CWGS Embrey Women's Human Rights Initiative

“I imagine a just world without stereotypes, sexism, or racism. Where everyone is equal, but is also different. A just world isn’t perfect, but it does have many communities that help each other through everything. My role in the creation of a just world is raising awareness. Speaking up, not stepping down.”

- High School Student in CWGS Performing Justice Project
@ The Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, 2012

The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) Embrey Women’s Human Rights Initiative (EWHRI) generates and supports projects to create an educational culture for gender and racial justice. Through innovative learning spaces including vibrant collaborations with community organizers, the EWHRI sustains research, teaching, and activism as justice strategies in resistance to oppressions along constructed borders of ability, class, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, nationality, and sexuality. Read the press release about the grant.

Current projects of the CWGS EWHRI include:

International Conference: 5-6 October 2012 we bring you Rethinking Power & Resistance: Gender & Human Rights from Texas to the Transnational. Organized by activist scholars and community organizers across Austin, this international, dual-language conference will create new partnerships for gender and racial justice work. See the program.

Performing Justice Project: A team of CWGS faculty generated the Performing Justice Project to build performance-based high school curricula on gender and racial justice. We facilitate this curriculum at local Austin high schools to prepare high school student awareness and ability to make change around gender and racial justice. Watch the Performing Justice Project from 2012 and 2011

Signature Courses: We recruit faculty to develop and teach new UT first-year CWGS EWHRI-Supported Signature Courses on gender and racial justice.

Speakers Series: We coordinate and collaborate on speakers series to develop a vocabulary for education and advocacy for gender and racial justice. In 2011-12, we brought in J. Bob Alotta, Executive Director of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and Dr. Radhika Balakrishnan, Executive Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University. In collaboration with the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, we also coordinated a series of interdisciplinary faculty conversations. Look for more events in spring 2013.

Support for Faculty and Students: We also run additional programs in support of students and faculty building an educational culture for gender and racial justice. We recruit faculty for an ongoing Project Group on Teaching Critical Approaches to Gender and Racial Justice. We fund CWGS MA international students working on gender and racial justice through activist research.

Established by J. Lindsey Embrey, the Embrey Family Foundation began in 2004 and continues to “cultivate human rights awareness and advance initiatives that challenge and embolden people to walk better in the world.”