NYU Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights Blog

2022 Fellows

Food Security, Food Sovereignty and Self-Determination

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Karen Santos

HASER

Vieques, Puerto Rico

 

Food insecurity has reached dire levels in Puerto Rico, particularly in the last few years, as a consequence primarily of the imperial predation and neglect first of Spain and then by the United States towards the archipelago in the Caribbean. According to a study conducted by George Washington University, forty percent of Puerto Ricans experienced food insecurity in 2020, compared to the ten percent in the United States 1 . Inadequate political and socio-economic policies throughout the decades, destroyed the agricultural industry and assembled an unsustainable capitalist system that looked at reformation as the answer to the situation on the island. In the last few years, a movement focused on food sovereignty have started in Puerto Rico. In part as a way of taking back rights and land and food that rightfully belong to Puerto Ricans, but also as a form of contestation to imperial powers and a way of reimagining and reclaiming self-determination.

This summer I will be collaborating with HASER (in English, Making Socio-Ecological Actions Resilient), a non-profit organization that promotes food sovereignty and inclusion in Vieques. I will be focusing in one of their projects, La Colmena Cimarrona, a project that promotes social well-being on the island through community-based actions, emphasizing food sovereignty. Working towards food sovereignty is not only a way of combating colonization, poverty, exclusion, inequality and discrimination, but is also an activity that can promote equity and improve the collaboration, respect, inclusion and quality of life of the members of the community, especially women, while also contributing to larger nation-building endeavors and the right to self-determination.

The project I will be working on aimes to provide and share services, knowledge, and concrete actions there where the federal and local governments have failed, specifically in Vieques. By working towards food sovereignty from a collaborative approach – where all the community comes together – La Colmena promotes inclusive economic justice and strengthen the solidarity networks between poor and landless Viequenses. During my fellowship, I will focus on community-organizing initiatives, such as designing courses that promote food independence, justice, collaboration, health and inclusion, and by creating educational and cultural projects that bring the community together. I will also participate by working on the farm and helping organize a farmers’ market.

 

1 “Food Justice in Puerto Rico.” Puerto Rico Report, 5 Jan. 2021, https://www.puertoricoreport.com/.

 

A Clean Environment is a Human Right

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Maggie Stutz, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Anchorage, Alaska. This summer, I will be working with Alaska Community Action on Toxics. This organization endeavors to further Alaskan’s human right to a healthy environment, bodily health, and knowledge. The United Nations acknowledges that access to a clean environment, water, air, and physical health are human rights. This summer, I will be working to ensure these rights are protected and bring justice to those denied them. 

Alaska Community Action on Toxics has conducted community-based research in the North East Cape and Sivuqaq communities. Elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, mercury, and other toxic chemicals have been found in the watershed at an abandoned defense site. Chemicals have also been found in the Suqi and Tapisaggak rivers, drinking water, food, and in the air. I will study the health effects of exposure to these chemicals and determine measures to protect the people in the North East Cape from these toxins. We will work to restore the Suqi river, ensuring people’s right to a clean environment and water.

I will help analyze health effects and investigate the amount of these chemicals in the North East Cape environment. I will research the reparations process, putting together an argument with legal precedent and law, for the community of Sivuqaq. I will explain how the government has violated human rights by polluting the water and land.

I will also participate in the “Protecting Future Generations” project, which partners with the Field Sampling Institute in Nome, to research PCBs and flame retardants in the environment. We will put together a summit, informational sheets, and toolkits for community members. There will be community meetings where scientists, researchers, and working groups will discuss the results in a way that is accessible to anyone.

My project connects to human rights because this research brings a scientific base for claims of health problems directly caused by toxic chemicals from military bases. This research will provide evidence and a factual basis to build a case against the United States government and its violation of this community’s right to a safe and clean environment and health. Moreover, this project educates community members about their environment. The health effects and damage have been done, now the government needs to clean up their mess, and give the people affected reparations and access to healthcare to build better lives. 

Health Rights and Disparities Issue among Asian Americans Population

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Cynthia Lee/ NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health/ New York, NY

Hello, I am Cynthia, a first-year graduate student from the School of Global Public Health, studying health policy and management. 

Since my undergrad degree, being a global health study student, health rights and accessibility to affordable health care is always issues I’m focusing on. 

