CGHR Research Group discussant

In May, I was the discussant for Gabriela Martinez Sainz's talk, 'Human rights education and training programmes in Mexico: A cross-case analysis of practitioners' professional knowledge and practice.'   This interesting talk was part of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights' Research Group's seminar series.  As Gaby pointed out, knowing about human rights educators is key, as they are the "mediators between the discourse of human rights, the objectives of human rights education and the reality of participants and stakeholders.”  As such, her research is contributing to the important and growing body of work interested in human rights in practice, rather than focused on philosophical or legal theory.

Here is the abstract for her talk: "In Mexico human rights education and training programmes are becoming one of the most recurrent outcomes of the official settlements regarding institutional violations and abuses of human rights. Despite their predominant role in addressing human rights violations there is little systematic information on how these programmes are conducted in practice. To fill this gap, the paper presents a cross-case analysis of three qualitative case studies that explore practitioners' professional knowledge and practices in implementing human rights education programmes in Mexico. Each individual case examines some of the challenges practitioners face in the implementation of these programmes, the institutional influence on their work, and the role of their own experiences in human rights their practices. The findings of this analysis show how practitioners develop their own professional knowledge through the implementation educational and training programmes and how they make sense of human rights from their teaching practices."