The François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights was founded and endowed by Albina du Boisrouvray in 1993. Her goal was to provide protection to children by furthering the vision for health and human rights of the first center director Jonathan Mann, and it received the enthusiastic collaboration of Dean Harvey Fineberg.
Our Mission
We use interdisciplinary approaches to promote equity and dignity for those oppressed by racism, poverty and stigma, nationally and around the world. We are proud to partner with a diverse group of scholars, educators, elected officials, government agencies, nonprofit organizations and members of the international policy community to advance health and human rights, and to show the harmful effects of violations on children.
Our Vision
We envision a world that fulfills the human rights of all people, with a special attention to children, and protects them from injustices imposed by discrimination, poverty, conflict and disaster.
Our Work
Childhood Protection
Children’s rights are at the heart of FXB’s work, and its programs are a response to the concrete implementation of their rights from conception to adulthood, as defined by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted on November 20, 1989.
Our initiatives are comprehensive and multifaceted, addressing various aspects of childhood protection, such as:
- The prevention of human trafficking and labor exploitation in India and the United States while advancing the rights of children in undocumented, refugee, and detention settings and providing a framework to strengthen multidisciplinary education around the policies and practices of child protection.
- Addressing the adverse perinatal impacts for Black-birthing people residing in resource-deprived neighborhoods over their life course, racial bias training in medical education and clinical practice, race-based medicine, algorithmic bias, and health policy.
- Assessing how systemic and structural racism via the carceral state and biased social policies and practices target the Black family and community and how these structures further perpetuate racial inequities in health, including psychiatric and substance use health outcomes.
- Developing critical quantitative, computational, & mixed methodologies to detect, examine, and quantify how structural racism in medicine jeopardizes healthcare delivery, access, and quality.
- Exploring ways to advance health equity, with particular interests in advocating data disaggregation practices and examining the intersections of structural racism and health.
Crisis Resilience and Response
Through advocacy and research, we increase awareness of the human consequences of inequitable responses to disasters and the impact of conflict on health and human rights of civilians.
Distress Migration
We conduct research on key child migration and displacement issues in support of communities forced out of their homeland by poverty, conflict, climate change, and state-sponsored campaigns of discrimination and violence. Visit the program page here.
Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights
The Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights is an academic hub engaging in a broadly collaborative justice and rights-based approach in the study of Palestinian health through knowledge production, education, and multidisciplinary community engagement. Visit the program page here.
Racial Justice
We strive to address all forms of structural violence domestically and abroad, including deaths by legal intervention. This includes calling attention to the ways structural violence has contributed to the U.S. opioid crisis, which disproportionately affects communities of color. Visit the racial justice program page here.
Roma Program
Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights founded the Roma Program at Harvard in 2012. The goal of the program is multifold: to develop a body of research and methodologies that examine and give voice to topics and issues Roma people prioritize; to spotlight and amplify the voices of leading and emerging Roma scholars, organizations, activists, and leaders; to shift the field of Romani Studies away from the margins of academic interest and co-center it in social, health, and political theory and multidisciplinary, multi-thematic, and multiregional studies; and to create connections and collaborations with other communities of scholarship. Visit the program page here.
