UConn Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute

Out now in the Journal of Human Rights: The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR)’s commitment to its holistic remedial mandates is unbending despite backlash from key allies from the African Union.

In “African justice in precarious moments: Evolving approaches to remedial mandates at the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights,” Maria A. Sanchez discusses how ACtHPR’s remedial mandates have expanded in recent years despite backlash from African Union member governments. This persistence suggests the Court’s firm stance on its uniquely holistic and intensive remedial approach. In addressing the research gap on ACtHPR, this analysis employs typology to trace the Court’s remedial mandates throughout its history.

Read the full study: https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2026.2630326

As we continue announcing this year's funding recipients and conclude the faculty awardees, we are excited to highlight our last 2026 Small Grant recipient, Michael Orwicz! Read more about Michael's awarded project below.

About the Project
Focused on the work of Brazilian photographer Alice Miceli, this project's exhibition (Fall 2026) and related edited catalog book explore how Miceli's experimental photographic practices investigate the violence and lethal trauma embedded in post-conflict landscapes but which remain literally invisible to the naked eye and to conventional photography.

Impact
This exhibition will bring Miceli's powerful work to new audiences in the Northeast region. Additionally, the related edited catalog will be the first monograph on this rising artistic star. The exhibition and volume will cover three of Miceli's most compelling works -- her Chernobyl Project (2006-2010), her In Depth Minefields (2014-2018) and 88 From 14,000, her treatment of the Khmer Rouge notorious S-21 Prison. The catalog will also cover Miceli's current project, Warfront Landscapes, which productively shifts the matrix of these earlier projects to that of urban warfare.

Stay tuned as we continue to announce the results of our annual funding competitions and start to highlight graduate awardees and their awarded projects!

Our Year in Numbers highlights the people, partnerships, and programs that shaped HRI during the 2025–26 academic year.

🔹 Here’s our next numbers: 100+ and 3,500+

Since its founding, HRI has connected local audiences with leading scholars, advocates, artists, policymakers, and practitioners from around the world.

Over the last year, more than 100 speakers joined HRI programming, engaging over 3,500 participants through in-person, virtual, and hybrid events.

If you're not already one of them, we hope to see you soon when our Fall programming picks up again!

Next up in our highlight of 2026 funding awardees! Read more about Prof. Catherine Masud and Prof. Janie Cole's Small Grant awarded project below.

About the Project
"The Making of Gabriel" is a creatively visualized short documentary film that brings to life the earliest surviving autobiographical account of an enslaved Ethiopian in the early modern Indian Ocean world. Framed as a work of memory and testimony, the story follows Gabriel, a Beta Israel Ethiopian Jewish child kidnapped from the Ethiopian Highlands in the mid 16th century and sold into slavery across Africa, Arabia, and South Asia. Over the course of his life, Gabriel is forced to navigate multiple regimes of power—slavery, religious persecution, and imperial violence—while repeatedly refashioning his identity as a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian in a relentless pursuit of survival, dignity, and agency.

Impact
Gabriel’s story of slavery, religion, mobility, persecution, and resistance, offers rare views into an early modern world of slave trading in the Arab world, Habshi life through the porous borders of Afro-Asian communities, and ritual and religious persecution in Portuguese India. It is told through the imaginary and sumptuous soundscapes, visuals and voices of an early modern Indian Ocean world brought to life in the groundbreaking musical narrative Gabriel’s Odyssey (2025), created and performed by the Kukutana Ensemble, together with interviews with leading global experts who address wider themes around religion, ritual, slavery, race, agency, and migration in the early modern Indian Ocean world and their impact on Afro-Asian communities in this period. Gabriel’s life represents a universal story of oppression, faith, migration and self-fashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans. This story has never been told in film before now.

Stay tuned as we continue to announce the results of our annual funding competitions.

Out now in the Journal of Human Rights: Urban Food Governance (UFG) provides a localized perspective on implementing the right to food under the International Human Rights Law (IHRL), revealing the empirical realities of human rights adaptation on local/non-state actors.

In “Conceptualizing human rights obligations and responsibilities in cities: An emerging research agenda,” Cindy Leung discusses how the place-based nature and multi-actor governance model of UFG initiatives can tackle the right to food in the local and non-state actors’ responsibilities under the IHRL, addressing the normative gap of IHRL on localized human rights implementation. Studying the interactions of IHRL and UFG can reveal the empirical realities and implementation of human rights obligations and responsibilities.

