Imagine… 

I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with our class on Tuesday! I thought it was so neat that you took the time to share your experience.   -Undergraduate student

It was incredibly valuable to hear the actual voice of an eyewitness. Her narrative was powerful and I felt that--as a primary source--she brought me to a better understanding of the atrocities happening than any article could.   -Undergraduate Student

I am so delighted to share my story with you all. Always a pleasure to tell my experience to those working and learning to improve the human rights situation on our globe.   -Torture survivor

I am honored to have the opportunity to share my experience with you all. I am glad that you get something out of my story. My story is not a unique one. But I hope it will help something in the understanding of the cost of individual liberty that is being paid by many of people in different part of the world. And I believe that sharing experience will help to develop the global front in the struggle for justice. As MLK has put it "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."   -Former Political Prisoner

I wanted to say thank you for the opportunity to talk with your students. Many of them have written to me, with words of encouragement, support and thanks   -UN Special Rapporteur

Your career has inspired me to believing that it's possible to find something you enjoy and follow through with it despite demands to conform to policies and political pressures. I am a very strongly opinionated person, so seeing how you have taken the job you have and changed it for the better, gives me faith that one day I too can accomplish what I set out to do. Thank you again for taking time out of your day to Skype with my class!   -Undergraduate Student to US Federal District Court Judge

It was my great honor and pleasure to Skype with your class. The questions were so good it seemed like a law school class! I have unyielding faith in your generation, much more than in mine!!!! All my very best and I hope our paths cross again. It may happen!!!   -Federal Judge to Undergraduate Student

I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with our class on Tuesday! I thought it was so neat that you took the time to share your experience. -Undergraduate Student

Though I did not ask any questions during the conference call, I believe I speak for many of my peers when I say that this was because I was in awe after hearing all that you had to say. In my experience, I have heard of very few people who attempt to go so far above and beyond their job description in order to make a true difference. I have heard of fewer people who are actually successful and consistent in doing this. -Undergraduate Student

Thank you so much for taking the time to skype with our class on Tuesday! Your passion for your work really resonated with me, and it was incredibly motivating to hear. What you said about the youthful generation and our obligation with regards to bending the moral arc--I've also taken that to heart, and I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to just listen and learn from the experiences you shared. Thank you again! -Undergraduate Student

I would just like to say that I personally felt very honored that you took time out of your day to have a conversation with me and my peers. It was truly amazing learning about you and your endeavors in person rather than reading about them in articles and textbooks. You are an inspiration, and I thank you so much for all that you do. -Undergraduate Student

I bragged to my roommate that I got to talk with a federal judge that morning. -Undergraduate Student

How great an opportunity it was to have such a great and relevant speaker personally reach out to our class. -Student

She was a wealth of information in addition to being charming, well spoken and a delight to listen to. She made an otherwise inaccessible or morose topic engaging and more interesting than it otherwise may have been. -Undergraduate Student

Speaking with the Lost Boys of South Sudan was an amazing experience. It is always great to see individuals who have gone through so much, happy and thriving in their new lives. -Student

The importance and impact of human rights issues increased by skyping and having guest speakers in class because it allows me to see how these issues personally affect individuals. -Student

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights “is the voice of millions of human beings, victims of oppression, misery and ignorance, who aspire to live under conditions of greater justice, freedom and simple dignity” -Rene Cassin, a key drafter of the UDHR

“When I agreed to share my experience for the book, I found it was too painful to think about some of the things that happened, so I made a compromise in my mind. I altered some details that I thought wouldn’t matter. I didn’t want to tell exactly what happened in order not to relive these painful moments all over again.” -Shin Dong-Nyuk

"If anything, the factual discrepancies raised in Stoll's book make Menchú's story a richer subject of study. The best teaching devices are those that are gently flawed." - Timothy Brook on the Menchú controversy. -Timothy Brook

The flow in narrated lives also becomes a means for increasing numbers of people around the globe to imagine themselves as global citizens within the contemporary human rights regime: the ensemble of discourses, instruments, institutions, and venues of advocacy and adjudication that address injustice and immiseration and manage their geopolitics. -Sidonie Smith

“Too often, the research agenda of developing countries is set by others outside the country. The golden rule of development – ‘He who has the gold makes the rules’ – usually applies.” Kwasi Wiredu -Kwasi Wiredu

Of course, I don't deny that women are oppressed the world over. What I do deny is the right of "civilizing" or colonizing projects to claim to rescue and free women from this oppression. So I composed my firecracker of a sentence—"White men are saving brown women from brown men"—to put people on their guard, and to get them to ask of future civilizing missions: is this really about saving women? Or is it about a superpower further consolidating its power, and denying others speech? -Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak

Perhaps, the first step in the activist journey of hyper solidarity is for human rights education activists to learn from the victims of the perfidies of power rather than to presume to educate them in the struggle for survival and justice. Humility before the victims of gross and flagrant violations of human rights, I believe, is critically indispensable for the would-be human rights education communities of the future. ... The problem then becomes one of how may we educate the human rights educators, rather than the people whom they so ardently wish to serve? -Upendra Baxi, Scholar, Attorney, and Activist

“Some of the reasons that Western observers struggle to understand testimonio can be traced to the fact that this type of genre blurs the traditional boundaries that exist between fact and fiction, material truths and social truths, and the acts of recording and witnessing. In testimonio, notes Vilches-Norat (1990), ‘the construction of the text constitutes the articulation of the subaltern life. . .the once mute is allowed a voice, and it ultimately forms the ulterior motive of the storytelling’ (p. 155). By treating testimonio as a type of communal device for the creation and dissemination of truth, many Mayans and other Latin Americans feel that they are gaining a voice in the political conversations that take place in their region.” (Avant-Mier and Hasian 330-331). -Avant-Mier and Hasian

What is of interest is the story of the interviewee's experience, not just facts or opinions. Try to get the specifics of his or her lived experiences before asking him or her to evaluate an experience or to offer analysis. In this connection, always ask the interviewee to speak in terms of his or her concrete experiences and not simply about what he or she thinks people in general felt or did. -UCLA Center

A recorded oral history is more than just a quote on a page in a book. It is a meaningful story expressed by the person who owns that story. -Doug Boyd

The formation of critical consciousness allows people to question the nature of their historical and social situation—to read their world—with the goal of acting as subjects in the creation of a democratic society (which was new for Brazil at that time). For education, Freire implies a dialogic exchange between teachers and students, where both learn, both question, both reflect and both participate in meaning-making. -Paulo Freire

Direct quotations from the poor often appear as disembodied voices at the beginnings of chapters, or carefully contained within case study boxes. As such they do much to add ‘ethnographic interest’, but in contrast to the state intentions of PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) they do little to interrupt the ‘expert’ voices that dominate the main text” -Glyn Williams

The colonizers: “In the first place,they expropriated the cultural discoveries of the colonized peoples most apt for the development of capitalism to the profit of the European center. Second, they repressed as much as possible the colonized forms of knowledge production, the models of the production of meaning, their symbolic universe, the model of expression and of objectification and subjectivity” -Anibal Quijano

There is a strong, albeit contested, current within feminism which holds that speaking for others---even for other women---is arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate. Feminist scholarship has a liberatory agenda which almost requires that women scholars speak on behalf of other women, and yet the dangers of speaking across differences of race, culture, sexuality, and power are becoming increasingly clear to all. -Linda Alcoff