Volume 11, Number 1 (2026) Human Rights

Introduction

This special issue of Binghamton University’s Undergraduate Journal, “Human Rights,” is a collection of selected essays from students who participated in the Source Project stream of the same name in 2024-2025. In this course, students approached human rights through transdisciplinary methods drawn from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, analyzing legal instruments, human rights reports, quantitative datasets, and creative forms such as erasure poetry. Their research was further shaped by a community-engaged partnership with the Ghana ThinkTank, an international artists' collective, which culminated in a public exhibition and dialogue with formerly detained men from Guantánamo Bay. The course sought to develop students’ abilities to critically evaluate human rights claims, engage with primary and secondary sources, and produce original research grounded in real-world case studies and public-facing scholarship. The articles discuss a range of contemporary issues in the realm of human rights, from correctional surveillance to youth incarceration, prison conditions, sexual abuse in custody, the consequences of imprisonment on families, human trafficking, and food insecurity. This special edition highlights the depth of undergraduate research produced through the Source Project and positions student research as a vital contribution to ongoing conversations in human rights studies.