Read the full study: https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2026.2624488

Continuing our highlight of 2026 funding awardees, allow us to introduce you to our first Small Grant recipient, Prof. Kathryn Libal! Read more about Kathy's awarded project below.

About the Project
This study examines how recent executive branch actions — particularly the Trump administration's suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and closure of the Welcome Corps — have transformed refugee resettlement services across the country. Using qualitative interviews with frontline practitioners including resettlement agency staff, lawyers, legal advocates, community sponsors, and refugee community leaders across Connecticut, New York, Kentucky, and Minnesota, the research maps how these actors are adapting to severe federal retrenchment. The grant specifically funds a two-week research residency in Louisville, Kentucky in Spring 2027 to conduct in-person interviews with lawyers, advocates, and community volunteers.

Impact
This research addresses one of the most urgent human rights challenges of our time: the dismantling of federal refugee protection infrastructure in the United States that leaves vulnerable populations — including refugees, asylum seekers, and asylees — without critical services and legal support. By centering the perspectives of frontline practitioners and documenting how communities are responding to federal retrenchment, the study generates evidence that can directly inform advocacy, policy reform, and the protection of refugee rights at both state and national levels.

Stay tuned as we continue to announce the results of our annual funding competitions and learn more about their impactful projects!

Today we’re launching our “Our Year in Numbers” series, highlighting the impact of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute throughout the 2025–26 academic year.

Over the coming days, we’ll share a closer look at the programs, partnerships, students, and research initiatives that made this year possible, as well as the community that continues to advance human rights across UConn and beyond.

🔹 Here’s our first number: 70+

Over the last five years, HRI has consistently hosted between 50 and 100 events annually. Excluding semester breaks and weekends, that averages out to a new event almost every other day of the academic year!

This year’s programming included public lectures, workshops, conferences, film screenings, research presentations, and community conversations that brought together audiences from across Connecticut and beyond. The breadth and volume of these events reflect the Institute’s role as a hub for human rights scholarship, dialogue, and community.

Kicking off our highlight of 2026 funding awardees, we're thrilled to share more about our Seed Grant recipient, Prof. Sarah Willen! Read more about Sarah's awarded project below.

About the Project
Public health in the United States is in crisis, and the implications for human rights and health equity will reverberate for years to come. Since January 2025, entire divisions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been eliminated, and over 2,000 employees have been terminated. Among the programs eliminated are two pillars of U.S. efforts to confront gender-based violations of health, human rights, and bodily integrity: the R**e Prevention and Education (RPE) program, and the Domestic Violence Prevention Enhancement and Leadership Through Alliances program (DELTA). In this collaborative study, developed by three medical anthropologists in partnership with two organizations founded by CDC community members, we will document and analyze these multi-layered effects at the federal, state, and local levels in order to help build the knowledge base needed to reimagine and rebuild the U.S. public health workforce and infrastructure in keeping with core principles of human rights protection and health justice.

Impact
Current attacks on the funding, infrastructure, and credibility of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and broader U.S. public health infrastructure are harming people and populations across the U.S. As a collaborative team of social scientists and public health professionals, we plan to track some of these effects in order to help everyday people -- including policymakers and members of the public -- grasp the scope of the damage done to health and human rights and begin to envision a more just and equitable path forward.

Stay tuned as we continue to announce the results of our annual funding competitions starting with our faculty awardees!

Out now in the Journal of Human Rights: While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) rhetorically supports human rights, its exclusion of many binding human rights obligations in its economic agenda reveals notable accountability gaps.

In “Markets over rights? Fragmented regionalization of business and human rights in ASEAN,” Moch Faisal Karim and Aishasiwi Asanti investigate the failure of ASEAN to embed business and human rights norms into its regional economic governance. By drawing on a structural analysis of ASEAN’s institutional design and member state interests, this article contributes to debates about regional human rights governance by explaining persistent accountability gaps in Southeast Asia. In doing so, this study reveals how economic imperatives and elite interests in Southeast Asia undermine efforts to institutionalize the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human rights in the region.

Read the full study: https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2026.2621344

We are honored to be able to support the study and scholarship of human rights across the university for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff. Over $130,000 in funding was awarded during this cycle.

Keep your eyes out over the coming weeks as we share more about awardees of our annual funding competitions, including highlights about awarded faculty and graduate projects, undergraduate scholarships, summer internship fellows, and supported capstone placements.

For the full list of awards and recipients for 2026, check out the article out now in UConn Today! https://today.uconn.edu/2026/06/2026-human-rights-institute-funding-awards-announced/