Hello all! My name is Sophia Nguyen. I’m a junior double-major in International Affairs and Art History with minors in Human Rights, Anthropology, European Studies, Swahili, and Law, Jurisprudence & the State. The human rights lab is a unique and prestigious opportunity at SPIA that I believe deserves its own spotlight. When applications open every semester, I encourage students interested in rights or research to apply!
Lab students work adjacent to the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) to measure violations across the globe—coding, describing, and filtering through data from surveys and state reports to do so. Projects focus on a variety of violations, including physical integrity rights (ex: torture and arbitrary imprisonment) and digital repression. This is a collaborative environment; nobody is left on their own, which transforms what can seem like scrubbing data to a process that’s fun and informative for rights learners. Furthermore, HRMI is an amazing organization! Its data has been used by governments, advocates, and scholars all around the world to inform populations about human rights, or even to decide cases in foreign affairs. Contributing to HRMI makes you part of such efforts.
Students in the lab also able to conduct independent research with some of the country’s best human rights scholars. Working with my lab partner, Iman Khan, I am combining a video game with a survey experiment to analyze the impacts of native language education on human rights instruction. However, others have written traditional papers and covered a variety of other interests, from LGBTQ+ rights to refugees, security, and nuclear war. The main idea is that you are in charge of choosing what this might be—and designing your own work around that. While the lab gives you the skills and platform, your own passion carries this work through to the end.
Passion is what defines the lab most of all. Teachers and students are part of GLOBIS to discuss human rights in an academic sense, but we are also able to see how academics can shine a light on a safer world. The main principle of human rights is that they are inherent and interconnected—you cannot have one right without another, and they can never be taken away from a person—but anyone who studies international affairs will know that this principle is an ideal.
GLOBIS works towards that ideal through research, learning, and the opportunity to do something more with it. Don’t miss your chance to apply and be part of this!
