Human rights protections are a good step, but are not always followed around the world.
Mark Gibney, Belk Distinguished Professor of Humanities, analyzes this gap.
Gibney is an Affiliated Scholar at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Lund, Sweden. From 2014-2016 he served as the inaugural Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Faculty of Law, Lund University and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute. Gibney is one of the founding members of the Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) Consortium and he serves on the Board of Editors of Human Rights Quarterly, the Journal of Human Rights and the International Studies Journal (Iran). Since 1984, Gibney has directed the Political Terror Scale, which measures levels of physical integrity violations in more than 190 states. His recent book publications include: The Routledge Handbook on Extraterritorial Obligations (2022); International Law: Our Common Future (2020); International Human Rights Law: Returning to Universal Principles (2015, 2d ed.); Litigating Transnational Human Rights Obligations: Alternative Judgments (2014); the Handbook of Human Rights (2014); and Watching Human Rights: The 101 Best Films (2013).
Interview excerpt: If a group of Martians landed on our planet and were shown International Human Rights Law these extraterrestrial creatures would immediately think they had landed on a perfect planet. Under this law, there is no war, no torture, and no discrimination on the planet Earth. In addition, every inhabitant has shelter, adequate food and water, and workplace protections. Moreover, vulnerable populations – children, women and those with physical and mental disabilities – receive special protection from the state.
Unfortunately, the real world is something much different. But how big is the gap between the rights proclaimed under international human rights law and actual state practice?
Formal land agreements with Indigenous communities can lead to some healing.
Trey Adcock, associate professor of American Indian and indigenous studies, explores how they are viewed in these populations.
Trey Adcock (ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ, enrolled Cherokee Nation), PhD, was named one of seven national Public Engagement Fellows in 2018-2019 by the Whiting Foundation for his work documenting a Bureau of Indian Affairs run day school in the TutiYi “Snowbird” Cherokee Community. He obtained his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a Sequoyah Dissertation Fellow focusing on technology integration at an American Indian boarding school in Oklahoma. Dr. Adcock’s work has been published in the Journal of American Indian Education, Teaching Tolerance and Readings in Race, Ethnicity and Immigration. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Native Health and sits on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Cherokee Studies.
Interview excerpt: At a basic level, a formal land acknowledgment statement is often an organization’s recognition of occupying the lands of an Indigenous people....Activists and academics support acknowledgment as the first step in decolonizing institutional practices that furthers a settler-colonial agenda. In contrast, others argue that without additional action, an acknowledgment is simply a move to innocence.
How do disrupt the education gaps that exist in public schools?
Tiece Ruffin, professor of Africana Studies and Education, looks into a few ways to do so.
Tiece Ruffin received her Ph.D. from Ohio University in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Special Education and cognate in Reading Education. Also, she received a B.S.Ed. and M.Ed. from Ohio University in Special Education, with an emphasis in learning disabilities and intellectual disabilities; and Secondary education, with an emphasis in reading education, respectively. Tiece Ruffin has past teaching experiences as a licensed special educator (K-12) and reading educator (K-12) teaching youth with and without disabilities from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in both rural and urban contexts. Additionally, her teaching experience spans various educational settings such as the public school, correctional institution, and home/hospital. Lastly, her school administration experience was as a local education agency representative for a large urban public school district monitoring placement and educational services for students with disabilities who attended private schools.
Interview excerpt: It’s not enough for a two-hundred-plus-year republic to simply engage in rhetoric about its education problems. We must address the issues with work grounded in equity and inclusion and the intent of transforming unjust systems in pursuit of educational justice – where all children thrive.
Programs for helping low-income residents get a home of their own is a crucial course of action.
Patrick Bahls, professor of mathematics, looks at a failed program to see what we can learn for the future.
