Julianna Williams ’30
Staff Writer
From Oct. 15 to 16, campus became the gathering place for senators, psychologists, state representatives, students, philosophers, lawyers and educators from a coalition of Connecticut schools as the College hosted the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights Community Action Summit.
The conference opened Thursday morning in the Reese Room of the Smith house with breakfast and a welcome delivered by Professor Benjamin Carbonetti, Director of Trinity’s Human Rights program; and Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, Quinnipiac Legal Studies Professor and Connecticut state senator.
The first presentation covered the Hartford Voter Captains Project by Trinity Assistant Professor of Political Science Dang Do and research assistants Chloe Libby ’27 and Malika Rice ’27, followed by a panel of Connecticut Legislatures discussing Criminal Justice practices and reform. Dr Beth Monchun, Executive Assistant to the President at CT State Community College, Naugatuck Valley, reflected on the state of Connecticut partnering with Norway to model some aspects of their criminal justice system, sharing that the panel prompted her to think of ways that Connecticut educational institutions could get involved. “My job is obviously not in the correctional system for the state of Connecticut, but the Community College, along with Trinity, Wesleyan, UCONN, I think even Quinnipiac, they all have programs where faculty from their campuses go into Connecticut facilities and teach. It’s just fascinating to me. I’m thinking about ways to maybe promote us being able to expand that.”
The presentation also resonated with Professor Benjamin Carbonetti, Trinity’s Director of Human Rights Studies. He told the Tripod, “The panel on criminal justice reform really made me think a lot about how we generate the political will to make this change sustainable. And I have a lot of students who ask me that all the time. How do we actually make this change?”
Shared meals, close conversations and the “Fireside Chat” style of many panels provided an intimate crowd setting, making the questions and perspectives of Human Rights students openly welcomed by panelists and participants. Financial Manager and Program Director for the Oxford Consortium, Jessie DePonte reflected, “We got to hear from students directly, which I think is always my favorite part.”
Carbonetti added, “I always tell students that I learned just as much from them as they do from me. The primary thing that often comes up is people asking me really difficult questions and me having to respond to those and being really provoked into thinking through different ways of being.”
Throughout the summit, emphasis was placed on locally relevant topics. As Dr Michael Rooke, President of three Connecticut State Community College campuses put it, “There’s a lot of human rights issues here in Connecticut.”
A panel led by State Senator Bob Duff (D-25) and State Senator Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox (D-22), CT Senate Majority and Deputy majority leaders respectively, on affordable housing led to discussion of Connecticut’s position as one of most racially and economically segregated states in the country. Duff emphasized that “we shouldn’t see Connecticut as absent of problems; there are always ways to improve.”
DePonte reflected on discussion of a recent housing bill requiring Connecticut towns to create and submit their own plans for tackling the housing crisis through increased construction of homes and regulation of affordability. “Talking about affordable housing in Connecticut, I think we were able to not only hear about that, but actually provide insight to the legislators that I hope they take back to the Capitol.” She continued, “I’d love to start thinking about those spaces in my own community. And, you know, Oxford does a lot of great work on thinking about those concepts when we are together in these conferences.”
A panel led by Beth Hamilton, Executive Director of Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence, and Krystal Rich, Executive Director of Connecticut Children’s Alliance, focused on the work of the Connecticut Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Council and described the demand for an intersection in legislation and systems for both domestic abuse and trafficking cases.
Hamilton emphasized the TIP Council’s work in prioritizing the needs of victims with trauma-informed questioning/reporting procedures and pointed out the need to step away from purely reactionary investigations and processes, towards more proactive mental health, sexual violence and domestic abuse services that would prevent instances of trafficking from occurring in the first place.
A presentation by Deborah Goffe, Executive Director of the Austin Arts Center, and Rebecca Pappas, Associate Professor of Theater and Dance at Trinity brought the focus to human rights issues occurring right in our backyard.
They discussed the stereotypes that Trinity students and administration perpetrate through harmful assumption-based views of our surrounding community with rhetoric about Hartford being a “place of lack.” They explained that the campus community’s narrative of the neighborhood being associated with crime and danger fails to acknowledge nuances like how much of the crime reported on and around campus is committed by students. Goffe suggested a perspective flip, where we dissolve ideas of an “internal” and “external” community and strive for vibrant, creative interactions between Hartford and Trinity. Pappas and Goffe pioneered these interactions through initiatives like Performing Hartford, which supports/amplifies the voices of Black, female and LGBTQ+ artists in Hartford and by establishing the Austin Arts Center as the multi-year residency of the social justice-focused theater company; the Heartbeat Ensemble.
Throughout the summit, an emphasis was placed on the truly interdisciplinary nature of the human rights field. This was put into practice as the conference concluded with a performance of Athol Fugard’s “A Lesson from Aloes,” an introspective play about politics and interpersonal relationships in apartheid South Africa, performed by the Heartbeat Ensemble in Trinity’s Goodwin Theater. As Carbonetti put it in his introduction to the arts discussion, “Storytelling and human rights are intrinsically linked.”
Deponte added that “human rights belong in every field. I think a lot of times we think about human rights as this exclusive humanities field, but it belongs in spaces like STEM and the arts and all of these other spaces because there is always a human element to everything we do.” She opined about the future of human rights practices: “As AI grows and changes, I actually think the human element is going to be more essential than ever.”
Carbonetti shared a similar viewpoint on the evolution of human rights within modern paradigm transformations. “Social media, new technology, cultural practices among young people, even just vernaculars among young people change the things that resonate with them. This is always evolving. There’s not one way to talk about this. And the way that we talk about it right now is going to be different in a year or two.” He also underscored the characteristics that will remain consistent. “A human rights approach to any issue is recognizing the multidimensional aspects of that issue, how many things can affect human dignity and how many different practices are required to raise awareness and generate political will to make change. Ultimately, that’s what the human race is really about.”
