Letter from the Director Fifteen years! It’s hard to believe. As I write these words, planning is underway for the celebration of our Center for Human Rights’ fifteen-year anniversary, and I find myself reflecting on all the changes this decade and a half has brought. In some ways, our Center still feels “new”—we’re still small,

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.

Research Informs Debates Over Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center For years, people detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma have reported human rights concerns, though a lack of transparency regarding the facility’s operations has made these difficult to investigate independently. Recent years have seen Congressional inquiries, cases in federal court, and numerous campaigns by advocacy

This summer I was able to attend the Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI) geospatial conference in San Diego, California. The week-long conference hosted hundreds of talks, tutorials for new geographical information systems (GIS) tools, and examples of other researchers and organizations who use satellite and GIS in their work. Relating to my own thesis, I

Thanks to the generous award from the 2019 Peter Mack and Jamie Mayerfeld Fund for Human Rights, I spent eight weeks this summer in the Amazonian province of Napo, Ecuador, studying the Indigenous language Kichwa at the Andes and Amazon Field School. Kichwa (or Quechua, outside of Ecuador) is the most widely spoken Indigenous language