About

 

The Human Rights Project helps the Bard community examine the theory and practice of human rights through teaching, research, and public programs.

The Human Rights Project is an exploratory research and action initiative at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Through teaching, public programs, research, and engagement with communities in the region and globally, the Project aims at once to foster critical discussions of human rights theory and practice, and to engage with practitioners on the leading edges of human rights research. Founded in 1999, the Project developed the first interdisciplinary undergraduate degree (B.A.) program in Human Rights in the United States in 2003.

HRP has supported more than a hundred student internships from Peshawar to Albany; helped create parallel human rights projects at Bard’s partner institutions, the Bard/al-Quds Honors College in Abu Dis (Palestine) and Smolny College St. Petersburg (Russia); developed the International Human Rights Exchange, a human rights semester at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa); and created a full online video archive of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the ICTY in The Hague, and the Bhopal Memory Project, an online archive of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984.  The Project inquires into the philosophical foundations and political mechanisms of human rights, maintains a special interest in freedom of expression and the public sphere, and explores the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and representational dimensions of human rights discourse.  Recent and ongoing research projects at HRP include “The Lesser Evil,” “Music and Torture,” and “Forensic Aesthetics.”

 

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