Past News and Events

Nobel Peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi

Friday April 11, 2008 - Shirin Ebadi is the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace prize. An Iranian, Ebadi is the first woman to be named to the bench in her country. After serving as president of the Tehran city court from 1975 to 1979, Ebadi was forced to resign after the Islamic republic decided that women were not suitable for such posts. Ebadi then established a law practice and took on the kind of politically sensitive cases many lawyers refused, including alleged human rights violations by the Iranian authorities. Her memoir, Iran Awakening: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country, was hailed by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu as "the riveting story of an amazing and very brave woman living through some quite turbulent times. And she emerges with head unbowed." Ebadi also works for women's rights and greater legal protection for Iranian children. A professor at Tehran University, she lives in Iran.

There will be a book signing of Iran Awakening: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country from 7:00 to 7:30 pm, hosted by the Regulator Bookshop Sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center and Research Triangle International. Co-sponsored by the Karl von der Heyden endowment, the Trent Foundation, Duke Libraries, the Duke Center for International Studies, the Duke Islamic Studies Center, the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Women's Studies and the Duke Chapter of Amnesty International.

Documentary Interventions

Grace Lile, Media Archive and Distribution Manager for Witness,March 20, 2008, 1:15 PM, in Duke Libraries’ Rare Book Room

One of the primary elements of the architecture of impunity that buttresses human rights abuses is invisibility: people, evidence, facts, and truth itself are “disappeared”, systems of accountability are thwarted and dismantled, and clandestine records and archives are mobilized in the name of terror and oppression. Practitioners and activists often find then that an effective and crucial tool to combat human rights violations is documentation. The speaker series “Documentary Interventions” explores the various and innovative documentary strategies that have been deployed by human rights workers to render human rights abuses recordable, visible, and thus addressable.

On March 20, 2008, Grace Lile, moving image archivist and Media Archive and Distribution Manager for Witness (http://witness.org/ ), will discuss this organization's innovative use of video and other moving image technology to "open the eyes of the world to human rights violations”. Grace will screen "Missing Lives: Disappearances and Impunity in the North Caucasus" (2007) Memorial / WITNESS (14 minutes)

The Past is Political:  Public Memory, Policy Choices and Human Rights

"Activating Historic Sites for Human Rights"Liz Ševčenko, Director, International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience - Wednesday, January 30, 2008 .

Liz Ševčenko is founding director of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, a network of historic sites that foster public dialogue on pressing contemporary issues. She works with over 1300 initiatives in more than 90 countries to design programs and practices that reflect on past struggles and inspire citizens to become involved in addressing their contemporary legacies. Before launching the Coalition, she had over ten years of experience developing public history projects designed to catalyze civic dialogue in New York and around the country. Her project “Mapping Memories,” in which visitors were invited to contribute their memories to a changing map of New York City and discuss conflicting claims to urban space, was produced at the Museum of the City of New York, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Eldridge Street Project, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, as well as at community centers and street fairs. She has partnered with public artist Shimon Attie on projects in New York and Boston exploring the hidden histories of urban landscapes. As Vice President for Programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, she developed exhibits and educational activities that connect the dramatic stories of the neighborhood’s immigrants past and present. She also developed national and community initiatives to inspire civic dialogue on cultural identity, labor relations, housing, welfare, immigration, and other issues these stories raise. Ms. Ševčenko has a B.A. from Yale University and is completing her PhD in history at New York University. She has most recently published “The Making of Loisaida” in Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York City.

"A Place for Memory" Patricia de Valdez, Director, Memoria Abierta, Wednesday, October 31, 2007. Patricia Valdez is the director of the Argentina-based "Memoria Abierta," a physical and digital memorial to the dirty war. "Memoria Abierta," or Open Memory, is a ground-breaking effort to not only collect and display objects from Argentina's period of state terrorism, but also to use memory-gathering activities as a way to strengthen a social conscience that values active memory and influences Argentine political culture and the construction of identity and the strengthening of democracy. "Memoria Abierta" is a founding member of the "Sites of Conscience" association of museums, which include New York's Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Cape Town's District Six Museum.

Sponsored by the Archive for Human Rights and the Duke Human Rights Center. Cosponsored by the Duke Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Duke University Program on History, Public Policy and Social Change.

2007 Dia de los Muertos

October 2007 - Memory and forgetting are the currency of archives, museums, libraries, monuments, and other institutional efforts aimed at disciplining the wayward path of history. There is an inherent tension in archival interventions, in that the preservation of memory requires elaborate technologies of selection, control, and surveillance. By exploring archival collections related to human rights and social justice and curating their own exhibit in the form of a traditional Latin American Dia De Los Muertos ofrenda, Duke students will have the chance to ruminate on the relationships between memory, history, community, social action, and power.

view Dia de Los Muertos photo exhibit