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Congratulations to Professor Jennifer Llewellyn, who recently received two federal SSHRC grants. Both of her research projects bring academic and community partners together and explore ways of bringing about the fundamental social changes needed to ensure human rights.

An Insight Grant worth about $130,000 over five years will support research on a Restorative Approach to Human Rights Theory and Practice. While the last half century has seen significant developments and reforms to protect and promote human rights, there are those who argue that it fails to adequately vindicate and protect individual human rights and those who suggest current approaches don’t do enough to achieve the fundamental social change required to ensure human rights.

The project, which will likely conclude with a book or series of articles, considers the implications of this approach for international and domestic human rights protection building upon Llewellyn’s previous and current work on international peacebuilding and on human rights protection in Canada.

“This project will also allow greater partnerships between the law school and human rights institutions.”

“This grant is exciting because it will support research that will have us think about the connections between domestic and international human rights and how we can best protect them,” says Llewellyn. “It will also allow greater partnerships between the law school and human rights institutions. It will also facilitate the involvement of law students, who will work as research assistants or interns.”

Llewellyn’s work has been leading the way for the development of a new approach to human rights protection. She was an advisor to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission in its recent reforms to incorporate a restorative approach and, more recently, in the review of the Northwest Territories Human Rights System that recommended the adoption of such an approach that was accepted by the Commission.

Sharing truth to create a legacy

Llewellyn is also a co-applicant for a $200,000 Partnership Development Grant over three years, which will create Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR), a “living history” 3D-imaging-technology educational tool for high school students to learn about the institutionalized racism and abuses suffered by some of the approximately 880 residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children over its 70-year history.

DOHR aims to understand what has happened in the past in order to ensure a better future for African Nova Scotian children and their communities. The project is in partnership with the Restorative Inquiry and several other provincial and national university and government partners. It is being directed by history education scholar and researcher Kristina Llewellyn at the University of Waterloo, who is Llewellyn's younger sister. “Our interests overlap on a restorative approach in education,” she says, "and there was a great chance to bring our mutual research and work together in support of the important work of the restorative inquiry."

“The project builds upon the restorative approach to education we have been developing in Nova Scotia and considers explicitly the role of education in the work of restorative justice and reconciliation,” says Llewellyn. As part of DOHR, three former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children spanning different generations – Tony Smith, Tracey Dorrington-Skinner, and Gerald Morrison – will engage students by sharing their personal stories as former residents of the Home. Wearing the high-tech headgear, students will “walk with” and hear the oral histories of former residents as they take students around the Home and point out their classrooms.

“DOHR will give the former residents another way to share their truth and to create a legacy that’s accessible.”

The digital stories will be accompanied by a curricular unit, produced with teachers, for Grade 11 African Canadian studies and Canadian history courses in the province. “DOHR will give the former residents another way to share their truth and to create a legacy that’s accessible. It’s also an innovative way of bringing history alive and a powerful way for students to be able to ‘meet’ and understand former residents’ experiences,” says Llewellyn. “This is particularly important for the next generation, who are inheriting the legacies of historic and systemic racism in the province, so they can make a difference in relationships toward reconciliation in the future.”