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Sindiso MnisiWeeks & Colleagues' Article On The Boston Human Rights City Pilot Project Published In Journal of Human Rights Practice

Titled "Learning by Doing: Lessons from the Graduate Students in the Boston Human Rights City Pilot Project," the article describes the experience and lessons learned by graduate students and supervising faculty (Sindiso MnisiWeeks and Gillian MacNaughton) in piloting an action-research project aimed at realizing positive economic and social change by advancing the vision of Boston as a human rights city that was articulated in a city council resolution adopted in 2011. It details the efforts led by the graduate students in their roles as paid outreach coordinators and research assistants to resuscitate the latent social movement that had resulted in the adoption of the Boston Human Rights City resolution. Against the backdrop of the Boston Human Rights City pilot project’s success at inspiring the re-establishment of the long-defunct city-level human rights commission, each of the graduate student leaders shares their reflections on and analysis of their experience of ‘learning by doing’. They detail the challenges they confronted and what key lessons were yielded by their trial and error. The article concludes with a summary of insights that readers (including the human rights commissioners) might find helpful with respect to both transdisciplinary human rights pedagogy in higher education, especially at the graduate level, and the development of social movements, particularly in the advancement of the Human Rights Cities movement. (Oxford Academic, 10/03/22)

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