Glasgow Human Rights Network

Policy work in the third sector - An introduction for postgraduate researchers 

26 September 2019 at 1pm-5pm, Rankine Building - Room 106

This half-day training was delivered by two policy officers from Zero Tolerance and Scotland’s International Development Alliance with diverse experiences working in several different sectors in the Scottish and international contexts which provided participants with different perspectives. The training has critically engaged with commonly used policy tools and instruments, including the policy cycle, theories of change and spheres of influence. The training included group exercises to provide participants with the opportunity to practice stakeholder analysis and mapping as well as identifying levers.   

A range of topics have been covered including:

• Theory, approaches and methods – Policy cycle, Stakeholder analysis, Influence mapping, Group exercise
• Working in Policy – Case studies, Highs and lows, Open discussion and group exercis
• The Who, When and Why of Policy – Inclusive policy development

• Different Career Pathways

There were 16 participants attended this event and received very good feedback from these participants. The organizer is considering about organizng another similar event soon. Once it is confirmed, related details will be made available on this website and through our mailing list. 

This is a joint seminar between QRaG's 2019/20 seminar series and GHRN (Glasgow Human Rights Network) PGR Cluster. 

Over the past several years the Third Generation Project (TGP), a think tank based in the School of International Relations (IR) at the University of St Andrews, has been refining a methodology and approach that aims to prioritise the voices and approaches of frontline communities in the fight against climate change. This approach, which continues to be a work-in-progress, aims to be 'community'-led, or at the very least 'community'-informed and remains unusual within the discipline of IR in particular. This session will explore, with TGP's Managing Director, Prof Ali Watson, (University of St Andrews) what such an approach means in practice, why it is necessary, and how TGP are developing this approach for wider education in schools on the human impacts of climate change.

All welcome to attend this free seminar which explores qualitative methods and 'doing' research.

Register here: 

  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/researching-climate-change-educating-for-social-change-tickets-76231613809

 Tuesday 22nd October, 12-1pm in Room 133 Hetherington Building, University of Glasgow, G12 8RS. 

Welcome to the seventeenth edition of Document.

Each year we foreground innovative documentary cinema as a way to explore and refresh our relationship to human rights and visual representation. This year, across a series of interconnected strands, we look particularly at the growing movement for climate justice and to strategies of collaboration and resistance - tracing narratives of colonialism, indigeneity, territoriality and migration.

Our focus on land-based struggles in Latin America takes its name from legendary Colombian filmmaker
Marta Rodriguez’s 1981 documentary, Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future, a film exposing the historic repression of indigenous Colombian farmers and their long fight against it. This newly and beautifully restored film resonates profoundly with contemporary manifestations of neo-colonialism and climate barbarism on the continent – perhaps none more so than in the context of the ongoing, historically-rooted devastation visited on the Amazon rainforest.

Filmmakers in our Uninhabitable Earth strand travel from the mountains of Macedonia to the jungles of
Sri Lanka in search of new futures beyond the spectre of such overwhelming crisis; and Franco-Brazilian
filmmaker, Ana Vaz, joins us at the festival as our artist-in-focus, presenting around her debut feature film The Voyage Out – a reflection on ecological disaster and the possibility of renewal.

While Britain remains consumed by its political relationship with Europe, we also take a closer
look at what life is like on the continent for those living on its fringes, with screenings of dissident
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s The Rest; and Ian McDonald’s split-screen rendering of identity
and belonging, Who is Europe?

Beauty and creativity often flourish at the margins, and with programme highlight Lisbon Beat we celebrate the city’s vibrant Afro-Portuguese music scene, with a screening and club night featuring sets from DJ Rita Maia and Príncipe Disco’s artist DJ Firmeza.

The enduring power of community also illuminates Lucy Parker’s Solidarity, a collaboratively
made exploration of blacklisting in the UK construction industry which serves as inspiration for
a strand on collective resistance, as well as our annual Critical Forum symposium – this year
looking at collaborative filmmaking, curation and research as creative practice.

