Faculty Highlight: Glenn Mitoma

In this interview, Glenn shares more about his background, the classes he will teach in the Fall, his favorite spots on campus, and more.

I’ve sometimes said, my background is, as someone who is a perpetual academic poacher, always ranging outside my field in search of interesting quarry. My undergraduate degree is in photography, my graduate degrees are in Cultural Studies. Methodologically, I’m primarily a historian. I was most recently in a school of education, and now have an appointment in the Political Science department and ISHR. In addition to demonstrating how easily I’m distracted, I think it may suggest how my interest, and by extension my career, in human rights has been pursued from the intellectual margins. Practically speaking, I’m interested in understanding and enacting human rights as a form of pedagogy that has the capacity to create and transform both individuals and communities. To be honest, I can’t recall ever “deciding” to pursue a career in human rights, but I suspect that I’m doing what I’m doing because I’ve been inspired and encouraged by the struggles for justice that have shaped our world.

This year, I’m teaching Introduction to Human Rights for graduate students, a seminar on Human Rights and Education, as well as two courses specifically designed for undergraduates, Introduction to Genocide Studies and History of Human Rights. All four draw on key aspects of my research and reflect my commitment to creating classroom environments that embody the core elements of human rights education. This includes not only supporting students as they develop foundational knowledge or specialized expertise but also fostering collaborative inquiry into the most vexing challenges of human rights practice—i.e., how this knowledge might be transformed into meaningful action. Finally, I try across all of these courses to make space for each individual to develop their own intellectual, political, and ethical relationships with the human rights project. 

I am convinced that the human rights project is an educational project, as much as it is a legal or political project, and I feel incredibly fortunate that I get to be a part of that as a member of the ISHR faculty. Of course, it’s gratifying to be a part of students’ journey of discovery and to co-create with them each semester a completely new experience of learning about, for, and through human rights. I particularly enjoy fostering the skills of dialogue and deliberation—key components of not only academic inquiry but democratic citizenship—that allow students to engage with difficult or contentious topics in a spirit of mutual respect. Inherent in such skills is the willingness for critical self-reflection, and thus I’m keen to make space for both student silence and response, for humility and uncertainty, fordeep conviction and brilliant insight. We have students with such an incredible range of experiences and perspectives, and indeed some deep-lived expertise in human rights, that I think this opportunity to learn from each other, when effectively facilitated, can be among the most powerful aspects of their time in the program.

ISHR is unique in a number of ways, but I’ll highlight three here. First, as far as human rights centers go, it's been around a long time. Established in 1978, well before the boom in human rights studies that emerged in the late 1990s, the Institute has been around long enough to have seen that human rights are fundamentally historical, i.e. that what counts as “human rights” is constantly changing. Second, ISHR manages to balance critical inquiry with practical engagement. Many programs are focused either on ivory tower scholarship or professional training and advocacy. ISHR has fostered a productive synergy/tension between theoretical critique and action-oriented practice across its research, teaching, and programming. Finally, ISHR attracts students who are all committed to human rights yet have such a range of interests, experiences, and ambitions, that every human rights classroom is an amazing mix of diversity in perspectives with solidarity in spirit. Half of our undergraduate majors are General Studies students—a higher ratio than any other major at Columbia—which I think is one indicator of how the human rights program speaks to people who come from different backgrounds 

Given all this, I’m excited about our new Minor, which presents us with the challenge of providing a meaningly rich experience of human rights education within the limited framework of five courses, but that also presents the opportunity to allow an even broader range of students—particularly those in more time-intensive STEM majors--access to the human rights program.

I guess I’m less interested in giving advice about pursuing a career in human rights, than I am about pursuing human rights in their careers, by which I mean, I don’t think of human rights as a single profession, but rather a perspective and approach that you can bring to any field. What I would tell students is that, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said, human rights practice begins close to home and that “working” for human rights doesn’t need to (and mostly doesn’t) take place at the UN, or the ICC, or Human Rights Watch. Rather, they can bring the values of human rights and an understanding of how human rights mechanisms work into any profession—teacher, doctor, engineer, chef, organ grinder. Working for human rights requires folks in every field to have an ability to understand power and systems, and to have the capacity to collaborate, build, and sustain community.  Just as (or probably, more) important, this applies outside of the vocational sphere and should inform our civic and community lives—and potentially our spiritual and family lives as well.

If I’m being honest then the coolest thing I’ve seen on campus are the south stairwells in the SIPA building. They’ve got an intense brutalist/cyberpunk vibe going on. I feel like I’m in Blade Runner.  But more seriously, a spot that is really worth spending some time in is the Barnard Zine Library.