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In addition to the conference ‘Economic
Rights: Conceptual, Policy and Measurement Issues’, there will
be many events in Fall 2005 dealing with issues of Economic Rights.
The Economic Rights Films Series will take place every
Wednesday from
September
7, 2005 – October 26, 2005 at 7:00pm in
the Thomas
J. Dodd Research Center and admission is FREE.
All the films shown will deal with the issues of human rights and economic rights.
Some of the films include;
The Corporation, Stolen
Childhoods, and The Take and many others. The screening of “The Take” will
be followed by a discussion with the film’s creator, Avi Lewis.
Sept. 14 - Thirst http://www.thirstthemovie.org/
Is water part of a shared "commons," a human right for all people?
Or is it a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded in a global marketplace?
"Thirst" tells the stories of communities in Bolivia, India,
and the United States that are asking these fundamental questions.
Sept. 21 - Strong Roots: The Landless
Worker's Movement in Brazil http://store.gxonlinestore.org/strongroots.html
Winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Latino Film Festival Best Documentary Award:
The Landless Workers Movement (MST) started in 1985 to correct the extremely
unequal concentration of land in Brazil. Over the past 15 years, the Landless
Workers Movement has won 20 million hectares of land for 300,000 families
and built thousands of food production cooperatives and schools.
Sept. 28 - The Corporation
http://www.thecorporation.com/
Winner of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Audience Choice for Documentary
in World Cinema Award, THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular
rise of the dominant institution of our time. Footage from pop culture,
advertising, TV news, and corporate propaganda, illuminates the corporation's
grip on our lives. Taking its legal status as a "person" to
its logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's
couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" Provoking, witty,
sweepingly informative, The Corporation includes forty interviews with
corporate insiders and critics plus true confessions, case studies and
strategies for change.
Oct. 5 - Life and Debt http://www.lifeanddebt.org/
Winner 2004 Paris Human Rights Film Festival, Special Jury Prize; Winner
2002 Prague Human Rights Film Festival, Audience Award Best Film of the
Festival, Winner Best Documentary at the Jamaica Film Festival Utilizing
excerpts from the award-winning non-fiction text "A Small Place"
by Jamaica Kincaid, Life & Debt is a woven tapestry of sequences focusing
on the stories of individual Jamaicans whose strategies for survival and
parameters of day-to-day existence are determined by the U.S. and other
foreign economic agendas. By combining traditional documentary telling
with a stylized narrative framework, the complexity of international lending,
structural adjustment policies and free trade will be understood in the
context of the day-to-day realities of the people whose lives they impact.
Oct. 12 - Stolen Childhoods
http://www.stolenchildhoods.org/
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Stolen Childhoods is a documentary feature film
about the 246 million child laborers in the world today. Extraordinary
footage and interviews with child slaves and kids working in poverty reveal
young childhoods stolen away. Stolen Childhoods features interviews with
2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, human rights activist Kailash
Satyarthi, and Senator Tom Harkin, who calls the world's child laborers,
"a breeding ground for Osama Bin Laden's army and future terrorists."
At a time of increasing global insecurity, Stolen Childhoods reveals the
risks of the world community continuing to waste these children's lives.
It portrays local, national and international solutions at work to end
child labor, offering a humanitarian path to a more stable world. It gives
voice to children still lost to work and it celebrates the resilience
of kids whose lives have been saved. It is a shocking, hopeful and energizing
film and a call to action.
Oct. 19 - The New Heroes http://www.pbs.org/opb/thenewheroes/
The New Heroes, hosted by Robert Redford and produced by Oregon Public
Broadcasting, is a four part PBS series that traveled the globe to explore the
ideas and impact of “social entrepreneurs.” In the first series,
Dreams of Sanctuary Kailash Satyarthi, founder of Rugmark was among those profiled
as a "new hero". The dramatic "live raid" footage brought
critical exposure to the issue of forced child labor and highlighted Rugmark
as an organization working to create systemic change in the carpet industry.
http://www.rugmark.com These remarkable individuals represent a new breed of
entrepreneur — the social entrepreneur. Courageous, compassionate and committed
to transforming society, these brilliant men and women have turned their business
skills into tools for change, development and hope. For them, profit is measured
not in dollars and cents, but in lives saved and dignity restored.
Oct. 26 - The Take http://www.nfb.ca/webextension/thetake/
In the wake of Argentina’s spectacular economic collapse in 2001,
Latin America’s most prosperous middle class finds itself in a ghost
town of abandoned factories and mass unemployment. In suburban Buenos
Aires, thirty unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory,
roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave. All they want is to re-start
the silent machines. But this simple act —the take —has the
power to turn the globalization debate on its head.
