Home / Global Human Rights Hub / Events
Events
Global Human Rights Hub
In our work to empower rights through research, the Global Human Rights Hub offers a variety of events and activities. Join us for working group meetings to workshop research in progress and receive feedback. Themed conferences provide networking and publication opportunities and featured speakers bring Hub faculty, post-doctoral scholars and graduate students together to engage in intellectual dialogue. If you are interested in presenting your work, please contact us at ghrhub@asu.edu.
Event Highlights
Past Events at the Hub
The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture
December 4 | 12–1:30 p.m.
MERCC C240 (The Mercado, ASU Downtown Phoenix campus)
The Hub hosted a book talk with UC Santa Barbara Professor, and author of "The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture," Lisa Hajjar.
About the author: Lisa Hajjar has an international reputation for her work on sociology of law and conflict, human rights, political violence, and contemporary international affairs. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who contributes to multiple fields in the social sciences and humanities, including Middle East Studies, American Studies, and Law and Society. Her current research focuses primarily on the US “war on terror,” particularly around the issues of torture, targeted killing, and Guantanamo. She is the only social scientist who has traveled to Guantanamo (14 times to date), where she conducts research and writes about the military commissions. Another area of current research focuses on human rights in the Arab world. Her journalistic writings have been published by The Nation, Al Jazeera English, Middle East Report, and Jadaliyya.
Working group meetings
The International Law Working Group provides a space to build community across ASU faculty and students who are working on research related to international law and human rights. Group members use these meetings to seek feedback on research or course syllabi, discuss ideas for new projects, receive and provide mentorship, and present work in progress in a supportive environment. The International Law Working Group meets several times during the semester primarily through Zoom. Please email Audrey Comstock (audrey.comstock@asu.edu) if you would like to join the group.
Wednesday, November 29 at 12 p.m.
Book Talk “Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-to-Five Emergency”
Melissa Gatter, Lecturer in Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex
Zoom link: https://asu.zoom.us/j/86954874820
Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, carried out during 2017–2018, the book challenges the perceptions of Azraq as the ‘ideal’ refugee camp. Melissa Gatter argues that the camp operates as a ‘nine-to-five emergency’ where mundane bureaucratic procedures serve to sustain a power system in which refugees are socialized to endure a cynical wait – both for everyday services and for their return – without expectations for a better outcome. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp also explores how refugees navigate this system, both in the day-to-day and over years, by evaluating various layers of waiting as they affect refugee perceptions of time in the camp – not only in the present, but the past, near future, and far future. Far from an ‘ideal’ camp, Azraq and its politics of time constitute a cruel reality in which a power system meant to aid refugees is one that suppresses, foreclosing futures that it is supposed to preserve.
The Gender Group provides a space to build community across ASU faculty and students who are working on issues of gender from different disciplinary and methodological approaches. Group members use these meetings to seek feedback on research or course syllabi, discuss ideas for new projects, receive and provide mentorship, and present work in progress in a supportive environment. The Gender Working Group meets once a month via Zoom. Please email Kendall Funk (kendall.funk@asu.edu) if you would like to join the group.
Wednesday, April 12 at 12 p.m.
Come join the trafficking group as we share our research and grants in progress. This is an informal session and a great time to get to know other ASU faculty and graduate students working on trafficking and forced labor at ASU.