Student activism finds a focus at Stanford's Handa Center
A growing number of undergraduates have found an academic focus for their personal activism through the WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice. Part of Stanford Global Studies (SGS) in the School of Humanities and Sciences, the center has been based on campus since its move from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014.
As the refugee crisis in Europe exploded in 2015, Ibrahim Bharmal ’18, knew he couldn’t stay on campus and watch events unfold without trying to help. “I saw that the Handa Center had a new fellowship,” he says. “I applied and was accepted to volunteer at a refugee camp in Skaramagus Port Harbor in Greece.” Bharmal, who speaks Arabic, spent nine weeks last summer organizing camp activities for children and teaching English to adults from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq in Greece’s largest refugee camp. “It was a difficult but really rewarding experience,” he says.
Based on what he learned, Bharmal has applied to teach a student-initiated course next fall titled, “Answering the Call? Ethical Considerations of Humanitarian Volunteer Work.” With support from Handa Center staff to implement the course, the junior says he wants to attract students interested in volunteering. “I hope that a class like this will encourage more meaningful and ethical engagements with people we are trying to support,” he says.
Like Bharmal, when Hannah Shira Smith first arrived on campus last fall she looked for a group that aligned with the values she learned through her Jewish community at home. “Tikkun Olam means ‘repair the world,’ in Hebrew,” she says. “It means you should repair your own community and then spread outward. When I came here, I was actively looking for ways to become a ‘repairer’—but from the outside in. That’s how I found the Handa Center.”
THE WSD HANDA CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE
Bharmal, 20, and Smith, 18, join a growing number of undergraduates whose personal activism has found an academic focus through the WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice. Part of Stanford Global Studies (SGS) in the School of Humanities and Sciences, the center has been based on campus since its move from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. Under the leadership of David Cohen, an expert in human rights and international law, the center focuses on research related to human trafficking, trauma mental health, justice and reconciliation in post-conflict societies, and atrocities prevention and response.
In fall 2016, growing student interest in the center’s work led to the launch of a new interdisciplinary minor in human rights. Three seniors, Alina Utrata, Christina Schiciano, and Maeve Richards will be the first undergraduates to earn the minor in 2017. Bharmal, a comparative literature and international relations major, and Smith also plan to pursue it.
All five students are members of the center’s student advisory board, which helped SGS craft the minor so it could be taken by students from a range of disciplines. “You don’t have to be a lawyer to work in human rights,” Utrata explains.
Penelope Van Tuyl, Handa associate director, teaches the minor’s gateway course HUMRTS 101: “Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights Theory and Practice.” While Van Tuyl cannot make a direct connection between current events and student interest in her course, she says enrollment has increased each quarter since she started teaching it in spring 2016. “Suddenly, human rights isn’t just something that happens ‘over there,’ it applies everywhere,” she says. “Students understand that human rights issues are not just academic questions—they are very real and will influence their path in the world.”
That certainly applies to Katie Joseff, a senior majoring in human biology and minoring in international relations, who works with the Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Laboratory in the School of Medicine. The lab, through a partnership with the Handa Center, advances research on the impact of trauma on survivors of human rights abuses.
Joseff is compiling research examining the effects of prolonged solitary confinement on prisoner health for lawyers and policy makers working on the issue. Last year, she and the center’s program manager, Jessie Brunner, attended a conference at the University of Pittsburgh, where she met solitary confinement experts as well as prison wardens and prisoners formerly incarcerated in solitary housing units.“I’m just floored by the access to resources through the Handa Center,” Joseff says. “The fact that the center has so many connections beyond Stanford—it’s much more than an academic institution. Usually, as a student, the most experience you have with the real world is getting a paper published. But at the Handa Center, it’s ‘let’s go talk to people, work with them, and collaborate on projects that are so much bigger than Stanford.’”
Utrata, a history and the law major, and Schiciano, a political science major, have had similar hands-on experiences that will influence their academic and career plans. This fall, Utrata will pursue a master’s degree in conflict transformation and social justice at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland as a 2017 Marshall Scholar. Schiciano plans to attend law school and work in international criminal law.
During the summers of 2015 and 2016, Utrata interned at the Balkan Institute for Conflict Resolution, Responsibility and Reconciliation in Sarajevo and at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. “When I came back I was all fired up after being abroad,” Utrata says about her work monitoring the trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders. “I wanted to do more in international transitional justice. How do you transition out of a conflict following horrific genocides in ways that don’t devolve into conflict again—that’s what I want to work on.”
Last year, Schiciano was awarded a Handa Center Human Rights Fellowship to intern with the U.S. State Department conducting research into gender-based violence and human trafficking patterns around the world. She also used her Arabic skills to assist lawyers interviewing Syrian and Iraqi war crimes victims through the Humanitarian Parole project in the Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Lab.
Utrata and Schiciano now use their experience to support future students taking the human rights’ gateway course. For their capstone project, they are producing a podcast that will offer background information on topics such as the war in the Balkans and the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides. “For a lot of people in the class it was the first time they were exposed to human rights and international relations,” Utrata says, based on her experience taking the course last fall.
Utrata also wants to develop a blog to explain complicated issues, such as the Iran nuclear deal, for students who didn’t follow current affairs until recently. “They’re asking, ‘what is happening, we need to get involved,’” she says about her former dorm mates.
These undergraduates say the Handa Center provides a rigorous interdisciplinary base combined with work opportunities for students motivated to pursue public service. This summer, Bharmal will intern with the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York City, working on immigration issues.
Smith has been awarded a Human Rights Fellowship from the center to work at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. “The Handa Center has provided me with fantastic classes, wonderful faculty mentoring, and a summer opportunity,” Smith says. “It’s a place that cares about the world outside Stanford.”