Working Groups
The Rapoport Center sponsors collaborative working groups that research various human rights topics that our affiliated faculty initiate. These groups are comprised of faculty and students from diverse disciplines across campus. Affiliated faculty may join an existing working group or propose their own here: Call for Working Group Proposals (.pdf).
The goals of the working group program include: identifying and generating sustained attention to critical issues on the leading edge of human rights scholarship; fostering ongoing interaction and intellectual cooperation among affiliated faculty; and encouraging the development of a unique brand of human rights scholarship that is multidisciplinary, critical, theoretically innovative, and empirically and practically informed.
We currently support two working groups:
The Border Wall Project Working Group
The Border Wall Project focuses on investigating the human rights impact of the proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall, including discrimination in the exercise of property rights. In 2008, a working group delegation traveled to affected border areas on an information-gathering mission and compiled its conclusions in a series of briefing papers submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The Border Wall Working Group is a multi-disciplinary collective of faculty and students from the geography and anthropology departments, LLILAS, the LBJ and law schools, the immigration and environmental law clinics, and the Rapoport Center. This working group collaborates with affected individual property owners, indigenous communities, environmental groups, environmental sciences faculty at UT Brownsville, and other academics and advocates. Please visit the Texas/Mexico Border Wall Website to learn more.
If you are interested in joining this working group, please email Denise Gilman.
Working Group on Health and Human Rights
The Working Group on Health and Human Rights originally began as an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students interested in fostering a university-wide conversation on the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. It has since expanded its focus to include other health and human rights issues.
In 2007, the working group held the university’s first annual World AIDS Day Conference to heighten awareness about the impact of the AIDS pandemic on minority and impoverished populations in the U.S. and abroad.
If you are interested in joining the working group on health and human rights, please email Professor Neville Hoad.
