Glasgow Human Rights Network

GHRN Information Bulletin 26th April 2013

1. Events

Tuesday 30 April 2013
Film screening, ‘They Go To Die’
7.30pm, Lecture Theatre E, Boyd Orr Building, University of Glasgow
This film is produced and directed by Jonathan Smith, a lecturer in Global Health and Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale University.
It is a documentary film-in-progress investigating the life of four former migrant gold mineworkers in South Africa and Swaziland who have contracted drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV. The gold mining industry is responsible for an overwhelmingly large proportion of TB cases in these countries, and when the miners fail to improve at the mining hospital, they are sent home to rural areas of South Africa often with no continuation of care or means for treatment.
This practice is often referred to as "being sent home to die” by leading health officials. Jonathan believes that "not every public health disaster can be described in numbers" and through this engaging film, he can turn an epidemic into an emotion. To find out more about the film, we recommend you watch this great trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A-chpwhVmU.
Representatives of RESULTS UK, the campaign organisation which organises screenings of the video, will also be in attendance to answer our questions and tell us how we can get further involved in the campaign.
The screening is free and all are welcome.

Wednesday 1 May 2013
‘The Human Rights Question: What sort of Scotland, and what sort of constitutional future?’
10.00 – 4.00pm, Glasgow City Chambers
How do the independence debate, and the question-mark it has placed over Scotland’s constitutional future, influence human rights protections? Will the debate provide opportunities to further promote and protect human rights, will it provide new threats to human rights, or is it largely an irrelevance or even a distraction from the day-to-day work of those organisations who work for the rights of particular constituencies?
This seminar will examine how those involved in civil society groups are working to promote and protect rights, and consider the extent to which the referendum context affects this work. The seminar will consider questions such as: whether groups conceive of, and articulate their work in human rights terms, or in other terms? To what extent are human rights issues seen as important to the constitutional debate? Are human rights particularly served by one constitutional future or another? How might human rights be useful to articulating a vision of the future that might inform constitutional development in Scotland, whether through an on-going development of devolution, or an alternative constitutional future?
The seminar is organised collaboratively by The Scottish Constitutional Futures Forum, the Human Rights Consortium Scotland, the Glasgow Human Rights Network, and the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network and follows on from another seminar in March 2013 and a seminar organised by the Human Rights Consortium Scotland in December 2012.
To register for this event, please visit: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/5386404882

Thursday 9 May 2013
‘Ending impunity for sexual violence’
Public lecture by Zainab Bangura, United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict
1.00 – 2.00pm, Arts Lecture Theatre, University of Aberdeen
The public lecture, organised by the Centre for Sustainable International Development and School of Law, University of Aberdeen, is open to all and will be followed by a seminar on the health implications of gender-based violence. Numbers are limited for the seminar and if you are interested in attending the seminar please contact csid@abdn.ac.uk.

Thursday 9 May 2013
Inaugural Seminar of the HIV, Human Rights and Development Network
6.00 – 8.00pm, Committee Room 2, Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh
(Registration and finger buffet from 5.30 – 6.00pm)
The network is for persons living with or working in the field of HIV including policy makers, Practitioners, academics, health professionals, human rights activists and researchers from Scotland, the UK and beyond. The Network aims to stimulate inter-disciplinary discussion seminars and good practice examples which will influence outomces relating to HIV, human rights and development.
Seminar speakers:
Jim Eadie MSP (Scottish Parliament)
Professor Jane Anderson (Chairb of the British HIV Association; Director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Health and HIV; Consultant Physician at Homerton University Hospital, London)
Professor Lorraine Sherr (Infection & Population Health, University College London; Editor of AIDS Care Journal)
Professor Avrom Sherr (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London)
Pamela Nash MP (Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on HIV/AIDS - tbc)
Places are free but limited and need to be booked in advance, no later than 1 May. To book a place, please email your name and contact details to Emma Giles, University of Edinburgh: emma.giles@ed.ac.uk, 0131 650 9370.

