Back to School: Teaching What the Moment Demands

By Jehane Sedky, Executive Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights

As students prepare to return to school in September—and as newly admitted students arrive brimming with energy, enthusiasm and a desire to make a difference—the intrinsic connection between health and human rights is more important than ever.

What was once seen as visionary—the idea that access to health is a human right—is now widely accepted as uncontroversial. And yet health inequities are pervasive, not simply a reality of our time, but a barometer of injustice. Children—nearly 30 percent of the world’s population—are particularly at risk of attacks on their health and human rights because, while they depend on state services (such as health care and schooling) for their basic needs, in most societies, they have no political voice.

In the early 2000s, when I worked at UNICEF, we were still in the relatively early years of efforts to turn into reality the principles set out in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. We spent many hours discussing—and, in some cases, trying to persuade others of—the idea that health and human rights were fundamentally interconnected: a child denied the conditions necessary for health could not fully realize their rights, just as a child whose rights were violated (e.g. by being trafficked) could not fully realize their health. A child might be vaccinated, we would say, but if that same child was exploited or abused, we could hardly claim that we had secured their health.    

The connection may seem self-evident now. But we are living in a different moment, and the conversation has shifted.

In a recent exchange with Dr. Margaret (Maggie) Sullivan, one of our scholars, she reflected on how rapidly changing times are reshaping what our students need from us; what we teach today should reflect the world they will encounter when they graduate, and it should equip them to deal with changes that will inevitably occur years and decades from then. How do we then prepare for incoming students for a fast-changing and challenging world?

A key part of the answer is that we see our scholarship and teaching, that is, our commitment to providing an education that advances social justice and health rights, not just as products of our academic expertise but also as rooted in our practice. Many of our scholars, like Maggie, are also practitioners working in clinics, hospitals and community-based organizations. Their practice informs our research and teaching. Our Child Protection Program—the first of its kind at Harvard, led by our Director of Research Professor Jacqueline Bhabha together with Rebecca Shin—puts this approach into practice, bringing graduate students and mid-career professionals into conversation with cutting-edge scholarship and the realities of child protection work.

The challenge before us is how to move from the present toward the future while the present is still unfolding. Our Center sits at the intersection of health and human rights, bringing together a wealth of expertise on what happens when marginalized populations are denied their health, their rights, or both. Grounded in history, research and practice, that expertise enables us not only to document what is happening now, but also to anticipate its consequences and prepare our students to respond.

This work requires a deep understanding of history and context. Our scholars focus on populations that have long been neglected and whose experiences—and scholarship—have often been marginalized. Dr. Magdalena (Magda) Matache’s book, The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism, exemplifies this approach by tracing how centuries of Roma enslavement continue to shape present-day structures of exclusion and inequality that affect the Roma minority in Europe.

Each setting is, of course, distinct: yet across contexts, children’s health is shaped not only by access to health care narrowly defined, but by a much broader set of social determinants of health and, in some cases, by the conditions that shape how these determinants impinge on populations. The social and power structures—the material circumstances and underlying historical and political forces into which children and their families are born, what they bear witness to, and their lived experiences—matter.  My colleague Dr. Bram Wispelwey recently co-authored a thought-provoking article on this very question as it relates to settler colonial settings where the lives of indigenous populations are shaped by an array of powerful, embedded conditions. Our migration research, directed by Professor Jacqueline Bhabha with Dr. Vasileia Digidiki, has shown in numerous studies that the stressors children and their families face following forced displacement—whether directly affecting their bodies or arising from what they witness during their journeys—have very real and consequential impacts. 

The FXB Center has long advanced conceptual frameworks in our effort to advance a human rights-based approach that is rooted in a deeper understanding of social dynamics. For example, the Center’s Cost of Inaction initiative, launched in 2008, was built on a simple but profound insight: that failure to intervene has measurable social, economic and health costs that compound over time.

Over the years, our work has expanded to study outliers that succeed despite the odds, and what that teaches us about the limitations of our current conceptual frameworks. Professor Jacqueline Bhabha, along with Dr. Magda Matache for example, used the notion of “push out” to challenge the idea that children and their families should be blamed for “school drop-out.”

As the issues we study evolve, so too do our research, our questions, our teaching and practice. Our responsibility is not simply to respond to changing conditions, but also to question the frameworks that have long defined health and human rights—examining where they fall short, challenging the assumptions they carry and developing new approaches that respond more effectively to emerging realities. We welcome the challenge and opportunity of working with our current and incoming students to make these ambitions a reality. 

 The above represents solely the views of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the institution.