Education and Gender Equality in South Africa and Beyond

Justice Matters will return this October. In the meantime, we'd like to share with you a podcast we think you will enjoy by our friends over at Strength & Solidarity. Strength & Solidarity is a podcast about the tools, tactics, and ideas driving and disrupting the human rights movement around the world. Host Akwe Amosu has over 30 episodes of interviews with human rights defenders form around the globe discussing ideas about how we use the language of human rights, how we build sustainable and healthy organizations, what it means to center respect and care in our movements, and asking questions about what solidarity is and how it can it be a tool to build stronger movements. We encourage you to subscribe to Strength & Solidarity as their new season starts this Fall. Today we’re going to play for you an episode that features a round table discussion recorded for International Women’s day in March of 2023 that features three feminist leaders assessing this moment in their respective fields. Akila Radhakrishnan, President of the Global Justice Center in New York, Hala Al Karib, Director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, and Mary Jane Real, until recently co-director of the Urgent Action Fund for Women – Asia Pacific speak with Akwe Amosu about the state of women's rights globally. More about this episode from Strength & Solidarity: How should we describe the state of the global struggle for women’s rights? It is surely impossible to make a single overarching assessment– even as battles are won on one front, major challenges remain – or emerge - on another. Yet if it is hard to generalize about progress, we can at least note that conditions are scarcely favourable. To pick only three global trends - authoritarian rule, identity-based exclusion and economic instability - none of these help advance women’s freedoms. As International Women’s Day 2023 approaches, we invite three feminist leaders to assess this moment in their respective fields. For a list of supplemental readings and additional information about this episode’s content, visit https://strengthandsolidarity.org/podcasts/ Contact us at [email protected]

The human rights podcast Justice Matters returns this October with host Maggie Gates, Executive Director of the Carr Center, and a team of Harvard faculty members acting as rotating co-hosts, including Mathias Risse, Aminta Ossom, Rob Wilkinson, and Yanilda Gonzalez.

On this episode of Justice Matters, host Sushma Raman speaks with Dr. Leslie Alexander about the history of Black Internationalism and its ties to today’s global Black Lives Matter movement. Her newest book, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States, examines how the Haitian Revolution and the emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation inspired the birth of Black internationalist consciousness in the United States. Alexander is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University. A specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history, she is the author of African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 and the co-editor of three additional volumes. A recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship, Alexander is the immediate Past President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and is an Executive Council member of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS).

Where do universal human rights begin? On this episode of Justice Matters, host Sushma Raman speaks with Professor Martha Davis about local movements and human rights cities. Davis teaches constitutional law, US human rights advocacy, and professional responsibility at Northeastern Law School, where she is a Faculty Director for the Program for Human Rights and the Global Economy. A Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Sweden, she is also a member of the expert committee for HumanRight2Water, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization that advocates for water and human rights. She is currently a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

What is critical race theory and why is it under attack? On this episode of Justice Matters, host Sushma Raman discusses critical race theory with Dr. Victor Ray, Carr Center Fellow and F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor at the University of Iowa. Together they explore the related topics of structural racism and intersectionality, and how race shapes social processes typically considered race neutral. Dr. Ray is also a Nonresident Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. As a public scholar, he has published commentary in the Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Newsweek, and the Boston Review.

What is black witnessing, and how does it connect to movements for racial equity and justice? Can capturing a moment shape a movement? On this episode of Justice Matters, host Sushma Raman speaks with Dr. Allissa Richardson about the power of communication on social and racial justice. Dr. Richardson is an Associate Professor of Journalism at USC Annenberg School. She researches how African Americans use social and mobile media to produce innovative forms of journalism, especially in times of crisis. She’s the author of “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism,” which explores the lives of 15 journalist activists who have documented the Black Lives Matter movement using only their smartphones and Twitter. Dr. Richardson is a Carr Center Fellow for the coming academic year.

What is the responsibility of businesses to uphold human rights? What is the role of civil society to hold businesses accountable? And how well is the human rights movement equipped to deal with the emerging challenges of the digital age? In this episode of Justice Matters, host Sushma Raman discusses these questions with Mike Posner, Professor at the Stern School of Business and director for the Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU. Posner served in the Obama Administration from 2009-2013 as Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy Human Rights and Labor, and from 1978-2009 Posner led Human Rights First.

This month on Justice Matters, host Sushma Raman talks with Dara Kay Cohen, a Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research spans the field of international relations including: international security, civil war and the dynamics of violence, and gender and conflict. On this episode they discuss rape during contemporary civil wars, research methods for collecting qualitative data about sexual violence and the ethics of research, her findings about how gender equality could help to avoid civil war, and how documenting war crimes in Ukraine may lead to accountability after the war. Cohen explores these topics further in her award winning books, Rape During Civil War and Lynching and Local Justice: Legitimacy and Accountability in Weak States.

This month on Justice Matters, host Sushma Raman talks with Dr. Yanilda María González, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School who researches police violence and how it relates to democracy and citizenship, with a focus on Latin America. In this conversation they discuss how to facilitate having dialogue around police reform with people from different backgrounds, authoritarianism and policing, civil society’s role in holding politicians and police accountable, race and how policing determines how you have access to rights, and police corruption and how it relates to police violence in both the United States and Latin America.

How does a leader strive for social justice for their community and country? Join us this month on Justice Matters as host Sushma Raman talks with Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the former United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women from 2013-2021, and the first woman to hold the position of Deputy President of South Africa. From her background as a teacher in South Africa and as an active part of the anti-aparteid struggle, through to her positions in the first democratically elected government of South Africa and later the UN, Dr. Mlambl-Ngcuka discusses her work fighting for the rights of women and children throughout her multifaceted career.