Letter from the Director Lately I’ve been contemplating history as cyclical rather than linear. In part this is because I’ve found myself frustrated by the fits and starts of teaching during Covid-19. (We’re on Zoom! Now we’re in person! Now back on Zoom!) We are all eager to leave the pandemic behind, yet it lingers, transforms, resurfaces.

Letter from the Director As a professor and a parent soldiering through the third year of schooling upended by pandemic conditions, it’s sometimes hard to be upbeat. My eight-year-old recently said she doesn’t want to join the rest of the family at the dinner table because all we ever talk about is “the destruction of

Letter from the Director Let’s see if I can write this letter without using the word “unprecedented.” This deep into the pandemic, I figure we’re all sick of hearing that word. I know I, personally, am eager to return to some sense of normalcy, even as the pandemic and the multiple other crises detonating in

Letter from the Director I‘m not going to lie—it’s been a tough year for human rights. It seems like every day there’s another reason to be discouraged about the state of our world, whether at home or abroad. On one particularly dark day this past February as I prepared to teach my human rights class,

A few days ago, a neighbor thanked me for my work in human rights. She shook her head as she said it, as if to convey the impression that our work is a depressing act of service performed amid challenging times—but I told her it’s quite the opposite.

Letter from the Director Dear friends, This has been a challenging year for human rights. In the United States and around the world, the very concept of human rights has faced growing resistance as political movements have demanded rollbacks of rights protections for people of color, workers, the disabled, women, and LGBTQ populations. New expressions

Letter from the Director Dear friends, This Annual Report goes to press at a challenging time for those of us who care about human rights. Personally, I’m still struggling to come to terms with the rising signs of intolerance in this country and around the world, and the human rights implications of some policies promoted

Letter from the Director As you may have seen, in October we filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Center Intelligence Agency in the U.S. District Court in Seattle, alleging that the agency has failed to meet its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). As part of the Center’s mission to conduct research in

Letter from the Director Five years already! Since the UW CHR’s founding in June 2009 we’ve been launched headlong into the process of institution-building. When June rolled around this year, I could hardly believe five years had already passed. Happily, the anniversary provided a welcome occasion to look back on the work we’ve accomplished, and

Letter from the Director As is common after graduation, several of my students asked me for career advice this June. In our conversations, held in coffee shops and on park benches in the beautiful Seattle summer, I shared some version of the quote from Aristotle, “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross,