Contributors

Ahmad Syarif

Doctor of International Affairs candidate, Johns Hopkins University

Doctor of International Affairs candidate, Johns Hopkins University

Ajay Chaudry

Research Scholar, New York University

Research Scholar, New York University Ajay Chaudry is a research scholar at New York University’s Institute for Human Development and Social Change and Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Services. His work in public policy research and analysis focuses on improving children’s well-being and development, early care and education, human services programs, and immigration. From 2012 to 2015, Chaudry was a political appointee in the Obama administration, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy in the Office of Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. He also previously served as Deputy Commissioner for Early Childhood Programs at the NYC Administration for Children Services, Director of the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute and as a faculty member at the New School for Social Research School of Management and Urban Policy. He is the author of Putting Children First: How low-wage working mothers manage child care, co-author of Cradle to Kindergarten: A new plan to combat inequality. He received his A.B. from Columbia University, and M.P.P. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Aoife Duffy

Senior Lecturer, University of Essex

Senior Lecturer, University of Essex Dr. Aoife Duffy is an interdisciplinary human rights scholar affiliated with University of Essex’s Human Rights Centre/School of Law. Prior to this posting, she held lectureships at the National University of Ireland Galway and Dublin City University. Aoife has been the recipient of various awards and grants, including the prestigious Department of Foreign Affairs Andrew Grene scholarship in conflict resolution for her doctoral studies. With a broad horizon of research interests, Aoife has published on topics ranging from indigenous peoples’ rights to states of emergency in such journals as Human Rights Quarterly, the International Journal of Refugee Law, and the International Journal of Transitional Justice. Her transitional justice scholarship examining major paradigm shifts has led to new historiographies shedding light on legacy issues in various case studies. Several of these have been published, including the ground-breaking monograph - Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland: Interrogation in Depth. In tandem with legal histories, she has accumulated expertise on intelligence/security operations, detention without trial, interrogation, and torture. Aoife’s interdisciplinary scholarship has evolved into other areas: producing original work on the interplay between photography/visual framing and international law, developing a conceptual framework on universality and rights recognition, and an output on reproductive autonomy. Adding to the canon of critical pedagogy, her latest journal article devises a fresh approach to human rights education by drawing on multiple disciplines. Current projects focus on the modalities through which the past is understood in the present; accessed through oral histories, official and non-official archives, legal documents, historic testimonies, memoires, and contemporary understandings of the past. A particular sensitivity is given to excavating subaltern or marginalised narratives that might otherwise be lost from the socio-historical record. Aoife's academic research and activism is animated by social justice goals - in particular, the achievement of substantive equality and the elimination of discrimination in society. In order to address structural injustice, systemic marginalisation and exclusion, human rights practice and scholarship is strengthened by different disciplinary perspectives. In that regard, she would welcome human rights PhD supervision in a cross disciplinary arrangement. In 2022, Aoife was invited to participate in the International Expert Panel: State Impunity and the Northern Ireland Conflict (due to report in 2023). She has also acted in an advisory/consultative capacity for various stakeholders on legacy issues stemming from the Northern Ireland conflict.

Andrew Rogers

PhD student, The University of Queensland

PhD student, The University of Queensland My research focuses on the impact of alien birds on native wildlife in Australia, and I have lived and done field work in California, South Africa, Madagascar, the UK, Borneo and Australia studying how animals use altered habitats.

Avinoam Patt

Director, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut

Director, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut Avinoam J. Patt, Ph.D. is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut. Until July 2019, he served as the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he was also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization. Previously, he worked as the Miles Lerman Applied Research Scholar for Jewish Life and Culture at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, May 2009); co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010); and is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM including Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938-1940 (USHMM/Alta Mira Press, September 2011). He is also director of the In Our Own Words Interview Project with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and is co-editor of an anthology of contemporary American Jewish fiction entitled The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (Wayne State University Press, 2015). He is co-editor of a new volume on The Joint Distribution Committee at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (Wayne State, 2019) and recently completed a new book on the early postwar memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt, to be published by Wayne State UP in Spring 2021). Together with David Slucki and Gabriel Finder, he is co-editor of a new volume Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (April 2020) and, with Laura Hilton, is co-editor of the new volume Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press, July 2020).

Armwell Shumba

Chercheur en agronomie, University of Zimbabwe

Chercheur en agronomie, University of Zimbabwe I am a Research Officer and Crop nutritionist and one of my career objectives if to leave a mark in the agricultural research, extension and advisory sectors through the pursuit of excellence and integrity. Zimbabwe's economy is agro-based and agriculture and its related businesses are the highest employers. Ironically Zimbabwe has the highest rate of unemployment in Southern Africa and most of them are youths who have attained some form of tertiary education. I strongly believe that youth engagement through such forums and conferences can help developing countries like Zimbabwe to reduce unemployment to 'acceptable' levels and in the long-run reduce extreme poverty and hunger.