Dr. Kjell Anderson is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law and the Director of the Master of Human Rights program.
Faculty of Law professor SSHRC grants to support significant Human Rights projects
International and community-led collaborations at core of $2.75 million in grants
Dr. Kjell Anderson, assistant professor in the Faculty of Law and Director of the Master of Human Rights program, was a successful co-applicant on two significant Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC): one Partnership Grant, and one New Frontiers in Research grant.
Together with international researchers, Anderson is involved with a project on the Visual Storytelling and Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights Education.
“At its core, the project brings together survivors of mass atrocities with artists to create graphic novels highlighting their experience of genocide and other human rights violations,” Anderson explained. “These graphic novels – on The Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, and Canada – will then be used for a range of educational activities.”
The project team has assembled a global network of scholars, community organizations, survivors, activists, educators, artists, and filmmakers across 17 countries to address a core question: what are the best Human Rights-focused practices for collecting, preserving, and teaching the testimonies of survivors of mass atrocity?
The University of Manitoba’s role in the project is multi-faceted, involving scholarship funding for Master of Human Rights students to prepare (human rights) educational materials, co-hosting an artist-survivors roundtable with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and an exhibition at the School of Art Gallery. Anderson will be part of the central steering group of the project, while also working directly on the Syria and Iraq novels.
In addition to this major project, Anderson, along with Centre for Human Rights Research director, Professor Adele Perry and other University of Manitoba-based scholars, was also a successful co-applicant on a $250,000 New Frontiers in Research grant for the project “A Long Walk: Repatriation, Decolonization, and Reconciliation”. This Indigenous community-led project involves establishing a University of Manitoba process for the repatriation of ancestor’s remains as a practice of reconciliation.
Anderson is a jurist and social scientist specialised in the study of human rights, mass violence, and mass atrocities. He is the author of Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (Routledge 2019), and co-editor with Erin Jessee of Approaching Perpetrators: Insights on Ethics, Methods, and Theory (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). He has been Director of the Master of Human Rights program at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Law since it began in 2019.