We work with universities in Armenia to support educational human rights programmes. Together with the American University of Armenia (AUA) and Yerevan State University (YSU), we have been exploring different ways to support universities, lecturers and professors with their human rights and clinical legal education initiatives.
Learn more about our work with Academia and Research in Armenia.
As a part of this work, we got a visit from Philippa Mullins, Assistant Professor at the American University of Armenia. She teaches on AUA’s MA programme in Human Rights and Social Justice, facilitating courses on social justice, power, knowledge, identity, and research methods. For the first time this summer, she led an interdisciplinary Human Rights Clinic. The Clinic’s development was supported by RWI and created an opportunity for students to engage in small group applied research projects.
Philippa stayed at the Raoul Wallenberg institute to exchange with professors from the LL.M. in International Human Rights Law and the MA in Human Rights Studies at Lund University. The interdisciplinary profile of these programmes reflects the MA programme at AUA.
Students come to us from a huge variety of backgrounds. It has been very useful to have conversations both about how we benefit from disciplinary diversity in the classroom, and how we create coherence and balance in developing an interdisciplinary programme.”
The Raoul Wallenberg Institute has also facilitated training at AUA on transformative, justice-driven pedagogies. These pedagogies use critical, dialogical methods to support learners to reflect on and transform their relationship with structures of power and inequality in their societies. While in Lund, Philippa has continued these discussions and hopes to build collaborative work on what it means to teach social justice in a way which engages with trauma and power inequities in and beyond the classroom.
An engagement I have in common with the researchers at RWI and Lund University more widely is an interest in transformative pedagogies. It’s been helpful to learn from others’ practices and experiences in the classroom, as well as to reflect on the different contexts within which we teach.”
While at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Philippa has also been able to connect with academics who share her interest in research and teaching on disability rights.
Philippa’s stay in Lund was carried out under RWI’s programme with the support of Swedish Development Cooperation (Sida).