The Rapoport Center sponsors collaborative working groups initiated by our affiliated faculty that research and explore various human rights topics. These groups are comprised of faculty and students from diverse disciplines across campus.
The goals of the working group program include: identifying and generating sustained attention to critical issues on the leading edge of human rights scholarship; fostering ongoing interaction and intellectual cooperation among affiliated faculty; and encouraging the development of a unique brand of human rights scholarship that is multidisciplinary, critical, theoretically innovative, and empirically and practically informed.
We currently support the following working groups:
The relationship between archives and social justice is often understood in terms of the role archives can play in human rights prosecutions. This working group aims to broaden this understanding by examining the transformative potential of what archives can do and be.
The Health & Human Rights Working Group originally began as an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students interested in fostering a university-wide conversation on the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. It has since expanded its focus to include other health and human rights issues.
Mery Godigna Collet poses with panels from her piece, Pure Energy. Photo by Steph Swope.
The Human Rights & the Arts Working Group maintains that literature, music, theater, dance, and the visual arts play an integral role in expressing the need for social and political change, in fostering education on social injustice, and in building more just and equitable societies.
The Natural Resource Governance, Inequality & Human Rights Working Group engages with the distributive consequences of extractive economies and the role of human rights in addressing the inequalities in authority, decision making power, benefit and risk exposure that arise in relation to natural resource governance.
In response to the lively debate surrounding its construction and seeing a need for more in-depth investigation and analysis, a multidisciplinary collective of UT faculty and students formed the Texas-Mexico Border Wall Working Group in 2008 to analyze the human rights impact of the wall.
