On June 19, 2017, the first day of the summer strawberry harvest, farmworkers at Sakuma Brothers Farm in the Skagit Valley began picking berries in the early morning fog. As they did so, they were making history. After four years of struggle that grew from local walk-outs and strikes to a national boycott against the

UWCHR is proud to present five fellowships to students for their human rights work. Read their reports about their research at the links below! Sarah Dreier received the 2017 Peter Mack and Jamie Mayerfeld Award. She will conduct research for her political science PhD thesis, which examines what drives support for or rejection of women’s rights

Like many students who have the opportunity to travel abroad, Susan Sygall’s year as an exchange student at the University of Queensland in Australia during 1975 was one of the defining experiences of her life. She went camping in the Outback, hitch-hiked across New Zealand, and bussed through Southeast Asia. As a wheelchair-rider and advocate

I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group office in San Francisco during the summer of 2016. This training proved indispensable as I worked to process and publish a number of datasets on human rights violations during the El Salvador Civil War as part of a collaboration between

For my pre-dissertation research I spent almost three months in Amman, Jordan this past summer. While my research broadly aims to examine the material practices and visions of the future of the Palestinian youth living in and out of refugee camps in Amman, human rights and humanitarian aid regimes are crucial in tackling how young Palestinian

This past summer I conducted nearly 40 in-depth interviews in Israel with asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan. I study the political organizing of migrants who are without permanent legal status, comparing between mobilization efforts led by African migrants in Israel with similar endeavors led by Latino migrants in the state of Washington. Thanks to

With the support of the Mack-Mayerfield and Caldwell Funds, I completed my preliminary dissertation research this past summer in Xela (also known as Quetzaltenango), Guatemala. I learned the basics of K’iche’, a native language in Guatemala, built relationships with new and old friends, and revised and strengthened my dissertation topic, which seeks to understand why, and

Thanks to the Osheroff-Clark Fund I was able to work for Human Rights Watch (HRW) in the US Program as a research intern, where I had one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life. The first half of my ten weeks interning was centered on the conditions of detention centers in the

Through the Abe Osheroff and Gunnel Clark Endowed Human Rights Fund I worked on developing a letter writing project connecting people inside and out of the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC), one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country, which in 2004, was built on a Superfund site in Tacoma’s Commencement Bay tidal flats.

Jessica Ramirez, a recent graduate in American Ethnic Studies, spent the last several months coordinating with Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), an independent farmworkers union made up of migrant farm workers from the Skagit Valley (an hour north of Seattle). In her application for funding from the Osheroff-Clark Fund, Jessica wrote: “In 2013, the