archival footage and personal interviews that foreground themes of discrimination and inequality, while unveiling the power of art and activism in creating a society more accepting of those considered ‘other’. Created for the Documentary Studies course DOCST 209FS, Rizavi shows the ability of immersive research and creativity to deliver a powerful message of optimism and tolerance.

2021 Best Essay
Genevieve Beske, “Tipping the Scales of Power: The Effect of Gratuities on Pullman Porter Agency in the Early 20th Century” 

In her research essay, “Tipping the Scales of Power: The Effect of Gratuities on Pullman Porter Agency in the Early 20th Century,” Genevieve Beske explores how historically marginalized Black men created a proud brotherhood within the constraints of white supremacy. Drawing together a vast range of primary sources, she describes the bigoted stereotypes that porters reframed to assert their agency. Thus, Pullman porters sustained their pride as prominent members of the Black middle class even as they behaved obsequiously toward white passengers whose tips supplemented their meagre wages. They dignified their ethos by reframing tips as payment for additional services. Elegantly written, conceptually original, and exhaustively researched, “Tipping the Scales of Power” attests to the ability of a seemingly disempowered group to contribute to the solidarity that decades later underpinned the civil rights movement. 

2021 Best Alternative Project
Shania Khoo, Comrades 

In her very creative zine, Comrades, Shania Khoo assembles photographs, posters, artwork, news headlines, academic articles, and fiction that documents transnational and domestic encounters between Asian and Black communities across nearly a century of human rights activism. Khoo jolts readers out of comfortable assumptions about this often overlooked intellectual and activist history. Provocative, aesthetically engaging, and theoretically challenging, Comrades asks probing questions about the interplay between Black and Asian activists. Khoo, however, does not offer clear-cut answers which can stifle further discussion. Instead, her collage of dramatic images and vivid prose incites more dialogue about these historically marginalized communities that have been targeted by xenophobia in white supremacist, capitalist America. 

2020 Best Essay

Selin Ocal, “Addressing Hepatitis C in the American Incarcerated Population: Strategies for Nationwide Elimination.” 

Selin Ocal's prizewinning essay, coauthored with a faculty mentor, is entitled "Addressing Hepatitis C in the American Incarcerated Population: Strategies for Nationwide Elimination." Building on research funded by a Human Rights Summer Research Grant, Ocal shows how a public health intervention in the prison system might help to control the nationwide epidemic of Hepatitis C. For a variety of reasons, prisoners are more likely to have the disease; and yet, because of the testing mechanisms available to them, this does not often translate into effective treatment. The paper is a sterling example of the necessity of a human rights framework for medical thinking and public health—a necessity that is all too apparent now, in the era of COVID-19. The paper is grounded in a thorough understanding of the capacious literature on this subject, and was published in an important medical journal. 

2020 Best Alternative Project

James Robinson, “Land Loss in Louisiana” 

James Robinson has produced a remarkable, multimedia exploration of land loss in Louisiana. Sea level rise is leading to a shrinking of the Louisiana coast, and also the devastation of local ecologies by seawater. Through an evocative use of images, audio, and video—capped off with a beautiful ten-minute documentary—the project brings viewers into the hearts and homes of those affected. "This was considered a safe place," one of his interview subjects tells him. "Not no more," she mournfully adds. The project powerfully shows how this beloved landscape became unsafe. It shows, too, how ecological loss dovetails with, and compounds, a long history of racialized subjugation and exploitation. Many of those affected now are Native Americans, who have lost land before and find themselves, once again, without a place to go. Robinson brings this history to life, reminding us of the importance of an intersectional and historical approach to issues of environmental justice. 

2019 Best Essays

Anna Chulack, “How and to what extent did the Nature of Civil Rights Activism perpetuate Gender Oppression and Hinder the work of Black Female Activists?” 

Anna Chulack’s “How and to what extent did the Nature of Civil Rights Activism perpetuate Gender Oppression and Hinder the work of Black Female Activists?” documents the pervasiveness of misogyny in the civil rights organizations of the 1960s and in the traditions of the black church. Clearly written and carefully researched, this study foregrounds the challenges of combatting masculine privilege in a movement that fights for racial justice. This case study reveals how efforts to secure the human rights of two minorities may intersect -- and clash. We are increasingly aware of the need for intersectionality in our human rights movements. Chulack’s work details the dangers that can take place when this approach is avoided, and it provides, too, a usable history for a black freedom struggle, today, that gives far more attention to issues of gender and queer justice. 

Christiana Oshotse, “The Medical Brain Drain: Impact on Sub-Saharan African Countries” 

Christiana Oshotse’s examination of “The Medical Brain Drain: Impact on Sub-Saharan African Countries,” situates two case studies, Nigeria and Malawi, within a global economic system that not only extracts wealth, minerals, and crops from Africa, but also incentivizes African doctors to leave their homelands and practice in richer countries. Besides enumerating the systemic origins of this critical shortage, Oshotse proposes practical measures that can expand Africans’ right to health. In doing so, she demonstrates a great deal of sophistication, notably an awareness of the limitations of social justice activism and of the proper regional rights frameworks that are too often overlooked. 

2019 Best Alternative Project

Erin Williams, Silent no More

In Erin Williams’s film, Silent no More, women in the Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne communities mourn the loss of three young women (two were murdered and one is still “missing”). As the girls’ relatives talk, their grief, rage and despair is heartbreaking. Community leaders’ brief reflections on misogynist tribal norms and citizens’ protest demonstrations place their sorrow in a broader context. By taking their experiences to broader audiences Williams contributes to indigenous people’s battle for the most basic human rights. Documentary film is one of the best, and most challenging, genres to use in human rights activism. Williams’s work reminds us why. 

2018 Best Essays

Hannah Miao, “Human Rights in the Context of Tradition: A Comprehensive Approach to Eliminating Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting” 

In her carefully-researched essay, Hannah Miao establishes the ways in which female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) violates girls’ right to health and autonomy. Asking how best to combat the attitudes that imbed this practice in custom, Miao concludes that legislation and health-based arguments are effective only when reinforced by grassroots advocacy organizing. Taking as case studies the Tostan educational project in Wolof-speaking Africa and the Positive Deviance Approach (PDA) in Egypt, Miao concludes that local leaders can motivate parents (especially mothers) to comply with laws against FGM/C. The paper makes a nuanced argument for a multi-pronged approach to a complex problem. This is a reminder to all of us that, when it comes to problems as embedded as FGM/C, there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution. 

Catherine Ward and Louden Richason “Education as a Human Right: Educational Transitions for Refugees in a Third Country Resettlement Context” 

Catherine Ward and Louden Richason, in “Education as a Human Right: Educational Transitions for Refugees in a Third Country Resettlement Context,” use the Bass Connections-sponsored Citizenship Lab at Duke to explore how refugees’ right to an education can be fulfilled in Durham public schools. They describe how Duke volunteers in an after-school program not only tutored students, but also fostered teens’ self-esteem through personal interactions and shared projects. By placing the global crisis in refugee education in a human rights perspective, they offer a case study that may be applied to institutions, like Duke, that struggle to extend human rights to refugees in a society that too often threatens to take them away.