On Friday October 28, 2005, UConn will
host a Fair Trade Fair. This Fair will provide students, faculty, staff
and community members and opportunity
to purchase
Fair Trade products including; coffees, teas, chocolate and craft goods.
It will also provide a chance to learn more about the importance of purchasing
fairly traded products.
More information about vendors will be posted as it
becomes available.
Emma Gardner Design, llc a design and development company that produces
fine contemporary interior products including hand-made rugs, luxurious
alpaca/wool throws and superior quality pillows for use in residential,
office and hospitality spaces, has donated a RUGMARK certified rug to
be raffled off October 28, 2005. For more information about Emma Gardner
design please visit their website http://www.emmagardnerdesign.com/
All of the proceeds of the raffle will go to support RUGMARK
schools for children who formerly worked on the rug looms.
RUGMARK is
a global nonprofit organization working to end illegal child labor in
the carpet industry and offer educational opportunities to
children in
India, Nepal, and Pakistan. It does this through loom and factory monitoring,
consumer
labeling, and running schools for former child workers. For more information
visit http://www.rugmark.org/.
More information regarding the purchase of
raffle tickets will be posted in the coming weeks.
Undergraduate and graduate students (including graduating seniors) from
any departments are invited to submit papers on issues concerning economic
rights,
broadly defined. Economic rights include the right to work, to just conditions
of work, including fair wages, equal work for equal pay, and a decent standard
of living; to social security; to adequate food, clothing and housing along
with continuous improvement of living conditions; to medical care; and to
education.10 of the papers will be displayed at a poster session during the “Economic
Rights: Conceptual, Measurement and Policy Issues” conference at the
University of Connecticut (October 27-29, 2005). Two of the poster presenters
(one undergraduate and one graduate) will be given the “Best Student
Poster” award, will each receive $250, and will be invited to attend
the Opening Ceremony Dinner for the Economic Rights Conference. There will
also be awards for the second and third runner up.
Those wishing to be considered
should submit completed papers by October 1, 2005 to:
Prof. Oksan Bayulgen
Department of Political Science
University of Connecticut
341 Mansfield Rd. Storrs, CT 06269
or via email: oksan.bayulgen@uconn.edu
These events are made possible by the generous
support of:
Emma Gardner Design http://www.emmagardnerdesign.com/
Human Rights Initiative
Office of International Affairs http://www.ia.uconn.edu/
Center for International Business & Education Research http://www.business.uconn.edu/ciber/
http://www.benton.uconn.edu/index.html
Tuesday October 25, 2005
Sixth Annual UNESCO Chair in Comparative Human Rights Conference
It is becoming increasingly clear that the traditional
realpolitik approach to international relations that views security in
purely military terms
is insufficient to achieve viable security. Viable security can be attained
only when respect for human rights, eradication of poverty and deadly
diseases, protection of the environment and promotion of sustainable
development are simultaneously achieved.
The intimate inter-connection
between human rights and human security is emphasized in both the UN
Millennium Development
Declaration adopted
in 2000 by world leaders and the UN Secretary-General’s proposal
for reform of the United Nations, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development,
Security and Human Rights (2005). The UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan,
captures the symbiotic relationship between human rights and human security
po ignantly when in his proposal he states: “Accordingly, we will
not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without
development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.
Unless all these causes are advanced, none will succeed.” The triple principal objectives of the 6 th Annual UNESCO Chair in Comparative
Human Rights Conference are, (1) to examine the concept of human security,
as complementary to the traditional notion of security advanced by proponents
of realpolitik; (2) to raise awareness about the various issues that
are integral to human security; and, (3) to contribute to a balanced
understanding and appreciation of a more integrated human security within
the framework of human rights. To achieve these objectives, speakers
will direct a searchl ight on the issues identified and emphasized by
the Millennium Development Declaration and by the UN Secretary-General,
as constituting human security. Speakers will identify, describe, and
provide diagnosis and possible practical solutions within ethical frameworks,
to the problems and issues that either hinder or foster human rights
and human security in their field or region of competence. Topics will
include food and water (in) security, poverty, diseases, illiteracy,
civil violence, organized crime, terrorism, repression, the rule of law,
governance, cultures, environment, xenophobia, racial and gender chauvinism,
and sustainable development.
For further information about the conference, please contact unescochair@uconn.edu;
telephone: (860) 486-0647; fax: (860) 486-2545.
Saturday, October 29, 1-6PM, and Sunday October 30, 10-4PM, 2005
Class of ‘47, Homer D. Babbidge Library at the Storrs Campus
Co-sponsored by Human Rights Institute,
Women’s
Studies Institute, Department of Sociology, Center for Latin American
and Caribbean Studies,
Institute of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, and Office of Multicultural
and International Affairs.