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been a global pandemic since 2019, and it is still ongoing at this point. During the pandemic around 2020-2021, several studies have found racial disparities in access to health care, with a disproportionate share of the COVID-19 mortality and morbidity burden being borne by racial and ethnic minorities. Many studies have focused on COVID-19-related health disparities experienced by Black and Hispanic Americans, but Asian Americans are one of the lesser-noticed groups. That is to say, for Asian Americans, language barriers and the gap between information and resource sending are always an issue in the community. Not to mention mental health works among minorities and Asian American children and their families. 

I am interested in knowing what kind of government obligations exist under human rights law to address COVID-19-related health disparities experienced by Asian Americans and what enforcement mechanisms exist against the U.S. government.

I’m going to work with Dr. Keng-Yen Huang, the Associate Professor of Population Health and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, working on several projects related to the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health. 

So most of the research I’m joining will focus on mental health intervention projects for minority children and their families. The projects include implementation strategy development to broaden child mental health knowledge dissemination and evidence-based intervention utilization in diverse community-based organizations and pediatric service settings where Asian American families are most likely to seek services.

Through my work during the summer, I would like to work deep into the health disparity issue among Asian Americans and have a chance to walk myself into the community and talk to family face to face to know about the difficulties they face during the difficult time of the pandemic.

Asian American Health Care Workers

Palestinian Human Rights in Broad Daylight

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Jonathan Adler / Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network / New York, NY

On May 5th, I awoke to the news that the Israeli High Court had approved the state’s decision to forcibly transfer over one thousand Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank. In a case that has extended over twenty years, the judges issued a unanimous opinion that dismissed the international prohibition on forced transfer of civilians in occupied territories as a mere, non-binding “treaty norm”.[1] The decision constitutes one of the largest instances of forced expulsion in the fifty-five-year history of the Israeli occupation, and, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, only reaffirms that “the occupied cannot expect justice from the occupier’s court.”[2]

We often think of the worst human rights violations as the ones that go unseen – state-sanctioned torture in secret prisons, or extrajudicial executions – and that the role of human rights advocates is to bring such abuses to light. But, as legal theorist Susan Marks has asked, what if the worst violations take place in broad daylight?[3] This is particularly apparent in the Israeli context, where clear violations of human rights and international law are routinely green-lit by the Israeli legal system and thus there is no need to hide them. Yet such abuses are only plain to see for those who know where to look; while this instance of forced expulsion will hopefully generate widespread media coverage and international outrage, many violations of Palestinian human rights often go unreported, especially here in the United States.

My hope is that I’ll be able to help address this knowledge gap through my work this summer, as an intern at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. Al-Shabaka is an online Palestinian-led think tank, that for the past decade has provided critical analysis of policy issues that affect Palestinians, for both an English and Arabic-speaking audience. The organization aims to “educate and foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self determination,” with specific reference to international law. And by drawing upon its large member network, which includes activists, academics, human rights advocates, journalists, and others from across Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora, Al-Shabaka has played an important role in amplifying Palestinian voices – voices that have long been left out of mainstream Western media and policy circles.

The bulk of my work at Al-Shabaka will be editorial, where I’ll solicit and edit policy briefs and roundtables, organize panels and podcast episodes, and craft op-eds for placement in mainstream outlets. Much of Al-Shabaka’s output provides an analysis of current political realities in Palestine, and helps to place individual human rights abuses in their larger structural context. But given Al-Shabaka’s equal interest debating political futures, I also hope to explore how human rights and international law will continue to play a role in ongoing political and social movements to achieve justice for Palestinians.

[1] Bethan McKernan, “Israeli Court Paves Way for Eviction of 1,000 Palestinians from West Bank Area,” The Guardian, May 5, 2022, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/israeli-court-evict-1000-palestinians-west-bank-area.

[2] “The International Community Must Prevent the Forcible Transfer of Masafer Yatta Communities, Approved by Israel’s High Court of Justice,” B’Tselem, https://www.btselem.org/press_release/20220505_international_community_must_prevent_the_forcible_transfer_of_masafer_yatta_communities_approved_by_hcj.

