The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life worldwide, including the work of human rights advocates. Human rights issues heightened by the pandemic include equal access to vaccines and housing, immigration, extremism and rights to privacy. How human rights methods, strategies and approaches have kept up with the pandemic will be the subject of the University of Dayton Human Rights Center's Social Practice of Human Rights Conference Dec. 2-4 at Daniel J. Curran Place on the UD campus.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life worldwide, including the work of human rights advocates. Human rights issues heightened by the pandemic include equal access to vaccines and housing, immigration, extremism and rights to privacy. How human rights methods, strategies and approaches have kept up with the pandemic will be the subject of the University of Dayton Human Rights Center's Social Practice of Human Rights Conference Dec. 2-4 at Daniel J. Curran Place on the UD campus.

"Long-standing practices and norms have changed radically to respond to the current crisis. Some institutional and political dynamics contrary to human rights and democracy have become further entrenched," said Shelley Inglis, executive director of UD's Human Rights Center. "The pandemic only heightens the urgency for structural change. We must question and reimagine different systems, institutions, practices and norms; and ask, 'What is human rights advocacy in the wake of the pandemic?'"

Erica Chenoweth, director of the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which studies political violence and its alternatives; and Nathan Law, a Hong Kong democratic activist, are the conference's keynote speakers. Foreign Policy magazine ranked Chenoweth among the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2013 for promoting the empirical study of nonviolent resistance. TIME listed Law among its 100 most influential people in the world in 2020.

In-person and online sessions, will tackle social movements during COVID-19 and the emergence of new human rights advocacy methods; the rise of authoritarianism and extremist movements; local approaches to international human rights advocacy, including racial justice in the United States; climate change; gender equality; corporate accountability; and human rights education, among others.

"The pandemic also has forced us to more intentionally connect local and global human rights efforts. For this reason, most sessions link these issues to the work of local activists, advocacy organizations and community organizing movements in the Miami Valley and Ohio," Inglis added.

Session presenters include representatives of the Atlanta Civil Rights Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, YWCA Dayton, Learn to Earn, the Northwest Dayton Partnership, Co-Op Dayton, East End Community Services and Omega Community Development Corporation. Click here for the complete schedule.

Complete information and registration is available here. Additional questions can be directed to hrc@udayton.edu.

For interviews, contact Shawn Robinson, associate director of news and communications, at srobinson1@udayton.edu.