About This Event

Are our buildings ethically sourced, as well as sustainably designed? This is the question at the core of Design for Freedom, the movement led by Grace Farms to eliminate forced and child labor from the building materials supply chain. As we confront the climate crisis, we must approach sustainable solutions that address the human suffering endured in the making of building materials, as well as the damage being done to the environment in the process.

This event explores ways in which companies and communities can work together to drive human rights-respecting market transformation and address the challenges and opportunities of ethical decarbonization in the construction sector.

Reception

Following the event, please join us for a catered reception in the Dodd Lounge.

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Our Speakers

Sharon Prince is the CEO and Founder of Grace Farms Foundation. Prince commissioned Pritzker Prize-winning SANAA architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa to design Grace Farms, which has become widely known as a global humanitarian and cultural center located in New Canaan, Connecticut.

The Foundation’s interdisciplinary humanitarian mission is to pursue peace through nature, arts, justice, community, faith, and Design for Freedom, a new movement to eliminate forced labor from the building materials supply chain.

Since opening, Grace Farms has garnered numerous prestigious awards for contributions to architecture, environmental sustainability, and social good, including the AIA National 2017 Architecture Honor Award and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize.

For her work launching Design for Freedom, Prince was recognized by Fast Company as one of the Most Creative People in Business 2022 for “cleaning up construction” and the AIA NY and Center for Architecture recognized her with the NYC Visionary Award.

Nora Rizzo is the first Ethical Materials Director of Grace Farms Foundation, focusing on the Design for Freedom movement. She serves as Ethical Material Advisor on Design for Freedom Pilot Projects and led the development of the Design for Freedom Toolkit.

She previously spent over a decade as Director of Sustainability for Fusco Corporation and has dedicated more than 15 years to creating change in the built environment through her sustainability and social equity work. She is on the Board of Directors for mindful MATERIALS and the CT Green Building Council.

Anna Dyson is the Hines Professor of Architecture, with an appointment in the School of Environment (YSE) at Yale University. She teaches design, technology, and theory at the School of Architecture. At Yale, Anna has also founded a new research entity titled CEA - Center for Ecosystems in Architecture. CEA is a joint initiative between the Yale Schools of Architecture, Forestry & Environmental Studies to unite researchers across multiple fields to develop transformative systems for the Built Environment. CEA supports Masters and PhD level students as well as professional researchers towards the invention and development of building systems that metabolize energy, water and materials while supporting biodiverse ecosystems. CEA has its central think tank within the heart of Yale University in New Haven. Dyson was previously the Founding Director of CASE, The Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE) in 2007 which hosts the Graduate Program in Architectural Sciences / Built Ecologies. 

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Sponsors

This event is supported by the Business & Human Rights Initiative, Economic & Social Rights Program, and Engineering for Human Rights Initiative at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, as well as the Grace Farms Foundation.

Breanna Bonner will present on, “‘The Space Between Black and Liberation’: Analyzing Black Women’s Experiences of Intersectional Invisibility Within Liberation Movements.” Her project advisor is Evelyn Simien (Political Science).

Nathan Howard will discuss his project, “Homofascism: The Queering of Hate.” His project advisor is Tracy Llanera (Philosophy).

Lunch will be served. Please register below to join us in person.

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About This Talk

In recent years, we have witnessed a major shift in how corporate stakeholders—investors, shareholders, employees, consumers, communities—understand the content of responsible business conduct. The legal landscape is rapidly evolving with the adoption of new hard law in the EU and its Member States, which requires large businesses to conduct ongoing, risk-based, human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) throughout their supply chains, as well as trade sanctions regimes that push companies to carry out more and better due diligence in their supply chains to ensure that the goods they want to bring into and sell in the US and EU are not made with forced labor.

Contracts can play a critical role in supporting more robust HREDD processes, making the commitment to HREDD between buyers and suppliers across the supply chain legally binding, and facilitating the flow of information between the contracting parties and across the supply chain. That information can be used for multiple purposes, including to better equip portfolio companies to conduct comprehensive HREDD and prevent adverse human rights and environmental (HRE) impacts, address inquiries from regulators, report on non-financial performance, and to provide more effective HRE remediation, when/as needed.

