Welcome to Human Rights in a New Key! This episode is a short trailer that serves as a table of contents with highlights from each of our six episodes. We recommend listening to it first to get an overview of the season before choosing episodes of interest to you!

Co-hosts Manaeha and Matt share their interview with Leila K Blackbird and Leah Horowitz in this episode. Leila K. Blackbird is a PhD candidate in US History and the Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellowship Coordinator. Her research focuses on (post/de) colonialism, slavery, state violence, and the environment. Leah Horowitz is at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, using ethnographic methods to examine grassroots engagements with environmental issues, especially with regard to Indigenous communities’ negotiations with and resistance to environmentally risky industrial expansion.

Both Leila and Leah share their personal experiences of being Indigenous and working on Indigeneity, respectively, especially in Academia. It can be hard, even counterintuitive, to discuss indigeneity from the context of a colonial institution. How can we strive to be anti-colonial at UChicago and other institutions? Leila and Leah offer their wisdom and share specifics about their respective works that explore this question.

In this episode, Manaeha and Matt share their interview with Ryan Fatica and R. Knoll, representatives of the Perilous Collective, talking about prison unrest and solidarity in the US. Perilous is a proletarian research project working on archiving the experiences of prisoners and instances of prisoner unrest in North America for activists and researchers to use to attack the incarceration system. Listeners can support the Perilous project through Patreon or by making a one-time donation via PayPal at https://perilouschronicle.com/donate/

CORRECTION: Tesfa Miller was incarcerated at Etowah County Jail in Alabama, not Cook County Jail.

Listen to Manaeha and Matt and their interview with Alex Blanchette, PhD’13, a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University. His book Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life is an ethnography of work within some of the world's largest meat corporations. A big thank you to Dr. Blanchette for sharing his research into American factory farms, including manure lagoons and concentrated feed lots. Hopefully, this episode starts a much-needed conversation about what workers as well as animals endure in and surrounding industrial farms in the US.

In this episode, Manaeha and Matt share their interview with Dr. Teng Biao, academic lawyer and human rights activist for China. Dr. Teng Biao has defended cases involving freedom of expression, religious freedom, the death penalty, Tibetans, and Uyghurs. He has also provided counsel in numerous other human rights cases. They talk about his work as an activist and his research into high-tech totalitarianism in China. Listeners sensitive to content about physical abuse or torture may wish to skip this episode or listen carefully.

In this episode, Manaeha and Matt interview Roja Fazaeli as well as a member of the Baháʼí community. We refer to him as “A” as he requested to remain anonymous due to the possible threat this interview might pose to himself and his family.

Roja Fazaeli is an Associate Professor in Islamic Civilisation, Near & Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin. “A” is a refugee living in the U.S. We provide an overview of the Baháʼí Faith and its emergence in Iran. Then we explore why the Iranian state sees the Baháʼí as a fundamental threat to its regime. The state is different from its people, and there is hope for the Baháʼí community, especially within the younger generations, to resist anti-Baháʼí propaganda. We end with ways the Baháʼí create a sense of community in their daily lives; this connection offers a way to resist the horrible oppression and constant persecution they face.

In this episode, Manaeha and Matt speak with Erin McFee and Arturo Gutierrez de Velasco. Erin is the Principle Investigator of Trust after Betrayal (https://www.trustafterbetrayal.org/), a project that examines interpersonal trust among violence-affected individuals in communities where actors from all sides of the conflicts live together. Her multi-sited ethnography spans former members of non-state armed groups in Somalia, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, and military veterans in the United States. She focuses on Colombia, which is where Arturo, AB’24, a 3rd-year student at the college, did summer research over. He helped conduct interviews with ex-militants in Colombia. They discuss what the Trust after Betrayal Project is, why it is important, and the nuance and complexity that goes into interviewing and researching ex-militants.