[3] Susan Marks, On Four Human Rights Myths, LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 10 (2012)

Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project: Hope and Home

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Laura Zhang

Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project

Los Angeles, USA

Hi all, my name is Laura Zhang and I am a junior studying at Gallatin with a minor in Creative Writing. This summer, I will be interning with the Esperanza Immigrants Rights Project, based in Los Angeles, California. Esperanza is one of the largest organizations providing legal services to unaccompanied youth in California and supports immigrant and refugee communities through educational, advocacy, empowerment, and representation programs. 

Through the Released Youth Program, a subset of their Community Education Programs, I will work as a part of Esperanza’s determination that immigrants’ access to education and representation is a human right. As a part of legal orientations offered to unaccompanied minors and their guardians, my work will include and is not limited to conducting legal intakes, assisting pro se clients, developing materials for ongoing cases, and assistance in administrative work. Esperanza’s focus on immigrants who are especially vulnerable as youth, adults with mental health struggles, or cases of domestic violence that require particular rigor in their legal processes is critical so that no one falls through the cracks of immigration services because of aspects of their identity. 

This semester, I have been particularly interested in how children are implicated in the politics of movement, the character of criminality, and their subsequent relationship to “resistance” and agency. As someone especially intrigued by language, and how it can be used to interrogate the human experience, I am curious what role narrative has in addressing memory and documentation in a legal setting. 

In my time as a student at NYU thus far, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with other students in organizations including the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP) and New Sanctuary Coalition’s asylum clinic. I am excited to carry with me those experiences into my time with Esperanza. As I prepare for the immersion into immigrant legal services I will have this summer, I also wanted to express my interest in the project of a ‘home’. I am interested in how vital, indefinite, and ongoing the project of a home is for children and am eager to learn with Esperanza how we are going towards it. 

Uplifting Afghan Women’s Voices in Conversations on Education

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Reem Djebli/ Wise Afghanistan/ San Francisco, USA 

 

WISE Afghanistan is a non-profit organization based in Kabul, Afghanistan that works to empower marginalized women in the country by providing them the tools they need to live healthy, successful lives. WISE’s pillars include healthcare advancement, youth empowerment, education, and human rights advocacy. It operates with the value of community building and empowerment at its core. Since its founding in 2013, it has provided over 7,000 women with health and educational resources throughout Afghanistan. In addition to providing these resources, WISE has also established a center that educates women and girls in Kandahar, Afghanistan – a region where over two-thirds of girls are not enrolled in school today. 

 

Alia Rasoully, a first-generation Afghan-American woman founded WISE in August of 2013, when she was still an undergraduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Ms. Rasoully created the organization intending to create deep connections between the passionate minds at WISE and the women in the communities they were going to work with. As head of the organization, she does her best to ensure that all employees and volunteers at WISE are doing work that is aligned with the visions of liberation that the women and girls in these communities hold. Given the often charged and Islamophobic discourse surrounding women’s education in the region occupying the media, Ms. Rasoully’s endeavors in education are crafted with the regional cultural and religious context of where they are to be implemented in mind. 

 

It is due to that very sentiment that I have chosen to do my summer internship with WISE. In my discussions with Ms. Rasoully, she made it clear that the work I will be doing in the coming months is in line with the principles of the communities I will be working with. It is, unfortunately, a rare find in the non-profit sector to find an organization that centers the viewpoints of Afghan women in the fight for education, so this opportunity is one I cherish greatly.  This summer, I will be conducting a research project into the ways that religious and cultural texts and practices have been incorporated into feminist organizing for education in Southwest Asia. After this initial research has been gathered, I will begin a series of interviews with the women and girls WISE is connected to within Afghanistan, to gain insight into what they view as a liberated education model. This work will culminate into a policy proposal for officials in Kabul to view. The ultimate goal of my work is to elevate the voices of these women so that their dreams of Afghan-centric, empowering education are centered in conversations about how best to create such educational environments. 

 

Al Otro Lado — Migrant Justice inside and out

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Nikki Myers

Al Otro Lado

San Ysidro, USA

 

One of the most influential quotes that I encountered when I first began discovering my passion for migrant justice was written first by legal scholar Alexander Bickel, reprinted in the front pages of Mae Ngai’s seminal migration text Impossible Subjects. The quote reads, “It has always been easier, it will always be easier, to think of someone as a noncitizen rather than a nonperson.” This quote has remained in the back of my mind as we have discussed the nature of human rights as a concept as well as the application of human rights work on pertinent issues like migration. This summer, my work at Al Otro Lado will contribute to the visibility of migrants as people and as cultural citizens that shouldn’t have their humanity debated as part of the so-called “border crisis.”

