Program Overview

Introduction to the Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights Program

The Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights Program (DDHR) promotes holistic training, collaborative research, rigorous theoretical approaches, and creative and innovative scholarly work on historical and contemporary problems. DDHR faculty and students study global and local issues across historical and geographical scales, bringing a critical focus to disasters, migration, displacement, the substantive struggles facing refugees and asylum seekers, and the relationship between these and social inequality.

Program Description

The DDHR Program fosters critical and nuanced perspectives on the substantive concepts of human rights and the international legal norms and institutions that embody and enact them. Our faculty and students, working across sub-disciplines, have engaged in post-conflict investigations using innovative forensic approaches, assisted refugees and their advocates in asylum cases, and aided communities with problems relating to the repatriation of human remains after violent conflicts. DDHR brings together scholarly inquiry into structural and political violence, economic development / underdevelopment, global inequality, resource access / extraction, environmental justice and food (in)security, identity and social inequality, and climate change.

Program Offerings

• The University of Tennessee offers a graduate certificate and an undergraduate concentration in DDHR.
• Required courses include:
  • The Anthropology of Human Rights
  • Forensic Science and Human Rights
  • Disasters
• A range of subdisciplinary electives allows students to specialize while fostering holistic training.

Resources and Opportunities

• Access to the department’s first-rate resources, such as the Forensic Anthropology Center and the Anthropological Genetics Lab.
• Archaeological field schools and ethnographic field research opportunities locally, nationally, and internationally, provide students with opportunities to develop knowledge and skills in-context.

Faculty

• Barbara J. Heath: Professor & Department Head, Anthropological Archaeology
• Kandace D. Hollenbach: Associate Professor & Associate Head; Associate Curator of Paleoethnobotany, McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture, Anthropological Archaeology
• Arsalan Khan: Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology
• De Ann Pendry: Teaching Professor, Cultural Anthropology
• Raja Swamy: Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology
• Dawnie Wolfe Steadman: Professor, Biological Anthropology

Projects

• The Agency of the Dead, Transitional Justice, and Forensic Science in Northern Uganda
• Hurricane Harvey and Houston, a critical disaster studies project

News in DDHR

• Dr. Raja Swamy featured on the “Pretty Heady Stuff” podcast show
• Dr. Narges Bajoghli: Unsilenced: Women’s Protests in Iran
• DDHR Webinar Series

Webinar Series

The DDHR Webinars draw critical attention to contemporary social crises as they impinge upon the physical, social, and economic well-being of human populations across the world. Spanning a range of foci, the series aims to invite conversation and dialogue by inviting scholars to discuss specific themes that link the study of disasters, displacement, and human rights to critical research into the inequalities, structural violence, as well as tenacious forms of popular critique and resistance that shape our contemporary social landscape.