Virtual Workshop Spring 2021: Racial Justice, Minority Rights, and Religious Freedom
Katie Dwyer
A New Virtual Workshop for 2021
RACIAL JUSTICE, MINORITY RIGHTS
AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT
The Oxford Consortium for Human Rights (OCHR) is offering a new virtual workshop for Consortium members in 2021 in which Oxford academics, OCHR students and OCHR faculty will engage in critical regional issues of human rights around racial justice, minorities, and religious freedom.
The workshop will build on the insights and inspiration of the Black Lives Matter movement to examine the history and challenge of racism, minority discrimination and religious persecution in all regions of the world. It will be led by Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University's Program on Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict, former Head of Policy and Humanitarian Diplomacy at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, and Co-Chair of the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights.
PURPOSE AND SCOPE
The purpose of this interdisciplinary and interregional workshop is to enable students to better understand and apply fundamental issues of human rights, justice, and freedom raised by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and then apply them with a new global dimension to their personal activism that reaches out beyond the United States.
Key topics of analysis in the workshop will include: statelessness and the politics of exclusion; racial consciousness, identity, and caste; ethnonationalism and self- determination; persecution; colonialism and genocide; intersectionality and discrimination law, education, and decolonization; liberation, equal rights, and justice.
Starting with the US experience of racism and minority rights, the course will then introduce students to several other situations of racism and the persecution of minorities in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The workshop will explore how categories of identity and citizenship have been constructed and constrained by international law and domestic political systems around the world. Case studies will enable students to understand the institutional and systemic conditions of inequality that exacerbate vulnerability for groups that are already marginalized in different ways.