The Rapoport Center sponsors numerous events throughout the academic year. The Center’s Human Rights Happy Hour Series brings activists and scholars from around the world to deliver lectures focusing on today's pressing human rights issues. Along with the Happy Hour Series, the Center organizes various conferences that bring together multidisciplinary panels featuring academics, artists, and policy-makers.
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Image, Memory and the Paradox of Peace: Fifteen Years after the El Salvador Peace Accords
April 17 and 18, 2008
The fourth annual conference of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice will be organized around the recent acquisition by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of a historic collection of photojournalistic work documenting El Salvador's twelve-year civil war. In coordination with the UT School of Journalism's Donna DeCesare, the Rapoport Center is planning what will undoubtedly be a stimulating and unique forum for discussion and debate concerning human rights, engaged from a variety of perspectives ranging from foreign policy to the visual arts.
The conference will include the opening of the exhibition “Inside El Salvador” at the Ransom Center with some of its featured photographers in attendance, as well as a closing session on the legacy of martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero led by representatives of The Rothko Chapel in Houston. In addition, a number of panels will offer perspectives on El Salvador's civil war, focusing particularly on the ways images have created a narrative on violence and human rights that informs our understanding of the country's past, present, and future.
In the spirit of the Rapoport Center, the conference will bring together a multidisciplinary group of academics, activists, artists and policy-makers to explore the relationship between the local and the global, as well as the economic and the political. The Salvadoran civil war will be discussed not merely as an episode of history, but also as a legacy whose effects – both tangible and intangible – are obvious in the country to this day. For more information, please visit the conference website.