Professor of history Geoffrey Robinson and assistant professor of archival studies Michelle Caswell have been awarded a $40,000 Faculty Initiative Grant from the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program. The grant will fund research on the challenges of documenting human rights abuses in Cambodia, East Timor and Indonesia.
Their project, “Human Rights Archives in the Pacific Rim: Political, Legal and Ethical Challenges,” will bring together historians, human rights practitioners, legal experts and archivists to explore the complex set of issues involved in the creation, housing, ownership and use of archives on human rights abuses and crimes against humanity.
The collaborative work will take place over two years and involve an international symposium at UCLA, to be documented in either an edited volume or special issue of a journal. Ultimately, the project will develop a set of best practices for archives on human rights abuses — which the co-investigators currently envision as a list of open-ended questions — that will be posted on an interactive website.