The Program on Human Rights (PHR) at CDDRL is pleased to welcome faculty, staff, and both new and returning students to Stanford University for the 2011-12 academic year. We are proud to be part of the human rights community at Stanford and look forward to strengthening our commitment to research that advances understanding and debate on current human rights issues through thought-provoking scholarship, events, internships and fellowships.

We are also happy to welcome Nadejda Marques who joined the PHR us as our program manager in September 2011. In this capacity, Nadejda will coordinate our interdisciplinary initiatives and events as well as expand the research agenda, oversee PHR's outreach, and spearhead fundraising efforts. She joins the PHR from Boston where she worked as research coordinator for the Cost of Inaction Project at the François-Bagnoud Xavier Center for Health and Human Rights based in the Harvard School of Public Health. Working for the Cost of Inaction Project for the past two and a half years, she was responsible for researching and analyzing the cost of inaction of public programs and actions that help reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on children in Angola.

Together we have planned and are organizing activities for the 2011-12 academic year in five main areas:

1) The Sanela Diana Jenkins Speakers Series – Following the tremendous success of our SDJ inaugural Speakers Series last year, this 2011-12 Speaker Series will feature debates on human trafficking, bringing local, national and international experts, academics and activists to interact with the Stanford community.  The series will foster a research approach that applies a broad socio-economic and interdisciplinary analysis to a range of forms of human trafficking. The new speakers series will be part of a three quarter sequence comprising a fall workshop and a spring conference. The results of these conferences will be compiled in a PHR Working Group Paper Series.

2) The Human Rights Collaboratory – This new initiative funded by the Stanford Science and Humanities Center under the Presidential International Initiative will offer three quarters of graduate and faculty workshops on human well-being and the environment. The Collaboratory will highlight three areas of interest: environmental humanities, cultural heritage and writing for empathy.

3) Human Rights Undergraduate Fellowship – This year, as in 2009-10, the PHR and the Center on Ethics and Society will join forces to support the work of undergraduate students seeking to participate in international human rights internships during the summer.  PHR grants cover the cost of travel and living internationally for Stanford students, enabling them to gain vital, firsthand experience in the field of human rights.

4) Teaching Human Rights in the Curriculum – In the 2011-2012 academic year, we will continue to develop human rights curricula to be implemented by college and high school educators interested in incorporating human rights into their teaching. We plan to organize a series of workshops that will enable the implementation of the human rights curricula in the 2012-13 academic year. All workshops and activities will be documented for a case study on this vital pedagogical initiative.

5) The Regional Human Rights Series– Based on our very successful series of events on Second and Third Generation Rights in Africa in partnership with the Center for African Studies, the PHR hopes to promote a new round of debates on human rights in different regions such as; Latin America, South-Asia, East-Europe, North America, the Caribbean and others. In these series, issues of sovereignty, civil conflict, post-colonial conflict, gender and race will be canvassed in faculty and graduate students workshops.