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Foundations of Humanitarianism:
A Program for Research and Teaching
Foundations of Humanitarianism combines multidisciplinary research excellence with the insights and communicative power of artistic expression and performance. The linkages among humanities, social science and legal disciplines, and the collaborations of these disciplines with theater and museum exhibitions make this project exceptional. Conferences, study groups, scholarly panels and the publishing program reflect the University's research stature in Human Rights and the Humanities, while the arts activities promote scholarly, student, and public consciousness. In the area of Undergraduate Enrichment, the substantial commitment of teaching assets by participating departments, and the addition of two tenure-track humanities faculty and a post-doc specializing in the subject, are enriching and expanding the undergraduate curriculum in the areas of human rights, diversity, and global studies.
The study groups re-shape courses through faculty engagement with the freshest multidisciplinary scholarship, while the museum and theater programs creatively reinforce and extend classroom learning. Presently there are three active study groups, external "magnet" scholars have begun to visit campus, and several presentations have been made by University of Connecticut faculty at national conferences. A theatrical production, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, appeared in 2005-06, as did a museum exhibit of Adam Nadel's photographs. The first international conference, Humanitarian Narratives of Inflicted Suffering, was held October 13-15 at Storrs. In August 2007 Alexis Dudden, Associate Professor of History, joined the faculty to head the Foundations of Humanitarianism Program. Kerry Bystrom, Assistant Professor of English joined the program at the same time.
Why foundations of humanitarianism? Contemporary movements for human rights, economic development, refugee protection and other forms of global solidarity are embedded in a long-standing humanitarian sensibility. We understand humanitarianism as entailing a universalized public empathy, which advocates the elimination of fear and suffering across the globe and upholds the principle of the realization of individual potential. However, human rights scholarship has not wholly recognized how its humanitarian values and practices are rooted in social, cultural, and intellectual movements reaching back to the eighteenth century. Nor has human rights scholarship fully examined the ways that empathy is generated through visual and print media, the publicity of governments and non-governmental organizations, and in literary and artistic representations. Finally, there has not been enough reflection upon how humanitarianism has developed in relation to counter-ideologies rooted in Romanticism, fascism, communism and religious zealotry.
In the past two generations voluntary groups have extended the concept of rights beyond preserving life and humane treatment of civilians in wartime, so as to include literacy, economic development, refugee protection, health, and protections for women's and children's rights—which together form the present-day field of humanitarian action. Foundations of Humanitarianism: A Program of Research and Teaching supports research and teaching associated with these themes.
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University of Connecticut |