Mission
The Research Program on Arts & Human Rights explores how the arts can promote the full exercise of human rights and the consolidation of a democratic culture. The arts not only make human rights visible. They also advance democratic thinking as they help us imagine new futures and open unique spaces for dialogue and debate, ushering us into novel modes of experience that provide concrete grounds for rethinking our relationship with one another. Thus, the arts can act as a powerful means of sustaining individual and collective reflection on human rights, and of linking individual and collective public experience, social belonging, and citizenship.
Guiding Concepts:
Art makes visible human rights, and their violations, helping us combat injustice.
Art strengthens mutual recognition, opening new spaces for dialogue and debate.
Art forges new potential futures, helping us envision a more moral and just society.
Research
Spatial Memory
Memorials, memorialization; museums and sites of conscience; spaces of human rights
Symbolic Reparations & Transitional Justice
Responding to demands for truth, recognition, dignity, justice and accountability made by victims of human rights violations
Arts & Democracy
Fostering democratic imagination through the visual and performing arts
Visual Culture & Human Rights
Traditional and new visual practices and technologies in relation to human rights
Performance & Human Rights
Demonstration of human rights questions through theatre and performance studies
Music & Human Rights
Music and struggles for social change; music as resistance to violence and trauma
Education
Select Course Highlights
Theatre & Human Rights
DRAM/HRTS 3139: Provides a critical study of theatre production as political discourse in global areas of conflict and how that discourse defines, or is defined by, human rights issues.
Human Rights, Digital Media, Visual Culture
ARTH/HRTS 3575: The problematics of digital media and visual representation in conceptualizing, documenting, and visualizing human rights and humanitarian issues.
Image as Witness: Testimony, Witness, Confession
ARTH/HRTS 3580: Explores the role of visual culture in bearing witness to human rights abuses. Examines how witnesses have used images to convey testimony, analyzing historical examples and artistic practices that highlight the limits of verbal expression, linking ethics and aesthetics in confronting profound historical events.
Public Engagement
“WE ARE NOT AFRAID: Music and Resistance in Apartheid Prisons”
Based on Janie Cole’s recent fieldwork in South Africa interviewing former political prisoners about their experiences in apartheid prisons, human rights violations, and recording their music. WE ARE NOT AFRAID explores the critical role of music as a tool of resistance for political prisoners held in harrowing conditions and torture in apartheid prisons, especially Robben Island (where Mandela was held for 18 years) and the women’s jails during the anti-apartheid struggle. View the 3 min trailer or visit the Music Beyond Borders website for more details.
News
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Scott Wallace, associate professor of journalism, discusses his experiences as a war reporter in advance of a panel discussion at 4 p.m. at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.
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Memorials commemorating a nation’s past conflicts can help build a more peaceful future, say two UConn researchers.
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Dramatic arts professor Gary English is spending a year working with the Freedom Theatre in a Palestinian refugee camp.
Our People
Leadership
José Falconi
Co-Chair, Research Program on Arts and Human Rights
Assistant Professor, Art History and Human Rights
