The University of California Confronts Violence, Mass Atrocity and Hate: Conversations on Human Rights, Humanity and Peacemaking
The UC Davis Human Rights Studies Program, in conjunction with faculty from across the University of California system, will host a series of meetings in winter and spring 2025 to explore the ways in which our research, teaching and public scholarship individually and through collaboration can confront violence, oppression and impunity; promote and protect fundamental human rights; and imagine and articulate radical solidarities that will foster just and lasting peace.
We invite UC faculty and graduate students from any field, discipline, regional focus, and time period to participate.
Each three-day conference will include:
- Graduate student symposium.
- Film(s) from the UC Davis Human Rights Film Festival and cultural performances.
- Directed public academic conversations among UC faculty members.
- Informal, off-campus faculty convening to talk and share ideas.
We will document key elements of the conference, making them available for faculty, researchers and the public to inform post-conference research, public scholarship and as the bases for working groups going forward.
Apply to Participate
More details about the conference are included in the application. Please apply by October 31, 2024 for full consideration.
Dates
January 30-February 1, 2025
The Role of Memory and Historical Consciousness in Understanding Regional Violence, Conflict and Peacemaking
What role does the history and memory of past human rights struggles play in contemporary human rights mobilization, tactics, and advocacy? Conversely, is there an ethic of comparison when bringing the memory of past atrocity to bear on contemporary episodes of mass atrocity? How do we understand the use of history by states in the re-traumatization of populations for political or policy ends?
Local Chair: Marian Schlotterbeck, UC Davis — Human Rights Studies and History
February 27-March 1, 2025
Artistic and Literary Freedom and the Destruction of Culture, Education and Heritage in Times of Mass Atrocity
The silencing of creative voices and the targeted destruction of cultural heritage are central to episodes of mass violence, not simply collateral damage. How can we find ways to resist silencing and ensure the resilience of creative voices? What are the ways in which national and transnational networks of solidarity can be built to support artists, writers and scholars? How can we understand the many dimensions and impacts of the wholescale destruction of cities, which has been called “urbicide” as a strategy of conflict and weaponized against communities targeted for discrimination? What are some of the ways in which culture can be central to processes of repair?
Local Chair: Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, UC Davis — Human Rights Studies and Art and Art History
March 6-8, 2025
Reparative Responsibility in the Face of Institutional Discrimination and Hate
What does it mean to begin to repair harms caused by racism, discrimination, and hate? What might the history of solidarity organizing and campus protest movements for divestment, reparations, and repair teach about the range of potential remedies? How could the university respond to calls for divestment and reparations? What are the personal, institutional, and collective responsibilities and possibilities of reparatory justice?
Local Chair: Benjamin Weber, UC Davis — Human Rights Studies and African-American and African Studies
April 24-26, 2025
The Human Rights Framework and Global Solidarities
Collaborating Chairs: Keith David Watenpaugh, UC Davis — Human Rights Studies
Bronwyn Leebaw, UC Riverside —Political Science
How do communities employ the human rights idea in language and discourse to build solidarity within their communities and beyond? How do local human rights movements persist in the face of the perceived failure of international human rights institutions and governance to deliver justice. What is the role of popular-cultural understandings of key human rights concepts — genocide, crimes against humanity, refugees, climate justice — in building global solidarity and justice-seeking.
Graduate Student Symposium Coordinator: Adam Zientek, Human Rights Studies and History
Theory of the Conferences
In late 2023, human rights studies faculty at UC Davis began to explore the possibility of a UC-wide symposium around key scholarly, professional and ethical issues raised by the conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as the way the UC administration has responded to external political advocacy and governmental intervention, including the call to teach “viewpoint neutral Middle East history.”
Our resolve to explore these issues intensified when peaceful student-led campus protests demanding the University of California respond effectively to genocide and mass atrocity and fulfill its institutional responsibilities for reparation, were met with an admixture of contempt, silence and violence.
The rubric of each meeting pivots from core disciplinary and interdisciplinary issues we have witnessed across the last several months, and are set to bring those issues into a broader conversation that will empower UC faculty to contribute to cultures of peace and the observance of human rights — and create the bases for ongoing research, grant applications, teaching, public scholarship collaborations and working groups.
We invite applications from UC faculty and graduate students from all campuses, disciplines, fields of study and regional foci. Co-chairs will work with a committee, including faculty, graduate students and undergraduates to assemble the graduate student symposium and the directed conversations.
We also encourage faculty and others to join us at UC Davis for as many of these conferences as they can. Financial support will be available for participants and we can provide discounted accommodation. At this time, we do not anticipate an online option.
Funding
The major financial component for these conferences comes from a grant from funds awarded to UC Davis by the University of California Office of the President to develop educational programs to “combat antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of bias, bigotry and discrimination.” Read more about the program and application process.
While the funding comes from the UCOP, no member of the UC Davis administration or the UCOP will be involved in the organization, selection or hosting of these conferences.
All application materials will be held in confidence by the UC Davis Human Rights Studies Program and will not be shared publicly or kept beyond the end of the conferences.
Questions? Contact Dr. Keith David Watenpaugh at kwatenpaugh@ucdavis.edu