The Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, staff and students to promote new understandings about global human rights issues. We put special emphasis on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, income inequality, the environment and artistic responses in our teaching, programming and outreach. The Center is committed to the goal of social justice as well as the study and practice of accountability and reconciliation. In partnership with the FHI, we see the humanities as an essential frame and launch point for inquiry. Our goal is to foster collaborative, cross-disciplinary and critical thinking about human rights in both local and global contexts. We put particular emphasis on developing undergraduate courses and global experiences as well as sponsoring campus-wide events that encourage awareness and activism on global human rights issues.

The Center is dedicated to teaching and practicing human rights both at home and abroad. As a university entity, we encourage our students to think deeply about human dignity and rights at the same time that they understand their history, development and practice. With this in mind, we take this extraordinary opportunity to reassert, for our faculty, staff and students, the critical importance of respect for human rights as a core value. Sexism, racism and hatred of the other based on ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity or religion are abhorrent. They are also violations of basic rights principles of equality and mutual respect, so essential to democracy.

The Duke Human Rights Center at the FHI is home to The Human Rights Certificate, which offers students an in-depth and rigorous interdisciplinary study of human rights history, theory and practice, cultivating life-long learners and engaged citizens who have a deep and nuanced understanding of human rights. Human rights cannot be isolated into one or even a few disciplines and its study must draw on the concepts and lived experience of scholars, practitioners, journalists and communities struggling to defend their rights. Students pursuing the certificate study human rights not as good or evil but as a constellation of approaches, histories, practices and critiques. For more information contact Emily Stewart at emily.stewart@duke.edu.