Blog posted under Humanitarianism

Mourning Our Losses invites incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists to submit visual works created during COVID-19 for an art exhibition inside their Traveling Memorial!

Read about the Human Rights Lab's pop-up art exhibition featuring Carving Out Rights from the Prison Industrial Complex and Humans of Life Row art works at the Chicago Transformation Collab Summit and Festival hosted by Zealous.

Free Minds, Free Voices was a night dedicated to celebrating the long, hard, work to end mass incarceration and build support for legislation for a parole system in Illinois.

Congratulations to the 2021-22 Pozen Human Rights Lab BA Thesis Fellows!

Welcoming Michelle Daniel Jones and Dorothy Burge to the Practitioner Fellows family!

Want to learn about the intersecting human rights crises of racialized policing and mass incarceration in the United States? Check out THREE Human Rights Lab courses offered this Spring 2022.

The companion playlist to Truth & Beauty in the Hard Places Gallery. This Artfully curated playlist weaves together the works featured in "Truth and Beauty in the Hard Places, excavating the brokenness and resilience evident in our shared humanity.

Genealogies of human rights and human rights studies have a vexed relationship with the Victorian era and the nineteenth-century more generally.

“Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works,” then presidential candidate Donald Trump said at a February 2016 campaign event in Bluffton, South Carolina. “Okay, folks, torture—you know, half these guys [say]: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works, okay?” At the time, I was finishing my recent book on Americans and human rights in the 20th century, and Trump’s repeated defense of torture, like so many of his pronouncements, struck me as relics of the past. Like many, I did not see the Trump presidency coming. Now less than one week into his presidency we already have a draft executive order that would reopen the “black site” prisons where terrorist suspects were detained and tortured during the George W. Bush Administration. And on Friday, Trump issued an executive order that suspended entry of all refugees into the United States for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and prohibited entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. Academics against Immigration Executive Order has rightly characterized the ban as “unethical and discriminatory treatment of law-abiding, hard-working, and well-integrated immigrants” that “fundamentally contravenes the founding principles of the United States.” The Trump presidency is unlikely to be remembered for its vigorous championing of human rights but it is already producing powerful forms of resistance that may put human rights center stage in the United States again. Why, again?