July 1-7, 2024

This workshop will explore the relationship between many new technologies emerging across human society and people’s continuous demands for human rights. The course will examine how the impact of new technology is sometimes positive and enabling of human rights, sometimes negative and restrictive, and often ambivalent and uncertain.

The course will be taught by leading scholars from the University of Oxford and visiting human rights activists working on and with new technology of various kinds.

Workshop begins the evening of March 18th, with a closing gala on Saturday, March 23rd. Groups depart the morning of the 24th

This workshop explores the role human rights can play to reduce two of the great global risks of the 2020s - climate change and great power war. In the first part of the workshop, students will be introduced to the main threats of the climate emergency and twenty first century militarism.

Location: Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California
Schedule: January 11 - 15th 2024

This workshop builds on our past seminars that feature both eminent scholars and local activists to engage students in conversations and skill-building around the theory and practice of community action. Some questions we will consider: How do we mobilize responses to build compassionate and just communities? How do we integrate the personal and the political? What is the role of international human rights principles on the scale of a small local community?

July 3 – 9, 2023

New technology is one of the major drivers of change in human society today. But what does all this new digital, biological and renewable technology mean for human rights?

This workshop will explore the relationship between many new technologies emerging across human society and people’s continuous demands for human rights. The course will examine how the impact of new technology is sometimes positive and enabling of human rights, sometimes negative and restrictive, and often ambivalent and uncertain. Students will study particular technological revolutions in communications, medicine, governance, surveillance, education, weapons, energy, and manufacturing to explore their implications for traditional human rights to health, privacy, free speech, free association, and the laws of war. More profoundly, the workshop will explore how new technology is changing our experience of being human – ontology itself - as we live an increasingly hybrid life as computerized humanity.

March 27 – April 2, 2023

The workshop will focus on Human Rights and Climate Crisis. Experts and activists from across the Oxford community, and from London's International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) and the Red Cross Climate Centre in The Hague, will discuss the rapidly changing climate and what this means for people all around the world. Students will examine the rise in climate related disasters like heatwaves, floods, droughts and storms, and the challenge for human rights and non-human rights as people and governments struggle with climate related poverty, environmental destruction, migration, adaptation, loss and damage.

A Special Workshop to mark the 60th Anniversary Year of the March on Washington

March 19 – 25, 2023

Nonviolent civil resistance has played a significant role in the struggle for freedom and human rights around the world. It continues to do so in social movements working for democracy, peace, equal rights, gender equality, labor rights and climate justice. This workshop will explore the modern history and theory of non-violent activism from its roots in the anti-slavery movement, women’s suffrage, trade unionism, and non-violent movements to end colonialism, apartheid, communism, capitalism and dictatorship. Students will explore the leading theorists of nonviolent activism and study the strategy, skills and tactics that form its everyday practice. Learning will be based in a series of case studies including the March on Washington in 1963 and subsequent civil resistance movements in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe. Emphasis will be given to both in-person activism and today's new cyber activism.