Finally, we’re beyond excited to open the festival with an exclusive Scottish performance of
poet, filmmaker and 2017 Ted Hughes award winner Jay Bernard’s multimedia, multi-narrative
work, Surge; before closing with the European premiere of Nguyen Trinh Thi’s intimate and
illusory portrait of Vietnam, Fifth Cinema.

Venue
Centre for Contemporary Arts
350 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow G2 3JD
+44 (0)141 352 4900
CCA is a fully accessible venue. For more info go to www.cca-glasgow.com

Tickets
Tickets can be purchased online at www.documentfilmfestival.org, via the CCA website, or in
person at the CCA box office.
In order to make Document more accessible to those on a low income, we use a sliding scale
ticket price of £2-£8 for our events, with free tickets also available on the day from the festival
box office. You can choose what you pay based on your circumstances – you won’t be asked for
any proof / ID. And, if you would like to book a free ticket in advance, or make a group booking
of free tickets, please feel free to get in touch via info@documentfilmfestival.org.

For the full details of the program, click here.

The Sakharov Prize 2019 in association with the Glasgow Human Rights Network and the European Parliament Information Office. Students on the Human Rights Masters programme will present the nominees for this year's prize followed by Q & A and discussion. The event will be followed by a buffet. 

Time and venue: 5-6.30pm, 30th October, Yudowitz Lecture Room, Wolfson Medical Building

This is a join event with ASBS Wards Accounting Seminar 2019-2020 series. The seminar will take place in Wards Library Room 543, Main building, from 3.30-5pm, on the 6th of November, 2019. 

Abstract: 

In the face of growing disaffection with neoliberalism and corporate social and environmental accounting (CSEA), critical accounting academics have highlighted the potential of counter-accounts to open up spaces for democratic voice and advance counter-hegemonic struggles.  Through their ability to create new visibilities and offer citizen-oriented representations of social and environmental issues, counter-accounts have reinvigorated hopes for moving beyond the monologism of corporate self-reporting.  In critical dialogic accounting (CDA), for example, counter-accounts are viewed as providing social movements with opportunities to challenge neoliberal hegemony, to address multiple publics and to open up new social realities.  However, the democratizing potential of counter-accounting is contested and the views of social movements themselves are not well understood.  The aims of this paper are both conceptual and empirical:  to extend CDA theorizing by elaborating on the value of counter-accounting in advancing democratic struggles against neoliberalism and, empirically, to address the opportunities and challenges of counter-accounting through interviews with social movement activists.

In the seminar, Professor Brown will address the theme of de/repolitization and democratization through accounting by situating the above paper within the context of the broader body of work on critical dialogic accounting she has worked on with colleagues, highlighting the democratic deficits associated with neoliberal governance regimes and outlining possibilities for recovering democracy through accountings aimed at opening up debate on contentious aspects of value creation/destruction.  This work argues that a democratizing agenda aimed at a reinvigorated public sphere requires envisaging contemporary crises in a political way, with close attention to issues of power, politics and voice.   Social movements’ counter-accounting practices offer one way of taking up this challenge.

Biography:

Judy Brown is a Professor of Accounting in the School of Accounting and Commercial Law at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the study of accounting and accountability practices in politically contentious areas such as labour relations and sustainability.  A key emphasis is on the use of accounting in enabling or constraining democratic engagement in organizational and civil society contexts.  Over 2011-2015, she led a research project on Dialogic Accounting: The Challenge of Taking Multiple Perspectives Seriously funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund.  She has published on accounting, pluralism and democracy in leading accounting and business journals including Accounting, Organizations & Society, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting and the Journal of Management Studies.  She is an Associate Editor for Critical Perspectives on Accounting and a member of several other editorial boards.

Love Human Rights? Love films?​

Please join us during our Film Night and Social Event on the 19th November, 17:15 hours, at the Gilchrist Postgraduate Club (seminar room).

The Glasgow Human Rights Network PG Cluster and the Equality and Human Rights teaching team are co-hosting a film night and a social event on Tuesday 19^th November at the Gilchrist. 

