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Welcome to Lehman's Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies

The Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies advances social justice and human dignity in an interdisciplinary fashion through active involvement of faculty, students, and community in research and teaching. The Center builds on the College’s unique history: the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights began at Lehman College when the United Nations met at the College. Lehman College students, often immigrants and the first in their families to access higher education, engender a broad understanding of human rights. The Center unites student and faculty engagement on local and global rights issues in New York and the greater world community. The Center now offers an interdisciplinary minor in Human Rights and Peace Studies.

Advising

If you would like to talk about the minor in Human Rights and Peace Studies, please email the Director of the Center, Michael Buckley, at michael.buckley@lehman.cuny.edu.

News

Lehman's Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies was awarded the 2022 Flowers Foundation Grant for work in human rights education. Every year, the Flowers Fund, a project of Human Rights Educators USA, provides small grants to support innovation and mentorship in human rights education. The fund aims to encourage new philosophic and theoretical thinking, new pedagogies, and new outreach methods for HRE, as well as emerging leadership in the field. The Center, together with Lehman College's Department of Middle and High School Education, aims to help high schools around New York City establish student-led human rights clubs. The goal is to create service-learning opportunities for students to reflect on and contribute to remedying local human rights injustices. Service-learning is a form of experiential learning in which students acquire and apply the skills needed to identify urgent community needs. Students learn leadership skills, develop cultural and racial understandings, and practice civic engagement, and their work alerts teachers, scholars, and grassroots organizers to emerging injustices. Lehman College has, through conferences and educational programs, created a loose network of restorative justice practitioners and educators. Lehman's Department of Middle and High School Education and the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies aim to strengthen this network and collaborate with human rights clubs and their respective schools to address ongoing and emerging educational injustices in NYC.

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