Page 30 - Human Rights Program 2025 Annual Report

29
SCRIBE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS WORKS WITH THE MOVEMENT FOR
HOUSING JUSTICE
Each year, HRP and the Department of English award a Master of
Fine Arts student the Scribes for Human Rights Fellowship to serve
as a writer-in-residence on a human rights topic. Since 2006,
Scribes have written about Tibetan refugee experiences,
implemented a creative writing program for at-risk youth, and more.
This year, Amalia Tenuta researched the role of municipal and state
authorities in policing and evicting unhoused residents in south
Minneapolis. Tenuta is a creative writing MFA student with a focus
on poetry and a background in women and gender studies. Tenuta
presented her findings at a talk titled, “Militant Research,
Institutional Review, & Rights to the Colonial City.”
Amalia Tenuta’s project
Tenuta’s research examined the involvement of the Minnesota Department of Transportation and
their use of third party security for encampment evictions, and the impact of those evictions on
unhoused individuals. Tenuta emphasized the vulnerability that people experiencing housing
insecurity face and how it can exacerbate other issues, such as mental health. “Everybody has
really bad days, but people who are unhoused don’t have the ability to have a bad day inside,”
Tenuta pointed out.
The 2025-2026 Scribe, Amna Chaudhry, was announced this
spring. Chaudhry, a creative writing MFA student, is writing a short
story that details the socio-economic conditions of female textile
laborers in Pakistan and considers potential channels for their
resistance. The work is based on a series of interviews Amna
conducted with garment workers in Karachi. Chaudhry plans to use
this text for study circles on labour and feminism.
Amna Chaudhry
AN INTERNSHIP AT THE UN PAVES THE WAY FOR A CAREER
GROUNDED IN HUMAN RIGHTS
Before her summer spent in Geneva, Switzerland as an intern for
the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights (OHCHR), Elise Kloeppner (MHR ‘25) had never been
outside of Minnesota for more than two weeks, much less lived in a
foreign country. Kloeppner’s experience in Geneva not only
expanded her horizons, but working for the United Nations helped
her grow as a person and as a human rights advocate.
Kloeppner graduated this spring with her Master of Human Rights
(MHR), with a self-designed concentration in social psychology.
The Master of Human Rights program has a partnership with the
OHCHR to send one student each summer to intern with funding to
support their experience.
Elise Kloeppner
In Geneva, Kloeppner was assigned to work on the Rights of Older Persons team, which was
tasked with building a strategy and framework to ensure the rights and wellbeing of older
persons around the world. Her role was to build a network of nonprofit organizations and NGOs
working on the human rights of older persons in UN member states. Working at the UN has
helped Kloeppner see the complexities of human rights work. “You have to come up with real
solutions and they might not be the most straightforward,” she says. With her experience in
Geneva, Kloeppner feels confident in her ability to figure problems out as they come her way.