We will present two short films exploring the role of social movements in upholding Human Rights followed by a Q and A session. After that, a reception would be held with drinks and nibbles! This will be the perfect occasion for students from different schools interested in Human Rights to come together and meet each other!  

Attendance is free but you need to register on our Eventbrite event so we can control the capacity. Please follow this link:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/human-rights-film-night-and-social-event-tickets-78661142595?ref=estw

Films:  

• In the middle of the current protest happening in Chile, "Nae Pasaran" is a short film that tells the story of a Scottish town that in 1974 decides to stop repairing a warplane engine in an act of solidarity against a violent military coup in Chile. A documentary from Felipe Bustos Sierra about the moral courage of a group of Scottish Rolls-Royce workers and trade unionists.
• Also in the middle of tumultuous times in Bolivia, the short film “The Fight” will remind us how people with disabilities struggle in this country and the huge discrimination they are subject to. This short film invites us to the journey travelled by a group of people with disabilities that started a march across the Andes to la Paz, to confront President Evo Morales.

Dr Birgit Schippers, St Mary's University College Belfast

Wards Seminar Series joint event with Glasgow Human Rights Network

Wednesday 3-4.30pm, February 19, 2020, Wards Library (Room 543), West Quadrangle, Gilbert Scott Building

Want to know more about the legal rights of trans people in Scotland? Please, come along on the 18th of February to the Gilchrist Seminar Room at 15:00 hours!!

During this two hours, James Morton, Scottish Trans Alliance Manager, will walk us through the legal rights for trans people in Scotland. Three core pieces of equalities legislation will be discussed during this workshop: Equality Act (2010), Gender Recognition Act (2004) & Offences (Aggravation by Prejudice) Scotland Act (2009).

 The workshop is ideal for:

- Trans people who want to learn about their legal rights

- Anyone conducting research with the trans community

- Anyone who wants to learn more about how equalities legislation works in Scotland.

This event is organised by the Glasgow Human Rights Postgraduate Cluster, and co-sponsored by the Gilchrist PG Club.

Please register here

Thursday, 30 July 2020 (via Zoom)

The workshop is aimed at postgraduate researchers working within the broad field of human rights at the University of Glasgow.

The objective of the workshop is to provide an informal and supportive forum for the dissemination and development of works-in-progress in light of pandemicrelated conference cancellations and diminished opportunities to receive feedback.
We welcome papers from many (and multiple) disciplines including Sociology, Criminology, International Relations, Law, Politics, Migration Studies, Philosophy, Economics, and History.

Participation in the workshop is open to researchers at any stage of their postgraduate research studies, including Master’s students currently writing their dissertations. We welcome work at all stages of development.

Presenters will be asked to circulate a summary of their paper ahead of the workshop and to give a 10-minute presentation of their paper. Each paper will be assigned a discussant.

Please send abstracts of up to 350 words to i.rodrigueztoribio.1@research.gla.ac.uk by 7 July 2020.
For more information, please contact i.rodrigueztoribio.1@research.gla.ac.uk 

GHRN workshop 30 July

On July 30^th, the GHRN has successfully organized its first virtual workshop since the outbreak of Covid-19. The workshop is aimed at postgraduate researchers working within the broad field of human rights at the University of Glasgow.

 The objective of the workshop is to provide an informal and supportive forum for the dissemination and development of works-in-progress in light of pandemic-related conference cancellations and diminished opportunities to receive feedback.

We have four papers presented with each of them has assigned an academic discussant. The workshop started with a heated discussion around the Scotland’s statehood and the right to self-determination, followed by a research exploring the realization of International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights. After the break, we have a well-structured work looking into the conceptual debate around transitional justice and closed the workshop with a research that looks into Venezuelan migrant women along the border from a feminist perspective. As a result of the locked-down and the global pandemic situation, some works have to re-design to fit for a research project that relies only on documents and secondary data. Students were still able to manage the transition and presented very interesting and provocative ideas. Learning from student’s feedback, the workshop made them feel supported and also offered them constructive feedback to develop their works further.