Confirmed Presentations by:
Professor Dorothy Smith, Professor Emerita from
the University of Toronto, has developed an approach to activist research
called institutional ethnography.
Institutional ethnographers examine how ruling relations are woven into the
production of texts used to organize people’s activities in various locations
such as schools or government agencies or professional offices. By revealing
how their daily lives are organized by processes of ruling and how these processes
can be contested. With a “thick” understanding of “how things
are put together” it becomes possible to identify effective activist
interventions. Professor Smith is the author of many books including The Everyday
World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (University of Toronto Press, 1987);
The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (Northeastern
University Press, 1990); and most recently Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology
for People : A Sociology for People (AltaMira Press 2005).
Dr. Ellen Pence is founder of Praxis International, a nonprofit research
and training organization that works toward the elimination of violence
against
women and children. Praxis International works with local, statewide, and
national policy-makers and police and other law enforcement agencies to
bridge the gap
between what people need and what institutions provide. Since 1996, the organization
has worked with advocacy organizations, intervention agencies, and inter-agency
collaborations to create a clear and cooperative agenda for social change
in their communities.
Dr. Tricia Gabany-Guerrero, Associate Director, Center for Latin American
and Caribbean Studies. University of Connecticut. As an anthropologist
who has
worked extensively with non-profit organizations in Mexico and with Latinos
in the U.S., her recent research on the U.S.-Mexico border partnered with
Casa del Migrante in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, to identify the human rights
violations and adjustment issues of Mexicans deported from the U.S. to Mexico.
The research has been translated into program and policy recommendations for
U.S. and Mexican authorities. This research has extended to the examination
of Latin American workers' human rights and exploitation in the Connecticut
agricultural and landscaping sectors. Dr. Gabany-Guerrero also directs a non-profit
organization (MEXECRI) which works with Mexican Native American organizations
in the state of Michoacán on cultural heritage research and development.
Lenore Anderson, esq. Director of Books Not Bars which is sponsored by
the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. The Ella Baker Center is working
to ensure
that California's resources is directed away from youth incarceration and
towards youth opportunities. BNB engages in grassroots advocacy campaigns
using media
advocacy, policy advocacy, grassroots organizing, and alliance building. http://www.ellabakercenter.org/ Adam Francoeur is the program coordinator Immigration Equality, a national
grass roots organization that works to end discrimination in U.S. immigration
law against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and HIV-positive people,
and to help obtain asylum for those persecuted in their home country
based on their sexual orientation, transgender identity or HIV-status.
Vision for the Workshop:
This workshop will feature interdisciplinary scholars and activists who are
involved in producing activist research for human rights. The workshop will
provide an opportunity for graduate students and faculty in different units
across the University of Connecticut and from other colleges and universities
to learn more about the diverse methods used by activist scholars and to
discuss the challenges they face. We will also highlight some of the ethical
concerns that researchers must negotiate as they produce scholarship that
is designed to support human rights efforts. We will feature presentations
by activists and activist researchers working in four different arenas for
activist research that will form the basis of keynote presentations and breakout
groups: (1) research on behalf of Mexicans immigrants and their families;
(2) research on behalf of immigrants to the U.S. featuring work being done
to expand the sexual citizenship of gay and lesbian immigrants; (3) activist
scholarship on behalf of battered women; and (3) activist scholarship on
behalf of prisoners in the U.S. One of the goals for the workshop will be
to pair activists working in the "community" with activist scholars
in the academy to have a dialogue about what kinds of research is needed
to support the activist efforts. Another goal is to give participants an
opportunity to discuss their works-in-progress with a focus on how institutional
ethnography can be used to link activism and scholarship.
Preliminary Schedule:
Saturday, October 29,
2005
1:00-3PM Keynote presentations
3:00-3:30PM BREAK
3:30-5PM Breakout group discussions with keynote presenters
5-6PM Reception
6PM Dinner
Sunday, October 30, 2005
8:30-10 Breakfast and informal meetings of breakout groups
10-12 Linking Activism and Scholarship Round Tables featuring works-in-progress
of conference participants
12-1:30 Luncheon
1:30-3 Joint Meeting for Reports from Round Table Facilitators
3-4PM Discussion of Potential Collaborations on Activist Research Projects
For further information, please contact Nancy A. Naples, Professor of Sociology
and Women’s Studies, University of Connecticut. Phone: 860-486-3049,
e-mail: Nancy.Naples@uconn.edu .
Download Registration Form (Word document).
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Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement, And
Policy Issues
2005
Conference
Economic Rights Reading and
Research Group
Related Events at UCONN |
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