Previous Annual Conference Events

Since our opening conference in 2005 on immigration and labor, the Rapoport Center has hosted more than a dozen conferences on cutting-edge human rights issues. Subsequent conferences have investigated topics ranging from the role of archives in political memory to anti-impunity and the lingering effects of conflict. These multidisciplinary events afford scholars, policymakers, and activists the opportunity to engage in critical exchange on the contemporary state of human rights theory and practice and their possible future trajectories.

  1. The Rapoport Center's Spring 2024 conference, Disarming Toxic Empire, brought together academics, advocates, and artists working through intergenerational channels of memory and justice to respond to nuclear toxicity in all its forms and manifestations, in sites ranging from the Navajo Nation and the Pacific Islands to Japan, North Africa, and Ghana.

  2. The Rapoport Center in Austin hosted an interdisciplinary conference to consider the relationships among the human rights, prison abolition, and penal reform movements. We invited proposals for papers, panels, art, or other forms of presentation from activists, practitioners, and scholars in all disciplines.

  3. Speakers:
    • Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
    • Winthrop Professor of History & Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

  4. This workshop and public forum will explore global supply chains and the possibilities and limitations of third-party certification schemes for the realization and enforcement of human rights.

  5. This conference considered whether international human rights law, movements, and discourses have, could or should engage with the problem of economic inequality nationally or internationally.

  6. This conference considered from both an historical and contemporary perspective many of the issues to which Farenthold has dedicated her life, from political campaigns to international advocacy.

  7. The conference will explore the genesis of human rights constitutionalism and its effects on the human rights agenda in different regions of the world.

  8. This conference will bring together scholars, human rights advocates and policy makers from around the world to assess critically the human rights movement’s focus on anti-impunity.

  9. This conference explored topics such as changing conceptions of property, the role of property rights in dispossession and redistribution, and the implications of private titling.

  11. The conference brought together scholars, activists, performance artists, and journalists to explore the intersections of violence, the colonial past, memory, and trauma in the National Theatre of Scotland's play 'Black Watch', presented by Texas Performing Arts.

  12. This conference brought together interdisciplinary thinkers who have researched the recent history of walls – made, unmade, in the making – and their consequences on the geographies of nation states.

  13. To commemorate the Rapoport Center's five-year anniversary, the Center's 5th Annual conference considered the human rights work being done at the University of Texas campuses.

  14. Activists, attorneys, community leaders, historians, and others from Texas and around the country discussed the relevance of human rights as a tool for Black self-determination and racial justice.

  15. The Center's 4th Annual conference focused on the acquisition by the Harry Ransom Center of a historic collection of photojournalistic work documenting El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.

  16. The conference used Lister, the State Department’s first Human Rights Officer in the Latin American bureau, as a launching point for exploring various human rights policy development issues.

  17. This conference will consider how international human rights law and discourse migrate, and how, in the process, issues of culture emerge internationally.

  18. Practitioners, policymakers, activists, and academics from a variety of disciplines considered the underlying concerns that animate today's debates over the global flow of labor and capital.

Event Types