DHRC at KIE

The Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics is home to an interdisciplinary international human rights community at Duke University. Central to its mission is promoting faculty-led collaborations that both transcend traditional departmental boundaries and bridge the often separate spheres of research, advocacy and policy in international human rights, directly engaging graduate and undergraduate students in scholarship and practice.

Our university-wide scholarly conversations, collaborations and programming explore the intersections of the humanities and social sciences with law, politics, and ethics, bringing together policy makers and practitioners with undergraduates, graduate students and faculty. The Center’s research and activities coalesce around four principal issue areas—Business and Human Rights, Environmental Justice, International Institutions, and Forced Migration and Human Rights—and are informed by the Kenan Institute’s “think and do tank” model of a reciprocal relationship between theory and practice.

This past year, DHRC at KIE brought engaging outside speakers to campus and formed partnerships to create conferences and workshops. In the fall, we partnered with the UN Refugee Agency to install Nowhere People: The Face of Global Statelessness, a photography exhibition by Greg Constantine. As part of of the opening events, a panel on the ethics of photography was held with Constantine, Charity Tooze of the UNHCR. In November, DHRC at KIE co-sponsored a conference on Neoliberalism, Inequality and the Politics and Culture of Affirmative Action. To close out the fall semester, we hosted a conference on rights and resource in Madagascar, which concluded with a free concert by Malagasy musician and activist Razia Said.

The spring semester was packed with events, beginning with a February conference on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on LGBT Human Rights advocacy. Twelve students traveled to Egypt and Nepal as part of the DukeImmerse: Uprooted/Rerouted program (read their journal entries here), and then performed monologues culled from field interviews with refugees. We also brought animal rights activists and political theorists Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson to campus, as well as famed anthropologist and political scientist James Scott. In April, we partnered with other Duke units on a conference for minorities and human rights, Human Rights and Diaspora: Minorities and Liberal Citizenship.