22 May 2013
Graduate Conference on Human Rights: New Frontiers for Human Rights Theory and Practice
Wolfson Medical School Building, University of Glasgow
The postgraduate cluster of the Glasgow Human Rights Network (GHRN), based at the University of Glasgow, will be holding its first Graduate Conference on Human Rights on Wednesday 22nd May 2013.
The theme of the conference is inspired by the desire to explore new developments in human rights covering a broader range of human rights issues. We encourage postgraduates working in the area of human rights to participate in this one-day conference at the University of Glasgow in a friendly and supportive environment.
Topics will include, but will not be limited to, the following issues:
• Globalization and human rights
• Human rights, terrorism and national security
• Human rights and the neoliberal market paradigm
• Human rights and current case studies in self-determination (Scotland, South Sudan, Tibet, Quebec)
• Critical approaches to human rights
• The paradoxes of human rights theory and practice
For more information please contact Beth Pearson at bethiapearson@gmail.com or Awol Allo at awol.allo@gmail.com
Follow the GHRN Postgraduate Cluster blog at http://ghrnpostgradcluster.wordpress.com/

2. Funding Opportunities

Kelvin Smith PhD Scholarship Scheme 2013/14
‘Health and educational impacts of socio-ethnic migration and neighbourhood dynamics in Scotland’
The fully-funded scheme supports new partnerships between members of staff and offers outstanding research students both from home and abroad the opportunity to undertake doctoral training in the context of cutting edge interdisciplinary projects.
The ethnic/religious composition of our cities and neighbourhoods is diverse and rapidly changing, with profound implications for social justice and cohesion. Current immigration policy, for example, with its far-reaching impacts on education and employment, is underpinned by a particular set of perceptions about ethnicity and the long-term effect of assimilation. Such policies are set against a backdrop of sociological concerns about how society perceives and integrates immigrant communities, and how contours of disadvantage fall along racial and religious lines, and persist down generations. For example, Devine et al. (2000) argue that discrimination towards early-twentieth-century Catholic immigrants became embedded, to the extent that these socio-religious divisions remain a source of disadvantage.
Much of this debate, however, is based on anecdotal evidence, small-sample/short-run case studies, or on area/group averages which are vulnerable to the Ecological Fallacy (using group-level results to make false inferences about individuals within those groups). Migration flows of individuals from particular ethnic/social backgrounds remain poorly understood at micro-spatial-scales and there is very little reliable evidence on the implications for long-term wellbeing.
This project will achieve a step-change in the scientific rigour applied to ethnicity research. Applying cutting-edge quantitative techniques to a unique combination of high-quality Scottish datasets, we shall open-up new avenues for ethnicity/inequality-research, and develop novel social-statistical methods that will have applications in other contexts. We shall follow 270,000 individuals over a twenty-year period, linking the greatly-underutilised Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS) to a rich combination of data on neighbourhood composition, health, house prices and education. This will allow us to map-out the individual life-trajectories and health outcomes of persons identified as Catholic in 1991, compare these trajectories with those of persons from different ethnic/religious backgrounds, and shed light on questions about the extent to which long-term discrepancies in social mobility and health outcomes are driven by ethnicity/religion and/or neighbourhood effects.
If you are interested in applying for this scholarship, please contact Professor Gwilym Pryce (gwilym.pryce@glasgow.ac.uk) for more details.

3. Resources

The Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) website, http://www.poverty.ac.uk, is a free educational resource for academics, students, NGOs and policy makers interested in evidence-based research on poverty and social exclusion in the UK. It is a comprehensive research tool, containing information on: methodology, conducting original and ethical research, research findings, international surveys, as well as up-to-date articles and a searchable digest of news stories and reports on welfare, poverty, inequality and more. It will also be publish the results of two major surveys over the next few weeks.
This website is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, (ESRC) and is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York, working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.
OPPORTUNITIES TO TAKE PART
Join in the Poverty and Social Exclusion attitudes to necessities survey at www.poverty.ac.uk/take-part.
• Contact the PSE if you are interested in writing an article for the website.
• Follow and tweet comments @PSE2010
• Register to post comments on the website
The PSE are keen to hear from students and educators about what they would like to see on the PSE website, including any specific research papers they would like to suggest for inclusion. The PSE are also in the process of adding links on the PSE website to other organisations and projects researching poverty and social exclusion so if you have suggestions, again, do contact the PSE.

If you have an announcement for an event or resource which may be of interest to other members of GHRN, please send them to GHRNadmin@glasgow.ac.uk for inclusion in the bulletin.

http://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/glasgowhumanrightsnetwork/