Webinars

This workshop will inspire students to develop their own method of personal activism as local, national, and global citizens. It will give them the opportunity to explore human rights activism as it is understood in practice and theory, and connect them with a wide network of fellow human rights activists.

The workshop involves several current activists sharing their experience, techniques, and expertise. It also uses historical examples to explore the techniques and impact of successful twentieth-century activists from around the world and will introduce students to essential academic theory around human rights activism, social movements, and political change.

March 2021 Virtual Workshop

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.

In this webinar you will hear what that means for the many activists working to improve conditions for others both before and during the pandemic, as well as how lessons learnt may change the face of future human rights activism. We will hear from four young activists from around the world who will share how they have adapted their strategy under COVID and their thoughts on what has changed along the way. These four inspiring activists will be Aaron Hughes, a doctoral student and mutual aid organizer at Oxford University; Wai Wai Nu, founder of the Women’s Peace Network from Myanmar; Wawira Njiru, founder and director of the Kenyan NGO Food 4 Education; and Secunda Joseph, community organizer and activist with ImagiNoir/BLMHTX and Project Curate of Houston, Texas.

One of the most fundamental steps governments around the world have taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 has been to reduce human mobility. Through ‘lockdown’ or ‘stay-at-home’ orders, travel restrictions and border closures, public service and legal systems shut-downs, etc., the scramble to slow virus transmission has been (largely) swift and arduous. For a lucky few, these are merely an inconvenience, but for the millions of migrants and displaced scattered across the globe, these restrictions have been particularly severe. In this webinar, we will dive into why the pandemic’s impact on migrant and displaced communities is particularly harsh, with a focus on vulnerability in living conditions and work, health care and social safety net access, and extended impacts on the Global South and families through remittances.

Monday, July 6, 2020
10am PST/1pm EST

The second OCHR webinar focuses on issues that the COVID pandemic has brought into increased focus - inequality and racial justice in particular. Our speakers are drawn from a variety of fields and represent both scholars and practitioners engaged in these issues.

In this first-ever online OCHR event, we discussed the pressing human rights challenges of pandemics. Speakers first gave us an historical context of the spanish flu and ebola pandemics before we discussed current events, clashing rights and hard political choices, and then some of the urgent contexts where human rights issues are playing out today: in education, prisons, and in immigration.