Al Otro Lado is an NGO based between San Diego, California and Tijuana in the Baja California region of Mexico. Tijuana and San Diego are separated by a land border that even extends into the shared coastline, with a physical wall that separates the two countries well into the ocean that they share. This “wall on the beach” has been subject to scholarly thought, artistic projects, and other visual and academic endeavors in hopes to succinctly describe a complex and devastating migration process. Al Otro Lado attempts to address this process and its difficulties for migrants by working with those coming through the San Ysidro port of entry, the fourth most-crossed land border in the world. Most of these migrants are Haitian, Mexican, Central American, and more recently, Ukrainian. 

My responsibilities at Al Otro Lado will be varied, especially since the organization has several different programs to address all of the issues that migrants face when crossing the border. One large, ongoing project that Al Otro Lado offers is the Family Reunification Project, which addresses the horrific legacy of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. The organization is also involved in several lawsuits against U.S. detention centers for a number of human rights violations, which pertains directly to the question of how to define human rights for migrants and what the underlying issues are in doing such. My focus is mainly to get more hands-on experience working with migrants and taking these experiences back into the academic realm in order to encourage human rights thinking from those affected rather than those who have studied it solely within other academic circles.

 

A photo of the wall that separates San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, extending into the water of the two countries' shared coastline. There are people taking photos of the wall on the Tijuana side of the wall.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Sakhi for South Asian Women

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My name is Huma Umar, and as part of this fellowship, I’m going to be working with Sakhi, in New York City, USA. 

Sakhi is a non-profit organization advocating for survivors of gender-based violence, particularly intimate partner violence, within the South Asian community in NYC. Sakhi uses multiple modes of advocacy, They define themselves as an “intersectional, intergenerational survivor led movement for gender justice”. Sakhi’s anti-violence program offers direct services to survivors, through trauma-informed safety planning, emotional support and legal guidance, and a range of other programs within the organization work for systemic changes through lobbying for policy changes, community mobilizing and organizing. 

Sakhi’s work models a culturally specific and attuned approach to advocating for and supporting survivors. An understanding of gender-based violence and its human rights dimensions needs to be situated within the sociopolitical, legal and cultural backgrounds it occurs within. At Sakhi, the specific human rights dimensions are doubly situated — while the focus of Sakhi’s work is within the South Asian community in New York City and its surrounding areas, it is also an organization working locally within the United States. Therefore, while their work is concerned with women’s rights, reproductive justice, economic and civil rights, protection against violence, it is also additionally concerned with a range of immigration and legal rights; therefore, much of Sakhi’s approach is also guided by ideas of transformative justice approaches that resist punitive measures and alternatives to criminal legal solutions as justice for gender-based violence. 

The past few months of this semester, and as part of this fellowship, we’ve unpacked human rights from a range of different perspectives. As I begin my work at Sakhi’s anti-violence program, I am hoping to bridge the gap between theory and praxis when it comes to advocating for victim-survivors in trauma-informed, culturally attuned ways, and the kinds of ideas about human rights that are operationalized in the process. As I prepare for the summer, my approach is grounded in questions about ideas of intersectionality and power dynamics especially, and I look forward to complicating my understanding through my work at Sakhi.

An image from a Sakhi organized march, where marchers are holding charts highlighting a range of different dimensions about women's rights: domestic workers' issues and queer rights.
Photo borrowed from this blog: https://blogs.brown.edu/ethn-1890v-s01-fall-2016/sakhi-for-south-asian-women/

This image from a march for Sakhi’s fifth anniversay in 1994. Marchers are holding charts highlighting a range of different issues, including domestic workers’ rights and queer rights, which speaks not just to how intertwined these various issues are, but are also evidence of the much broader network of solidarity and sisterhood within the South Asian community which Sakhi is a part of. I bookmarked this image a while ago as a reminder of the ways in which specific human rights projects borrow and share from others like them and are embedded within a broader movement for justice, and as an acknowledgement that despite the many commonalities that I do hope to locate in Sakhi’s work, coming from a South Asian country myself, there is a legacy and history that their work is grounded in that I’m simply not familiar with, and that I really hope to learn about. 

