Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Northwestern University Conference on Human Rights

Apply to NUCHR 2011!

NUCHR 2011 is seeking high-caliber undergraduate delegates with an active interest in human rights and forced migration for this year's conference Human Rights in Transit: Issues of Forced Migration!

NUCHR 2011:

The eighth annual Northwestern University Conference on Human Rights (NUCHR) is proud to announce a national student conference entitled Human Rights in Transit: Issues of Forced Migration, which will take place on Northwestern's Evanston campus on January 20-23, 2011. This year’s conference will focus on forced migration across borders. We hope to utilize this theme to analyze the role of borders on the universality of human rights, and more specifically to discuss the obligation of the country of origin and the host country to protect and preserve the rights of migrants. Speakers and delegates will examine forced migration from the perspective of multiple actors to highlight all who are affected by this phenomenon. We hope to question responsibility in the application of human rights (i.e. who is obligated to ensure the rights of refugees and what measures of enforcement do and should exist). Through our case study panel that will explore the issues of migration across the US-Mexico border, panelists will be asked to challenge conventional definitions of refugees and forced migration while examining human rights violations in our own country. Finally, delegates will break up into small groups throughout the three-day conference to discuss specific case studies of forced migration and apply the framework developed by the panels of the conference to these individual scenarios.

How to Apply:

Fill out this form and send the appropriate information to conferenceonhumanrights@u.northwestern.edu by November 1st, 2011 to apply to be a delegate at NUCHR 2011. You can also visit our website at www.nuchr.net!

Chosen delegates will receive a travel stipend, hotel accommodations, and meals during their stay in Evanston. We expect delegates to actively engage in each activity throughout the conference. Certain events during the conference will be exclusively for delegates, including private question-and-answer sessions with keynote speakers and discussion sections with in-depth exploration of case studies.

About NUCHR:

NUCHR, the largest undergraduate student-organized conference on human rights in the United States, is dedicated to promoting the universality of human rights while recognizing the difficulty in consensus, issues of cultural relativism, and the potential paradoxes in implementation and practice. This three-day summit unites student delegates from across the country with renowned activists, academics, and policy makers, but is also free and open to the public. In the past, the conference has explored such issues as the misapplication of humanitarian aid, human trafficking, American policy towards HIV and AIDS in the developing world, and American interventionist policy abroad. NUCHR has featured distinguished speakers including Nicholas de Torrente, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof; and Mark Hanis, founder and president of Genocide Intervention Network.



Please visit our website, http://nuchr.net, for more information on NUCHR, including the student delegate application, the conference schedule, and speaker updates. If you have any additional questions, please contact the co-directors of this year's conference - Scott Chilberg, Julie Kornfeld, and Katharine Nasielski - at conferenceonhumanrights@u.northwestern.edu.