Letter from the Director Dear Friends, I’d like to think of this annual report as something like a time capsule. It recounts the activities our Center for Human Rights conducted in our fifteenth year. Having helmed our center since those early days when our existence was a bit more, shall we say, aspirational than actual,

In 2023–24, UWCHR supported multiple scholars who came to UW after fleeing violence in their home countries. These included Mahir Hazim, who shares his experience as an Afghan legal scholar in the interview below. Mahir Hazim is an acting assistant professor of law at the University of Washington School of Law. Previously he was a

Over the past year, the Strategies for Massage Parlor Workers’ Rights project has experienced huge strides in connecting students, faculty, staff, and the larger UW research community to the Seattle region’s mostly unlicensed Asian immigrant massage workers.  Deepening collaborative research practices that  began in 2022–2023, this project, led by Massage Parlor Outreach Project in collaboration

  This year we embarked on a new collaboration between immigrant rights group La Resistencia, UWCHR, and Hinton Publishing to showcase the stories of people in deportation proceedings in Washington State. A team of 17 students worked to gather the stories of people facing deportation through Boeing Field (and in some cases, folks already deported).

The 2023–24 academic year brought new opportunities and deepened relationships among the Indigenous Rights and Environmental Sustainability project’s students, faculty, and community partners. During the summer and fall of 2023, we brought two new University of Washington School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (UW SMEA) graduate students onto the project: Thor Belle and Kayley Pingeon.

Funds from the Lisa Sable Brown award have supported research for my dissertation, “Nascent Moves: Loss, Desire, and In/Visible LGBTQ Resistances in Bangladesh,” which argues that to understand queerness in postcolonial global south modernities, we need to employ the lens of kotipona. Kotipona is a way of life and refers to being flamboyant and having

With funds from the Peter Mack and Jamie Mayerfeld award I have continued to work on the Indigenous Youth Prevention Survey, work that I feel a profound sense of purpose and excitement about. Collaborating with two dedicated Indigenous youth homelessness workers in Washington State, who work on state-level and national system change initiatives, has been an

I think for me, the work that the UW Center for Human Rights engages in has always been deeply personal. I come to the work not only as an academic researcher, but as someone who has long been engaged in community organizing, and who additionally sees himself reflected in the struggles that the center research

For my research project with the Pacific Hospital Preservation & Development Authority (PHPDA), I focused on identifying and addressing the barriers faced by survivors with disabilities of sexual abuse and domestic violence when accessing healthcare services, particularly forensic exams in Washington State. My project aimed to examine challenges, find solutions, and create actionable recommendations to

I and members of Resist US-Led War Seattle worked alongside dozens of other anti-imperialist organizations to agitate, organize, and mobilize our communities to San Diego to oppose the RIMPAC military exercises. This summer, from June 28th to 30th, over 550 individuals from across the country, including 10 members of Resist-US Led War Seattle, met for