Recent Classroom Speakers

Professor Anu Taranath Welcomes Three Human Rights Activists to “Global Se...

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UW Instructors! Invite a human rights advocate to your class!

In the 2024-25 school year, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) will make funds available to support honoraria for human rights practitioners as guest speakers in University of Washington classes. We are currently seeking proposals from instructional faculty on all three UW campuses, in all departments and programs, working in all areas of human rights, to bring a perspective from the “front lines” of human rights efforts to the classroom (guest speakers must be in-person/physically in classroom).

Guest speakers could be professional rights advocates, grassroots organizers, and/or members of a community directly affected by a human rights abuse whose first-person perspectives are often underrepresented in academic discussions. We particularly welcome proposals from our Center’s Faculty Associates, and proposals that may help strengthen longer-term relationships between faculty and frontline human rights organizations.

We welcome proposals for all three quarters of 2024-25. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until funds are spent; to apply email uwchr@uw.edu with the information below.

What we need from you*:

• The name of the speaker you wish to invite, the organization they represent and their role within it.
• The course in which they will speak and the approximate date for which you’d like to invite them.
• A brief description of how involving the speaker will enhance your course.
• A brief description of any previous collaboration you may have had with the speaker and/or his/her organization, and/or any future intended collaboration.
• Upon completion of the guest lecture, provide at least two original photos and a summary of four to five sentences summarizing the presentation and its impacts for your class/students. These may be shared with our constituents during meetings, on social media, via email and/or on our website.

*We anticipate that this would take no more than one page.

If your proposal is selected, we will provide $300 towards an honorarium payable to your speaker or their organization. Your home department is responsible for processing the honorarium. Unfortunately, we cannot accommodate requests to split honoraria between multiple individuals or organizations. This funding opportunity is not designed to support conferences or talks given outside of regular classroom instruction.

Founded in 2009, the UW Center for Human Rights aims to build partnerships between the academic community and the world of human rights practice. We aim to increase opportunities for UW students to learn about human rights through hands-on involvement, and to build pathways for UW research to inform advocacy, policymaking, and activism, towards a world in which all rights are more fully respected. Every year, we offer funds to students seeking to conduct hands-on human rights projects in partnership with off-campus organizations. We also support faculty interested in research collaborations with human rights organizations. This is a pilot effort to facilitate the involvement of practitioners within regular course instruction. We welcome further suggestions.

Submit your application to uwchr@uw.edu

Past honoraria awards

Honoraria has been given to speakers in UW classes including the following…

• During winter quarter 2017, Professor Stephen Meyers welcomed Susan Sygall (CEO and co-founder of Mobility International) to the JSIS/LSJ/DS 346 – Disability in Global and Comparative Perspectives class. Sygall spoke to students about the barriers young women with disabilities encounter in different countries where MI works and diverse strategies used to address those barriers and advance human rights within specific sociopolitical contexts. During the class discussion, she explained why a rights-focused approach development is especially essential for the more than 500 million women with disabilities around the globe, who experience disproportionate rates of violence and scarce access to healthcare.
• During spring quarter 2023, Law, Societies & Justice Professor Arzoo Osanloo’s course on international sanctions, Sanctioned States, welcomed Ms. Elika Eftekhari, an international sanctions lawyer, expert, and practitioner with extensive work experience, including a stint at the US government’s trade office. Ms. Eftekhari provided the students with a detailed overview of how sanctions operate, who they target, and what their human rights impacts are.
• During fall quarter 2023, Jackson School of International Studies Professor Vanessa Freije invited John Gibler to discuss his book, I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa (City Lights Open Media, 2017), in the class, Narcoculture: Propaganda and Publicity in the War on Drugs. Gibler’s book was the first (and still among the only) oral history accounts of the disappearances of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico.
• During fall quarter 2023, Hannah Wilson (Skyway Coalition) was a guest speaker in Professor Megan Ybarra’s Geographies of Environmental Justice, a class they attended as an undergraduate at UW. In their guest lecture to the class, they reflected on learning trajectories as a student of color at UW, the importance of collaboration in social movements through the struggle to save the BLM Memorial Garden in Capitol Hill, and their current work in supporting unincorporated immigrant and communities of color in King County. Students reflected on the relationship between the role of gardens and land in contemporary activism for communities of color in King County and the Fanny Lou Hamer’s historic “freedom farms” that sought to build solidarity and autonomy amongst Black communities.
• In winter quarter 2024, Professor Anu Taranath hosted three activists, from Ghana, India, and Mexico, to speak with students from her “Global Service Learning and the Politics of Help” course, which culminated in students traveling to Accra, Ghana, for two weeks at the end of the quarter and over spring break.
• In winter quarter 2025, Assistant Professor Morgan P. Vickers invited Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis to join their class LSJ 491: Reparations: Race, Recognition, and Remediation. Dr. Lewis shared his experience working on academic scholarship and public-facing reparations legislation. He spoke on themes related to the Tulsa Massacre (the subject of his most recent book), working within and against histories of harm, modern moves toward reparations, political “slights of hand,” and more. He answered student questions, particularly around the 115 policy recommendations made by the California Reparations Task Force to the state of California. Critically, Dr. Lewis told students that “so much has come at the cost of so many,” but that we must remember how “reparations, at best, bring a community back to a starting point.” The students loved the visit, and many even followed up and asked to set up meetings with him to discuss his research on Black geographies and repair, as well as his work on the California Reparations Task Force.