With HRE performance becoming an increasingly important component of companies’ financial performance, investors are understandably interested in learning more about how to engage with portfolio companies to achieve better HRE outcomes. We will discuss the role of HREDD-aligned contracts in helping investors evaluate potential risks to a target company’s or existing portfolio company’s HRE performance when making investment and divestment or sale decisions.

Download the Investor Guide on Responsible Contracting

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About The Speakers

Chavi Keeney Nana is the director of the Equitable Global Supply Chain program at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. She is also a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School and a US Legal Advisor for the Responsible Contracting Project. She teaches anticorruption law and business and human rights, and supervises students in the Human Trafficking Clinic and Business and Human Rights Lab.

Sarah Dadush’s research lies at the intersection of business and human rights. Her scholarship explores various legal mechanisms for improving the social and environmental performance of multinational corporations. She is the founding Director of the Rutgers Law School’s Business & Human Rights Law Program and the Responsible Contracting Project (RCP), the mission of which is to improve human rights in global supply chains through innovative contracting practices.

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Sponsors

This event is supported by the Business & Human Rights Initiative and Economic & Social Rights Program at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute.

About the Workshop

This workshop offers UConn graduate students a unique opportunity to learn about human rights practice from Charlie Clements, a notable human rights campaigner/practitioner on the global stage. Using examples from his lifetime of experience and achievement, Charlie will discuss what it takes to start and maintain a successful social movement, with an emphasis on having dialogue with students about how to turn these lessons into future successes in their own human rights work. 

About the Facilitator

As President of Physicians for Human Rights, Charlie Clements, MD, MPH was a key member of the coalition that produced the international treaty to ban landmines that won the Nobel Peace Prize. As a medical practitioner during the civil wars in Central America in the 1980s, Charlie inspired an Oscar-winning documentary about his work. Clements has also served as the Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School

Lunch will be served. Please register below.

Have a food allergy we should be aware of? Let us know in the comments of your registration. 

Making the most of every opportunity will ensure you start your career on the right foot. The Judicial Branch Experiential Learning Program will share tips on how to impress prospective and new employers. We will be discussing everything from first impressions to attitude and etiquette. Please contact Professor Kimberly R. Bergendahl if you have questions and/or need accommodations to attend this event at kimberly.bergendahl@uconn.edu

Universal voting– redefining voting as not only a fundamental right but as a required civic duty– is a game-changing reform for American democracy. Though never really discussed in the United States, it is successfully utilized in 26 democratic countries, in some for 100 years. Join us to learn and discuss universal voting, and the impact it could have in Connecticut.

This spring we will review the Supreme Court’s recent decisions and preview important upcoming cases in the area of Election Law, exploring issues relating to voter access, minority representation, candidate eligibility, and the role of courts in policing the electoral processes. The distinguished participants in this roundtable discussion are:

• Guy-Uriel Charles (Harvard Law School)
• Yasmin Dawood (University of Toronto Faculty of Law)
• Ruth Greenwood (Harvard Law School)
• Doug Spencer (University of Colorado Law School)

Light refreshments will be served before the discussion.

RSVP here!

The speaker will be Daniel B. Prieto who currently is the managing partner of Range Strategic Advisors, LLC. Prieto has held influential positions in industry (including at Google, McKinsey, and IBM) and in the US government (including on the White House National Security Council staff and Capitol Hill).

Political Science undergraduate students will present posters showcasing their research. Refreshments will be provided and the event is free and open to the public with the sponsorship of the Alan R. Bennett Professorship.

Dr. Barry Zellen

PhD, University of Lapland (2015)

Arctic Exceptionalism in a Contested World: Navigating New Challenges to Circumpolar Unity

Dr Zellen’s talk is a preview of his newest book, Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World, which is due to be released this summer.  The book is a structural analysis of the roots and endurance of Arctic cooperation, and the rise of what until 2022 was quite commonly called “Arctic Exceptionalism,” a term that has since come under much fire as the profound consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rippled beyond Europe, fostering a complex re-organization of the international system aimed to isolating Russia from the globalized world but which has induced instead a re-bifurcation of world politics into western and eastern blocs, largely corresponding to the late-19th to mid-20th century geopolitical constructs of Rimland and Heartland.  This re-emergence of competing blocs has quickly reached the Arctic, leading many to believe Arctic Exceptionalism was over, or perhaps had never existed at all.