Welcome
Dedicated to interdisciplinary and critical dialogue on human rights, the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series (WPS) publishes innovative papers by established and early-career researchers as well as practitioners. The goal is to provide a productive environment for debate about human rights among academics, policymakers, activists, practitioners, and the public.
Authors from all disciplines and institutions are welcome to submit papers. We publish papers on a variety of human rights and social justice topics, and we particularly welcome papers focusing on issues and topics affecting the Global South. We are especially interested in the following: reproductive justice and sexual rights; environmental justice and climate justice; peace and nuclear disarmament; inequality; and the future of work.
Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis and evaluated by the WPS interdisciplinary editorial committee, which includes graduate and professional students from across the University of Texas. The WPS committee provides comments and feedback to authors before the paper is published online. Publication in the WPS does not preclude future publication elsewhere; in fact, many of our working papers have since been published in academic journals and edited volumes.
Each year, the WPS publishes the winning paper from the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights and the Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice.
Our Latest Posts:
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The Need To Increase Participatory Mechanisms at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
by Karina G. Carpintero 27 MAR 2017 The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been subject to significant criticism regarding the absence of participatory mechanisms that allow societal actors to intervene in the inter-American process. To some extent, these critiques reflect a similar demand that is occurring in the domestic realm. Latin-American constitutional democracies present
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The Weight of Stigma and Segregation: Examining the Denial of Equal Education Opportunities to Roma Communities in EU Countries as an Abuse of Human Rights
by Claudia Kania 22 MAR 2017 The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination released a statement in 2000 that acknowledged “the place of the Roma communities [is] among those most disadvantaged and most subject to discrimination in the contemporary world.” Such socially and institutionally accepted xenophobia is perhaps most
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“Are Refugees Really Not Welcome?”
by Courtney McGinn and Reina Wehbi 2 MAR 2017 “#RefugeesNotWelcome: Making Gendered Sense of Transnational Asylum Politics on Twitter” by Inga Ingulfsen is the winning paper of the 2016 Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights, an interdisciplinary writing competition organized by the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. In 2017, Ingulfsen
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Oscar Night Winners Bring Human Rights Issues Center Stage
by Briana D. Perez 1 MAR 2017 On a night usually reserved for celebrating Hollywood elites, human rights violations around the world were featured front and center in several winner’s acceptance speeches. Especially in the categories that celebrated international achievement in filmmaking, winners did not hesitate to make strong statements in support of inclusion, tolerance,
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Ann Swidler on the Romance of AIDS Altruism
by Megan Tobias Neely and Maro Youssef 22 FEB 2017 How is culture embedded within institutions? This central question drives the research of Ann Swidler, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. The interplay between culture and institutions has taken her from investigating how middle-class Americans talk about love to studying
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New Research on the Relationships between Businesses and Military Regimes under Latin America’s Cold War
by Eyal Weinberg 13 FEB 2017 State terror and human rights violations during Latin America’s authoritarian phase have been amply studied in the past two decades. Scholarship has revealed how Cold War military dictatorships and juntas-headed national security states detained, tortured, and disappeared hundreds of thousands of civilians— from indigenous groups in Central America to
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The Human Right to Education: Mercosur Commitment and Economic Inequality
by Craig Lauchner Publication forthcoming in the Texas International Law Journal Abstract: Access to quality education has improved significantly throughout Latin America over the past three decades as a result of substantial investment in education at the national level. One driver of that investment has been Mercosur’s robot coordination within its member states, underscored by a
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Beyond Kafala: Remedying Human Rights Abuses of Migrant Workers in the Persian Gulf
by Ryan Jones View/download paper Abstract: The six nations that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—have found themselves severely criticized for the abhorrent conditions that migrant workers frequently face in these countries. One common target of criticism is the kafala system, used to regulate migrant
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#RefugeesNotWelcome: Making Gendered Sense of Transnational Asylum Politics on Twitter
This post is one of our Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship in Gender and Human Rights, Working Papers .by Inga Helgudóttir Ingulfsen View/download paper Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2016) Please note that in November 2017, Helgudóttir Ingulfsen wrote a follow-up post to this paper, entitled “3 Reasons Why We Need Critical Feminist Theory More Than Ever in the Age of Big Data” (available here). Abstract: This paper explores strategies
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A Move Towards Acceptance of Transgender Women in the Middle East
by Courtney McGinn 10 NOV 2016 On May 27, 2016, Talleen Abu Hanna, 21, became the first Miss Trans Israel. On an international scale, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals face discrimination not only by those in their communities, but also by the legislation and court systems that are entrusted with the duty to protect
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