The Duke University Center for International Studies is pleased to announce our first annual Summer Institute in Global Studies. The Institute, which will run from July 13-17, 2009, will provide $1,000 to cover expenses for the ten selected members. The faculty director is Robin Kirk, who has extensive experience in the field of human rights (see below for biographical information)
The focus of our inaugural seminar is “Human Rights and Wrongs: Terror, Truth and Political Conflict in Classroom Study” and is for faculty whose teaching focus is undergraduate students. Applicants must be regular rank faculty, preferably at the junior level. All disciplines are welcome to apply. Community college faculty are especially encouraged to apply.
The study of human rights incorporates fundamental questions about how human societies struggle over questions of what is moral and who is human. For undergraduates, a human rights education is an important way to teach global citizens and to raise unsettling questions about human behavior. Students can not only learn about the darker side of human nature, but also examine the successful movements that have moved society away from evils like slavery, torture and discrimination. This summer institute introduces faculty participants to the history, theory and practice of human rights, and shows how they can be effectively taught.
The focus in on an interdisciplinary approach, using not only law and policy, but also philosophy, the arts, economics, and journalism. Human rights are not beyond criticism; we will also look at human rights as an intellectual question and challenge orthodoxies. Participants will have a broad range of readings in the field and also hear from recognized academics and practitioners. In addition, we will examine how hands-on learning can contribute to a richer education in human rights. Finally, there will be opportunities for several field trips, to sites where practitioners are working out how to translate human rights theory into great protection.
Robin Kirk
Robin Kirk outside Raleigh Central Prison.
An award-winning author and human rights activist, Robin Kirk teaches at Duke University and coordinates the Duke Human Rights Center, part of the Franklin Humanities Institute. She is the author of two books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia (PublicAffairs) and The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She co-edited The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University), now in its second edition, and Duke University Press’s Reader series. She blogs about human rights at Talking Rights.
Kirk won the 2005 Glamour magazine non-fiction contest with her essay on the death penalty, available in the November 2005 issue. She frequently speaks and writes about Latin America, human rights and U.S. policy. In the fall of 2006, she was a Fulbright lecturer at the Human Rights Center at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. She also was a consultant to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which published its final report in May 2006. As a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch for twelve years, Kirk authored, co-authored and edited over twelve reports, all available on-line.
In the 1980s, Kirk reported for U.S. media from Peru, where she covered the war between the government and the Shining Path. During that time, she also prepared reports for the U.S. Committee on Refugees, including the first report ever on the plight of Peru’s internally displaced people. The Decade of Chaqwa was followed by a second report, To Build Anew, dealing with the effort of some displaced families to return to their homes. Kirk also authored the first report chronicling the plight of the forcibly displaced in Colombia, Feeding the Tiger.
Kirk is a former Radcliffe Bunting Fellow and is a past winner of the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award for Freelance Writing.
Application procedure
Please complete and print out the application form found at the bottom of this page. You will need as well, to prepare a one-page statement as to why this institute would enrich your current courses or help do develop a new course.
The application and statement must be submitted by June 10, 2009 to:
Rob Sikorski
DUCIS
Box 90404
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708-0404
Email applications are acceptable but, please, no faxes. If you have any questions, please contact Rob Sikorski, (919) 684-867 or via email [Email: r.sikorski #AT# duke.edu ]. More detailed information will be sent upon acceptance.
Application form
2009 Summer Institute ApplicationPDF (595.4 KiB)
