Engaged research is research that is conducted with communities, organizations, government agencies, schools, nonprofits, or other partners, rather than simply about them.
The idea is that researchers and community partners collaborate throughout the research process to address real-world issues and produce knowledge that has practical impact.
Engaged research often includes:
- Working with local communities to identify research questions
- Partnering with schools, healthcare systems, nonprofits, or government agencies
- Sharing findings in ways that benefit the community
- Using research to inform policy, practice, or social change
Engaged Research Initiatives
Buen Vivir Index
A novel instrument that measures a sense of Buen Vivir (i.e., good living or living beautifully due to harmonious relationships between human rights and the rights of nature). This project leverages South American indigenous ways of thinking to challenge existing wellbeing and quality of life indicators. Analyses of comparative populations can highlight the importance of indigenous perspectives for climate change mitigation efforts.
Contact
César Abadía-Barrero, Associate Professor, Anthropology & Human Rights
cesar.abadia@uconn.edu
Charlie Clements Digital Archives
Due to open in 2027, the Charles Clements Digital Archives collects the papers, ephemera, photos and artifacts of noted human rights practitioner Dr. Charles Clements, MD. A former U.S. Air Force pilot who refused further Vietnam missions on moral grounds, Dr. Clements became a Quaker committed to non-violence and trained as a physician. He volunteered in guerrilla-controlled El Salvador during its civil war, leading to his book Witness to War, which begat an Oscar-winning documentary. Clements later represented Physicians for Human Rights at the Nobel ceremony for the Landmine Treaty and worked for water rights in the U.S. Southwest.
Contact
David Richards, Associate Professor, Political Science & Human Rights
david.richards@uconn.edu
CIRIGHTS
The CIRIGHTS human rights dataset contains information about government respect for 30+ human rights for approximately 196 countries for the years 1981-2021. The CIRIGHTS project builds upon the previous CIRI Human Rights Data Project. The goal of the CIRIGHTS data project is to create numerical measures for every internationally recognized human right for all countries of the world.
Contact
David Richards, Associate Professor, Political Science & Human Rights
david.richards@uconn.edu
Crowd Counting Consortium
The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) collects data on the size and political activities of crowds engaged in marches, protests, demonstrations, and other actions throughout the United States based on information reported in local and national media and on social media. The data are made freely available for the public interest and to further scholarly research. For access to the data, see the Harvard Dataverse and the CCC dashboard. The CCC is funded in part by the Scheidt Family Foundation.
Contact
Jeremy Pressman, Professor, Political Science
jeremy.pressman@uconn.edu
Forced Migration Lab
The Forced Migration Lab was created in 2025 to foster interdisciplinary research, policy analysis, and community engagement related to the human-created displacement of people from around the world. It aims to develop human-rights informed knowledge and practices in response to forced migration through providing research workshops, hosting interns and student researchers, and enhancing the visibility of teaching, research, and community engagement on forced migration at UConn. By collaborating with scholars, practitioners, and displaced community members, the lab aims to advance knowledge, influence policy, and support those affected by forced migration.
Contact
Kathryn Libal, Professor, Social Work and Human Rights kathryn.libal@uconn.edu
International Criminal Tribunal of the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Digital Archive Project
The goal of the ICTY Digital Archive Project is to advance a better understanding of the legal decisions of the ICTY and the history of the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The Project provides access to a range of documents and other records associated with the work of prosecutors, expert witnesses, researchers, and translators at the ICTY. The project curates ICTY documents relating to key decisions of the tribunal on genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed during the 1991-1995 conflict.
Contact
James Waller, Director, Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute; Professor, Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
james.waller@uconn.edu
Journal of Human Rights
The Journal of Human Rights (JHR) seeks to broaden the study of human rights by fostering the critical re-examination of existing approaches to human rights, as well as developing new perspectives on the theory and practice of human rights. The journal aims to meet a globally growing interest in the study and practice of human rights by serving as an arena for the public discussion and scholarly analysis of human rights, broadly conceived.
Contact
Shareen Hertel, Editor; Professor, Political Science & Human Rights
shareen.hertel@uconn.edu
Pandemic Journaling Project
The Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) was created in Spring 2020 as an online journaling platform and interdisciplinary research study of how people around the world were experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic. The project, which ran May 2020-May 2022, offered a digital space where participants could create weekly journals of their COVID-19 experiences. With over 1,800 participants in 55 countries, the project is rooted in a human rights-based commitment to democratizing knowledge production. Since the conclusion of PJP’s first phase, it continues to invite contributions quarterly, and has generated new projects on the enduring impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contact
Sarah Willen, Professor, Anthropology
sarah.willen@uconn.edu
Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment (SERF) Index
SERF scores countries’ performance on fulfilling social and economic rights on a yearly basis. SERF is unique in that it considers not only the extent to which citizens enjoy these rights, but also the extent to which the government complies with its duty to progressively realize these rights with available resources. SERF has yielded award-winning research, graduate training, and data-driven policymaking, and is part of the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI).
Contact
Susan Randolph, Emeritus Professor, Economics
susan.m.randolph@gmail.com
Subnational Nonstate Actor Governance
This project develops a measurement strategy for subnational variation in non-state actors’ territorial control and governance within conflict zones, designed to facilitate comparison of conflict dynamics within and across country contexts. We draw upon local and national news sources to identify reporting on a rebel organization’s violent and governance activity, which we incorporate into a measurement model to estimate the spatial and temporal extent of the rebel organization’s territorial control and forms of governance. The first iteration of the measurement strategy is applied to the Syrian Civil War.
Contact
Michael Rubin, Assistant Professor, Political Science & Human Rights
michael.a.rubin@uconn.edu
Teaching Human Rights Database
This online database provides lesson plans and tools to support the integration of human rights into college classrooms across disciplines, as well as the creation of interdisciplinary introductory human rights courses. Reflecting the Connecticut School of Human Rights’ interdisciplinary approach, the database is built on the belief that human rights cannot be fully understood through a single academic discipline. Instead, it encourages teaching and learning from multiple, intersecting perspectives to provide students with a more comprehensive understanding of human rights. The database allows instructors to incorporate lessons from a range of disciplines into existing courses or use them to develop interdisciplinary human rights curricula.
Contact
Gladstein Family Rights Institute
humanrights@uconn.edu
Terrorism Attributed to Political Actors
Attributes incidents in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the most comprehensive corpus of terrorism incidents with worldwide coverage, to specific non-state political actors in complementary social science datasets. By linking data on terrorism incidents to the data on the organizations that perpetrate these attacks, TAPA facilitates new empirical research investigating the origins and dynamics of terrorism. The first stage of the project focused on rebel actors in armed conflict.
Contact
Michael Rubin, Assistant Professor, Political Science & Human Rights
michael.a.rubin@uconn.edu
Transportation Equity Index Project
Transportation infrastructure can be a substantial enabler or barrier to social inclusion. Although the link between equity in access to opportunities and socio-economic impact is frequently discussed in the planning literature, it is not measured systematically. This project will construct a human rights-based measure of transportation equity and assess its relationship to social deprivation.
Contact
Davis Chacon-Hurtado, Assistant Professor, Engineering & Human Rights
davis.chacon-hurtado@uconn.edu
News
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A repository of data detailing the personal experiences of more than 1,800 people living during the COVID-19 pandemic is available to researchers for the first time
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Incitement, Hate Speech, and the Freedom of Expression
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‘Can we create new indicators of well-being using this Indigenous concept of Buen Vivir?’
