IMM-004
"Human Rights Advocacy Using Video"
Instructor
Sam Gregory,
Program Director, WITNESS
View Syllabus >
About the course: Aided by the spread in low-cost, high-quality technologies, video and moving image media are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and multi-form (even though a considerable digital divide exists in terms of access, literacy and skills both within and between societies across the globe); video will soon be part of every communications and advocacy strategy. Increasing moving image creation, usage and literacy defines much of the experience of a connected younger generation, particularly in the Global North and within certain sectors of Global South society. Video production and distribution is emphatically no longer the exclusive realm of the professional.
Use of video, including particularly mobile video, has publicized and documented many emerging human rights struggles from Rangoon, to Oakland, to Tehran, and characterizes many vibrant citizen media spaces that fill niches long ignored or abandoned by the mainstream media. Video is the “tool of choice” for many human rights struggles and contributes to securing local and global attention.
However, strategic, directed, impact-driven use of video remains under-utilized as an intervention by either NGOs or citizen networks in human rights spaces including treaty monitoring systems, legislative debates, lobbying of decision-makers, and community organizing. Many human rights actors do not yet have the skills, connections or experience to organize or coordinate others’ audiovisual media including citizen media content in spaces like YouTube or the Hub, create their own targeted advocacy media for specific audiences, collaborate to develop compelling material with professional or citizen storytellers, or to link their strategic use of video to new technologies that enhance creation, distribution, and debate, such as mobile, social media, data visualization, mapping and Web 2.0 tools.
This course, taught by a leading practitioner of using video for human rights advocacy, will combine a focus on practical advocacy skills for using video and related multimedia with analytical discussion, expert guest speakers and review of emerging trends. Although not focused primarily on technical skills in video production it will include a optional session on filming the basic building blocks of video testimony that are utilized in many settings.
Sam Gregory MPP '00 is the Program Director at WITNESS (www.witness.org, hub.witness.org) which uses video and online technologies to support human rights advocacy worldwide. He is a video producer, trainer, and human rights advocate. In 2005 he was the lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press), and in 2007 he lead the development of the curriculum for WITNESS' first ever Video Advocacy Institute, an intensive two-week training program. He has worked extensively with grassroots human rights activists - particularly in Latin America and Asia, including the Philippines, Burma and Indonesia, integrating video into campaigns on a range of civil, political, social, economic and cultural human rights issues.
Videos he has co-produced have been screened to decision-makers at the US Congress,the UK Houses of Parliament, the United Nations, and at film festivals worldwide. He has been interviewed on using video in advocacy for the Christian Science Monitor, the National Journal, Videomaker Magazine, Reason, PBS Now, Voice of America and many other media outlets. In 2004 he was a jury member for the IDFA Amnesty International/Doen Award. He attended the Harvard Kennedy School on a Kennedy Memorial Scholarship, and graduated with a MPP. He has also worked as a television researcher/producer in both the UK and USA, and for development organizations in Nepal and Vietnam, and holds a BA from Oxford University in History and Spanish. He is on the Board of the US Campaign for Burma, and the Tactical Technology Collective. He speaks fluent Spanish, conversational French and basic Nepali.
|
|
IMM-005
"Human Rights, Development,
and International Politics"
Instructors
Loubna Freih,
Founder, Human Rights Watch - Geneva
and
Felisa Tibbitts,
Co-Founder and Director of Human
Rights Education Associates
View Syllabus >
About the course:
Human rights and its impact on development are said to be a process that reflects particular historic configurations of power relations. Practitioners and human rights activists argue that the international human rights system has reached a critical time and that international events in the last few years have emboldened a number of States antagonistic to human rights. At the diplomatic level, the United Nations appears to be incapable of fulfilling its mission to promote and protect human rights and has turned into the arena where fundamental human rights battles are being fought.
What should Security Council reform look like? Should the UN be more activist in pursuit of human rights? Is the Human Rights Council set up for failure? Is a North-South divide inevitable and growing? Are human rights indivisible in practice? We will identify who and what are the main obstacles and challenges to the human rights system and look at ways to influence key state actors’ global human rights agenda.
Nowhere are human rights more important than in global and national efforts to eradicate poverty and lead countries on the path to development. Recently, the UN and development agencies have adopted a human rights-based approach to development and poverty eradication programming. This is an evolving area of practice which makes acquiring the necessary skills to articulate and implement successful human development programmes highly relevant to a career in international development.
We approach the course with an activist agenda, i.e. how to gain most impact in human rights protection and programming, and on the premise that we learn best by becoming actively engaged around themes and questions related to real life concerns and experience. We will use case studies, including texts of actual negotiations, interactive exercises and insider accounts of events, to review recent political developments in the global application of human rights and its impact on the ground.
*NEW*: On January 18 & 19, an optional study trip is organized to the United Nations and Human Rights Watch in New York for those who sign up (at their own cost).
This course is intended for human rights activists and practitioners, advocates, development experts, international affairs and political scientists interested in the analysis of international relations at the diplomatic level, engineering systemic changes, and the development and application of human rights programs in the field.
Felisa Tibbitts is Co-Founder and Director of Human Rights Education Associates (HREA). She has worked as an educator, evaluator and materials developer on the topics of monitoring children's rights, the human rights-based approach to programming and the integration of human rights themes in curricula. Felisa has carried out adult trainings with educators and humanitarian workers in over 20 countries and serves as a consultative expert for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNDP, OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Organization of American States. She is presently working on a doctoral thesis that examines the roles of INGOs and national actors in promoting human rights education in national secondary school curricula in European countries during the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education (1995-2004).
Loubna Freih Georges is Human Rights Watch's Europe-based Director for Strategic Initiatives where she identifies and leads international advocacy campaigns. Until 2006, Freih Georges was the organization’s main advocate to the United Nation in Geneva where she founded and ran HRW’s presence in Switzerland. She contributed actively to the UN’s Reform Agenda in 2005 that led to the creation of the Human Rights Council. Since 2000, she has followed human rights crises in Darfur, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Colombia and Uzbekistan, and worked closely with Mary Robinson, Sergio Vieira de Mello and Louise Arbour. Due to her advocacy efforts, an expert monitor on protecting human rights while countering terrorism was appointed in 2002.
Freih Georges was a Mason Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School where she earned a Masters in Public Administration in 1999 and she graduated with an MA in Journalism from New York University in 1994. She is currently working on a campaign to ensure Russia’s accountability in crimes committed against civilians during the two wars in Chechnya and is writing a memoir of her first years in Iraq where she was born.
|
