In recent days, news of Afghanistan’s citizens in peril, a devastating earthquake in Haiti, destructive wildfires and the surging Delta variant has touched all of us in the UC Davis community, causing grief and sorrow for many. We have Haitian and Afghan families who are part of our larger community, as well as families who have suffered from the fires and COVID-19. I want to express my condolences to those who have experienced losses resulting from these tragedies. These events can be overwhelming, but I am grateful to see Aggies responding to support people in need, both here at home and a world away. Here are a few ways that is happening.
According to one estimate, the global refugee population has more than doubled over the past decade to 26 million. Professor Keith Watenpaugh, director of the Human Rights Studies program at UC Davis, leads an innovative project to help refugee students start or continue their university education — even as they are displaced and on the move. In this episode of The Backdrop, Watenpaugh discusses the Article 26 Backpack project, UC Davis’ Human Rights Studies program and his rethinking of the history of humanitarianism.
UC Davis Global Affairs and UC Davis Human Rights Studies are building a team of interns to support the Article 26 Backpack – the UC Davis Tool for Universal Academic Mobility. Backpack, as we call it, is a multi-lingual ecosystem that empowers refugees, displaced, and at-risk young people around the world exercise their human right to education.
UC Davis recently released an updated version of Article 26 Backpack, a digital tool and ecosystem for refugees and other displaced peoples to safely and securely curate, store, and share critical academic and career development documents with universities, possible employers, and agencies.
Literary scholarship at the nexus of human rights and climate change has earned English major Jumana Esau ’20 a prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship. The scholarship will fully fund Esau to earn her Master of Philosophy in Criticism and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where she plans to study climate fiction with the author Robert Macfarlane.
The Institute of International Education today (Feb. 19) awarded a Centennial Medal to Keith David Watenpaugh, professor of religious studies and director of Human Rights Studies at UC Davis. The presentation took place at the institute’s Centennial Summit in New York City.
The Article 26 Backpack at UC Davis is a new humanitarian tool that displaced people are using to securely store and share documents, such as transcripts and resumes, with universities, scholarship agencies and employers. Nearly 600 people have created virtual backpacks since the project launched in Lebanon this spring.
With ink and watercolors, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis, is helping Syrian refugees thousands of miles away to pursue their education too. Maureen Burdock, who already has a career as an artist, designer and illustrator, designed the comic book for Article 26 Backpack, which launches in Lebanon June 15.
A team from Information and Educational Technology is behind a very human project that launches this week to help Syrian refugees in Lebanon reclaim their right to education. Web developers did the custom programming for the Article 26 Backpack, a cloud-based platform to help refugees document and share their educational credentials.
Article 26 Backpack, a part of Global Affairs at UC Davis and supported by a $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, is named for the article that established the right to education in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nearly 70 years ago. The international consortium behind the project is led by Keith David Watenpaugh, a professor and director of Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Davis.
