Ideas & Action Building a Human Rights Agenda

Two people who occupy that important overlapping space between organizing and the academy will be speaking to the conferences' main themes. Distinguished scholar and early student of social movements, Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author, with Richard Cloward, of Regulating the Poor (Vintage), The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New Press) and Why Americans Still Don't Vote (Beacon). Most recently, she is author of the tour de force Challenging Authority. For a review, see Stephen Lendman blog.

Craig Calhoun, President of the Social Science Research Council, has written the conference organizers explaining why he thinks human rights work is so important. His remarks have found practical value in the work of the Council: its website reports that, "Under Calhoun's leadership, the SSRC has been reinvigorated as a leader of public social science, research on critical social issues, and support for leading young researchers. He has launched new work on knowledge institutions and innovation, on information technology, on HIV/AIDS and social transformation, and on media, democracy and the public sphere."

by Keri Iyall Smith

It’s a free country! I learned this retort early in elementary school and immediately used it to attempt to negotiate later bed times, changing rules on the playground, eating cookies for dinner, and more. It was rarely (if ever) effective. The fact that it is a free country did not entitle me to much that mattered, it turned out.

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Welcome to the alpha version of our website. It will rapidly fill up with useful information, tools and content as we ramp up our activities for the July 31, 2008, Human Rights Boston Conference.