Patrick Bahls was born and raised in Helena, Montana. He stayed in the West for college, attending the University of Denver as an undergraduate before moving to the South to pursue his doctoral degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. After a completing a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois, Patrick joined the faculty in the Math Department at UNC Asheville and later took over as Director of the university’s Honors Program. Patrick’s academic interests vary widely, including not only pure mathematics but also composition and rhetoric and urban studies. Among his favorite classes to teach are Calculus II and the university’s senior capstone course, LA 478: Cultivating Global Citizenship.
Interview except: In the late 1970s, the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville was struggling to redevelop much of the land it had claimed through urban renewal in the historic Southside neighborhood. Hoping to enable one-time residents to return to their old community, the Housing Authority implemented the Housing Incentive Program, or the “Dollar-a-Lot” program, through which prospective homeowners who committed to buying a home on a vacant lot were eligible to receive the lot for the price of one dollar.
What can Bruce Springsteen teach is about economics?
Leah Greden Mathews, professor and chair of economics, listens in to find out.
As an applied environmental economist, Dr. Mathews’ research focuses on estimating the value of those things you can’t buy on grocery store shelves like water quality, scenic quality and cultural heritage. This work has led to over $1 million in research grants that have engaged over 40 UNC Asheville students. Dr. Mathews is a founding member of the Food for Thought cluster at UNC Asheville, a multidisciplinary faculty group teaching courses across campus that focuses on developing the students as an informed consumer of food by providing a platform for discussion of what we eat, why we eat, where our food comes from and its journey from production to consumption, and how food affects our bodies and health. As an interdisciplinary, systems-thinking teacher-scholar, Dr. Mathews is perennially engaged with students and colleagues from multiple disciplines in order to enrich her intellectual life, improve her understanding of the world, and gain new perspective.
Interview excerpt: Listening to a song, then closely reading the lyrics, and listening again, allows students to engage with challenging content in an approachable manner. Connecting with the song invites students to sit with and explore their emotional responses to music–and thus its economic content–which supports critical thinking and mindful engagement with the ever-changing and often-challenging economic conditions that surround us.
It’s easy to get a COVID vaccine in the U.S., but how about elsewhere?
Deena Burris, associate professor of management at the University of North Carolina Asheville, examines the process who gets access.
Dr. Deena Burris is a tenured Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She received a Ph.D. in International Development from the University of Southern Mississippi, an M.A. from the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies, and a B.A. in Business Administration and English from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include development finance and equity financing for microfinance institutions. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC Asheville, Dr. Burris was a tenured faculty member at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC and was in international banking prior to academia. She enjoys traveling around the world and lives in Asheville, NC with her husband and daughters.
Interview excerpt: While we have all become familiar with the development and rollout of vaccines to fight the global COVID-19 pandemic, the program that makes these vaccines accessible globally to lower income countries is an important and interesting process. This program, known as the COVAX initiative, was launched in April 2020 – early in the global pandemic – and is a joint effort between three main partners to deliver COVID vaccines to people in 190 countries with the majority of those doses going to lower-income countries.
Have we discovered everything in the animal kingdom already?
Graham Reynolds, associate professor of biology at the University of North Carolina Asheville, explores Hispaniola to find out.
Dr. R. Graham Reynolds is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His research is focused on characterizing vertebrate biodiversity, particularly in the Caribbean, using evolutionary genetics, field research, and computational biology. He has published over 50 papers and three books, as well as dozens of technical notes. Reynolds was most recently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University from 2014-2016, where he held appointments in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He is also currently a Research Associate at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and a National Geographic Explorer.
Interview excerpt: Our most recent discovery is an example of the most exciting flavor of biodiversity study- where a completely unknown species is found in the wild. Many new species are described from populations that are already known. But when a brand new unique animal is found in the forests of a tropical island, that is cause for excitement.
Last year our colleague Miguel Landestoy discovered a unique looking snake while searching a remote forest in southern Hispaniola. He invited us to help investigate the animal, and my lab at UNC Asheville conducted the genetic analyses. We found that the species was entirely new, and entirely unknown!
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