Columbia Human Rights News

Recent ISHR Visiting Scholar D’Ann Penner published “Assault Rifles, Separated Families, and Murder in Their Eyes: Unasked Questions after Hurricane Katrina” in the latest issue of the Journal of American Studies.

Abstract:

This essay critiques the trauma literature that includes African Americans who endured Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. It is concerned with possible dissonance between scholars’ and subjects’ agendas. Drawing on narratives from the the Saddest Days Oral History Project that Penner directed in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, she explores divergences between the most urgent traumatic concerns of her study’s narrators and the dominant questions of Katrina mental health literature. Her focus is the survivors’ perceptions of rescuers’ intentions, a primary consideration in the assessment of potentially traumatizing events. The mental-health specialists, with minor exceptions, correctly predicted an overall surge in traumatic and depressive symptoms for Hurricane Katrina survivors. They were less effective in identifying causation, specifying type, and appreciating major differences between social groups and communities. For almost all of the African American narrators trapped in the city after the storm, the trauma of Katrina was experienced as the product of human beings, mainly armed law enforcement personnel and soldiers, brandishing assault rifles, acting disdainfully, and separating families. The event was made cataclysmic not by the winds or the floodwaters but by their descent into a militarized zone in which narrators seemed singled out for persecution because of their race/ethnicity (and gender). The traumatizing events that were omitted from the structured interview protocols, in particular the impact of the militarized response, have had the deepest impact on  survivors’ identity and ability to trust others.

From Columbia computers or with login access, the article is available from the Journal of American Studies webpage.  Others can look for Journal of American Studies, 44 (2010), 3, 573–599.

Also…

Read a review of Dr. Penner’s most recent book, Overcoming Katrina, at the Huffington Post.

The Dart Society, which is affiliated with Columbia’s Dart Center, is publishing an article by Dr. Penner, “Post-Katrina Trauma and Journalists,” in three parts.

ISHR is hiring a Prorgam Coordinator and an Assistant Director for Education.  Please visit http://hrcolumbia.org/about/hiring.htm for more information.

Pushing the Elephant, Arts Engine's latest Big Mouth documentary film, will premiere at Human Rights Watch Film Festival at New York's Lincoln Center. There will be three screenings the Walter Reade Theater:

• Saturday, June 12 at 1:45 p.m.
• Sunday, June 13 at 4:30 p.m.
• Monday, June 14 at 4 p.m.

Q & A with filmmakers and film subject Rose Mapendo will follow each screening.  Tickets and festival information are available at http://www.hrw.org/en/iff/pushing-elephant.

Pushing the Elephant's is directed by Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel, who received her Masters in International Affairs with a concentration in Economic and Political Development from SIPA in 1998.

Video of the talk (in French) is available from the Institut Émilie du Châtelet

On May 6-7, 2010, in Istanbul, Turkey, ISHR co-sponsored Choreography of Sacred Space: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution, an international conference in partnership with Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and Columbia University’s The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR), Institute for Religion, and Culture and Public Life (IRCPL).

View Program | Bios of invitees

NEW YORK, April 19, 2010 - Columbia University Libraries' Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research (CHRDR) will house the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Archive—a comprehensive collection of documents representing 29 years of the organization’s research, reporting, and activism in support of the international press freedom movement.

"The Committee to Protect Journalists serves an immensely important role for the profession, and we are honored that Columbia University Libraries will house their archives," said Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism at Columbia University.

The Committee to Protect Journalists joins Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Committee of Concerned Scientists, and Human Rights First in recognizing the CHRDR as an international documentation center for the global human rights movement. The CHRDR supports Columbia’s human rights programs, many of which draw on its resources for teaching and research, as well as the international community of human rights scholars, students, policy-makers and advocates.

Japan's sex industry has again become a source of international concern after a recent CNN report on Japanese rape simulation video games. ISHR visiting scholar Kei Hiruta explains what is missing in the current controversy. Read his article.

New York, NY - April 2, 2010

The Trustees of Columbia University have approved a proposal for the Center for the Study of Human Rights to become an institute in order to coordinate human rights studies throughout the university and connect with scholars and practitioners around the world.

The change is effective immediately, and the center is now the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR).

Full Press Release

The February 2010 issue of RightsNews, ISHR's newsletter is online (1.54mb PDF)

Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh, a Columbia University faculty member detained in Iran since July 2009, has been transferred from prison to house arrest, according to a family representative.
 
Dr. Tajbakhsh was scheduled to assume duties as an associate professor of urban studies last fall at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.  He was arrested while working in Iran as a consultant, providing nonpolitical urban technical advice with explicit permission from the Iranian government.
 
Dr. Tajbakhsh was found guilty of “political crimes” by an Iranian court on Oct. 20, 2009.  He appealed his sentence only to then be accused of new espionage charges on Nov. 23.
 
Twenty Columbia faculty members sent a letter on Jan. 11, 2010, to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking her to work for Dr. Tajbakhsh’s release.
 
According to news reports, Dr. Tajbakhsh’s sentence was recently reduced from 15 years to five years.  He was transferred out of Iran’s Evin Prison and placed under house arrest, according to a Tajbakhsh family representative.

CSHR congratulates Professor Andrew Nathan, Chair of CSHR's Board, for his election to the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy.  Prof. Nathan was elected to a three-year term on January 15, 2010.

Twenty Columbia faculty members and officers signed a letter requesting that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton help secure the release of Kian Tajbakhsh from Iranian prison.  Dr. Tajbakhsh was found guilty of “political crimes” by an Iranian court on October 20, following his support of the Iranian uprising against the government in the aftermath of the disputed election last summer.  He appealed his sentence only to then be accused of new espionage charges on November 23, 2009.

Dr. Tajbakhsh, who earned a doctorate from Columbia in urban studies, was providing nonpolitical urban technical advice as a consultant with explicit permission from the Iranian government. He was scheduled to assume duties as an associate professor of urban studies last fall at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

More information about Dr. Tajbakhsh's situation is available at http://www.freekian09.org/. A copy of the letter to Secretary Clinton is available as a PDF.

Overcoming Katrina was awarded the 2009 Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Leadership in Journalism Award.  Read more about or purchase the book at http://us.macmillan.com/overcomingkatrina.

Reviews in the New Orleans Tribute and Black Press USA are online at http://www.neworleanstribune.com/bookreview.htm and http://www.blackpressusa.com/Op-Ed/Speaker.asp?NewsID=19859, respectively.

The Epoch Times covered CSHR's October 1 event, "Laogai: The Machinery of Repression in China."  Read the article at http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/23289/.