Looking at Carceral Conditions and Migration on Greek Islands

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Eric Raimondi, Still I Rise, Greece
My name is Eric Raimondi. Through the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights Program, I am traveling to Greece, where I will be interning in the advocacy department of the Italian organization Still I Rise and conducting research on Samos island that will complement my work with them. Since Still I Rise used to but no longer is present on the island of Samos, I will be working with them on a hybrid schedule. My tasks with the advocacy department will be to draft press releases, social media reports, and collect information on the ground from other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Greece.

On the island of Samos, human rights are disregarded on an unimaginable scale. This island, as well as the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Kos, Leros, are places of transit through which many refugees and asylum seekers pass on their longer journey to other European countries. These spaces, and significantly how they are designed by the authorities and navigated by refugees and migrants, signify the future of Europe.

For the last seven years, Greece has been in the spotlight in how it manages migration. The old Samos camp, initially a military base that was converted into a reception center, was physically unequipped to house the displaced population, but due to its location on the periphery of the central town, was accessible to the multiple humanitarian NGOs that emerged on the island. Now, both Greece and the European Union (EU) are embarking on a path of segregation and exclusion through new surveillance techniques, heightened security, and physical infrastructure. The new camp, officially named the Closed Controlled Access Centre (CCAC), although still under construction, received the island’s refugee population on September 18, 2021.

The Closed Controlled Access Centre on the island of Samos, Greece. Retrieved from “‘All I Want is to be Free’: Life in the Closed Controlled Access Centre,” published by the Samos Advocacy Collective and Europe Must Act.

Through advocacy work with Still I Rise and research on the new CCAC, my project seeks to use testimonies from refugees and migrants, security guards and camp officials, humanitarian aid workers, and members of the local Greek population to explore how recent changes in camp design, location, and infrastructure impact human rights of the displaced at Europe’s border. What about the EU’s projects to construct new, isolated, and contained camps suggest about the union’s evolution regarding the human rights of displaced populations? How does the physical infrastructure of the camp – and the new technologies of surveillance– reflect and inform the EU’s handling of human rights?

Imagining Disability Justice in Wales

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Olivia Epley /
Disability Wales / 
Caerphilly, Wales, U.K. /

The fiftieth anniversary logo of Disability Wales.
The fiftieth anniversary logo of Disability Wales.

Hello! My name is Olivia Epley and I am a junior in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. My concentration is Mental Illness and the Criminal Legal System and my minor is in Disability Studies. My passion is in intersecting the studies of disability justice and criminology, and working with the overlap of communities affected by these areas.

This summer, I will be spending my time working for Disability Wales, which is a non-profit in Caerphilly, Wales (right outside the Welsh capital, Cardiff) that serves Welsh and British folks with disabilities. Disability Wales seeks to provide a mechanism for achieving “rights, equality, and independent living” for the people it serves.

Something I’m studying in my independent study that is particularly relevant to Disability Wales is its reliance on the social model of disability. Put simply, there are at least two models of disability: the medical model and the social model. The medical model would treat disability as something to be cured, and demand that those who are disabled change themselves in order to fit into a broader, able bodied and neuro-typical society. The social model would have that larger society be categorized as the thing that needs to change to accommodate disabled people, and would identify disabled folks as people who deserve accommodations for their impairments, which is different from their disability, which is societally imposed. In order to achieve disability justice, society must be the thing that changes, including public attitudes, legislation, and physical accommodations.  

Disability Wales has several goals that will be at play during my tenure with them. Fundraising, research, legislative advocacy, and other projects are constantly happening. Additionally, my time there coincides with their 50th Anniversary celebration, and I will be doing everything I can to support the organization in that effort.

My current tasks mostly involve getting ready to depart in early June. I’m in the midst of securing a visa, which is a complicated, though ultimately worthwhile, experience. I’m very grateful to Gallatin Global for promising the funding necessary for me to book flights to and accommodations for my trip to Wales. I can’t wait to tell you all more about my adventures abroad!