On February 28, 2024 the Centre for Human Rights Research was honoured to welcome in conversation:

• Leah Gazan, MP for Winnipeg Centre
• Alex Neve, University of Ottawa
• Harold Shuster, Independent Jewish Voices — Winnipeg
• Youcef Soufi, PhD, University of Toronto
• Ethel Tungohan, PhD, York University

Resources

Read CHRR’s blog on Solidarities + Connections: https://chrr.info/solidarities-connections-with-palestine/

Miss the webinar? Check out our podcast of the conversation: https://chrr.info/resource/solidarities-connections-with-palestine-a-podcast/

On Thursday, May 2nd, 2024, Indigenous Engagement and Communications, the Department of Indigenous Studies, the Margaret Laurence Endowment Fund (Women’s and Gender Studies) and the Centre for Human Rights Research at the University of Manitoba were honoured to host Cambria Harris for an event in honour of the National MMIWG2S+ Awareness Day, or Red Dress Day. 

Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) provides information on the significance of National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ Peoples, or Red Dress Day. Read more here!

The event was free and open to the public and all members of the UM Community. For information on getting to the University of Manitoba, click here! Lunch was provided by Daily Bread Cafe, made possible by the financial support of the Margaret Laurence Endowment Fund.

In lieu of a registration fee, please consider donating to an Indigenous-led organization working with MMIWG2S+.

Resources

Watch a recording of Cambria Harris’s lecture.

CHRR’s Methods + Mediums in Human Rights Workshop Series returns! Join the CHRR to learn about the benefits and logistics involved in publishing open access, and the world of open scholarship. We look forward to welcoming, and learning from:

• What is Open Scholarship and what does it mean to publish open access? with Victoria Ho, University of Manitoba Libraries and John Bryans, University of Manitoba Libraries
• What do publishers look for in Open Access work? with David Larsen, University of Manitoba Press.

Register now!

Time: 2:00-5:00pm

“The Period Poverty and Equity, On Campus and Beyond” research team and the Centre for Human Rights Research (University of Manitoba) welcomed more than 30 community members to a Button-making Workshop for menstrual justice.

The workshop featured Ariel Gordon (she/her), a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. Ariel is the co-editor, with Rosanna Deerchild and Tanis MacDonald, of the anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our age (Fontenac House, 2018). In GUSH, more than 100 women and nonbinary writers from Canada and around the world take apart the bloody instruction of menstruation: its cultures, its lessons, its equipment, and its lexicon. Co-edited byRosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon, and Tanis MacDonald, GUSH offers menstrual manifestos for our time that question the cultural value and social language of monthly blood loss, with rage, humour, ferocity, and grief, and propose that the ‘menstrual moment’ is as individualized, subjective, personal, political, and vital as the ‘feminist click’. With work from emerging and established writers in poetry, cartoons, flash fiction, personal essays, lyric confessions, and experimental forms, this anthology features the voices of Indigenous writers, writers of colour, writers with disabilities, rural writers and urban writers, representing four generations of menstruators: writers who call down their bloodiest muses. Including work by Yvette Nolan, Mini Aodla Freeman, Sheri-D Wilson, Sonnet L’Abbe, Pamela Mordecai, Susan Holbrook, and many more.

Ariel, alongside ArtsJunktion, supported participants as they created buttons for menstrual justice.

Resources

Learn more about the event from this article by Kyra Campbell in The Manitoban: https://themanitoban.com/2024/01/shortfalls-in-menstrual-equity-at-u-of-m-audit-reveals/46680/

On Wednesday, October 25, 2023 at 1pm, CHRR hosted Dr. Youcef Soufi who presented a seminar on “Islamophobia and Colonial Violence: Solidarity and Civil Resistance in Post-9/11 Manitoba.”

Dr. Youcef Soufi is a Research Associate with the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, where he led an international working group funded by the Connaught Global Challenge Foundation studying anti-Muslim racism within Western societies. He is an expert in the history of Islamic law and his first book, The Rise of Critical Islam: 10^th-13^th Century Legal Debate (Oxford University Press 2023), pushes back against secularist assumptions that Islam and critical speech are inherently at odds. His recent publications analyze North American Muslim communities’ responses to anti-Muslim racism in the aftermath of 9/11. He is a contributor to the volume Systemic Islamophobia in Canada, published by the University of Toronto Press earlier this year and his forthcoming book tentatively titled On the Outskirts of Empire: Radicalization and State Surveillance on the Canadian Prairies will be published with NYU Press in 2024. Dr. Soufi is a former faculty member of the University of British Columbia’s Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies Department, responsible for the department’s Islamic Studies program, and the former Chair of the Canadian Association for the Study of Islam and Muslims (CASIM)

Resources

Watch a recording of Dr. Soufi’s lecture.

Download the resource guide on “Islamophobia and Colonial Violence.”

On Thursday, October 26, 2023 at 7pm, the Centre for Human Rights Research is pleased to present the launch of Messy Ethics in Human Rights Work featuring co-editors Neil Bilotta, Christina Clark-Kazak, Maritza Felices-Luna, and CHRR Research Affiliates Shayna Plaut and Lara Rosenoff Gauvin.

The launch will take place at McNally Robinson Grant Park.

Live streaming will also be available through McNally Robinson’s YouTube channel here.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Centre for Human Rights Research (University of Manitoba), and the Faculty of Law (University of Manitoba) co-organized and sponsored a public event on November 28, 2023 “Innocents Behind Bars: Systemic Racism and Wrongful Convictions.” There were over 125 people in attendance, as well as 25 people joining online.

The panel brought together leaders of the police torture justice/reparations movement in Chicago, into conversation with those working on demanding justice for Indigenous and racialized peoples wrongly imprisoned here in Canada.This event is inspired by the July 2023 release of Allan Woodhouse and Brian Anderson who were wrongfully imprisoned for a murder they did not commit and spent almost fifty years fighting to clear their names. Brian Anderson and members of his family were in attendance and Allan Woodhouse was able to join virtually.

We were honoured to welcome:

• Amanda Carling, CEO, BC First Nations Justice Council
• James Lockyer, Founding Director, Innocence Canada
• Alice Kim, Director of Human Rights Practice, Centre for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture
• Gregory Banks, Torture Survivor and Learning Fellow, Chicago Torture Justice Center (joining virtually)
• Facilitated by Dr. Niigaan Sinclair, Indigenous Studies, University of Manitoba
• Opening remarks from Elder Robert Greene, Canadian Museum for Human Rights

We hope this event will encourage a rethinking about the intersections of racism, policing, wrongful convictions, and the prison system throughout Turtle Island, and urge us to consider alternatives to how we understand safety and justice for all.

Resources

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/ZWMDvs3kTN0

Download the Graphic Recording: https://chrr.info/resource/innocents-behind-bars-systemic-racism-and-wrongful-convictions/

The art featured in this event poster is titled “Hummingbird” (2015), and is an unfinished painting by Peter Collins, that he was working on in the final days of his life. Peter Collins was a Canadian artist and activist who was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 22. During his time various prisons around Kingston, Ontario, Peter was an ardent activist for those living with HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C in prisons. He was a tireless advocate for reform calling attention to systemic racism and injustice, both inside and outside the prison environment, through his artwork and writings. Denied compassionate leave to spend the end of his life with friends and family, Peter died in prison at the age of 53. For more about Peter and his art, please see Lockdown Galleries: Art and Voice of Peter Collins. © Robert Collins