Human Rights Academia and the Problem of Solitude

This post was prompted by a survey of individuals who work with violent and disturbing “user-generated content” as part of their work. The survey was aimed at journalists and human rights and humanitarian workers who work with user generated content as part of their work.  Reading the call, I was stumped:  Do I qualify? 

This is the problem with human rights academia: unlike our colleagues in other areas, we often aren’t just academics. Our research touches on daily human suffering. Sometimes we engage, sometimes we intentionally disengage. We’re often asked to be advocates or activists, but we always remain academics.

So do we fit in as “human rights and humanitarian workers?” 

I’m definitely not a field operative. And I don’t work in a headquarters.  But I do, unfortunately, engage with a great deal of user-generated content.

Some of that content fuels my research, some fuels my teaching. All of it has a profound effect that I hadn’t quite realized or appreciated until I tried to fill out this survey while sitting in a coffee shop.

By the way, I did ask and the relevant researchers assured me I was someone they wanted to hear from.  So, I started it while sitting at a coffee shop, thinking it’ll just take a moment.  It would be a quick little break from a sentence I’d been trying to construct for five minutes.

And it did just take a moment – the survey was less than 3 minutes in total.  But somewhere around minute 1.5, I almost started to cry. In public. Alone.

Anyone who knows me well knows how much I hate crying in public, much less crying in public while looking at my phone or computer. I think it must make everyone around me incredibly uncomfortable, if not slightly afraid of my mental state. I find it embarrassing and stupid, even when it shouldn’t be either. It makes me feel like a five-year-old child separated from her mother at the mall, a ridiculous feeling when I think of the kinds of things that cause me to cry in public.

But the survey asked: “can you talk to your colleagues about the trauma?”

This is a difficult question for me, not just because I’ve recently moved universities. In my old University there was a huge human rights network, plus other PhD students. In my old University, I shared an office with between 3 and 8 other PhDs. While those working on non-human rights issues didn’t always understand my work, they did understand why my work could cause secondary trauma. My colleagues let me cry or vent or yell at my computer screen when I needed to.

In my new university? 

Let me start by saying I like my new university and I enjoy the people here.  It’s nice and friendly and I do think people are committed to making the world a better place.

But, it’s a new dynamic and I’m not yet sure how to navigate it.

I’m not a PhD student. I sit in an office by myself. I currently interact on a regular basis with no more than 8 people.

And I’m supposed to be a “serious” academic.

Do “serious academics” really yell at their computer screens for reasons other than the data not working? 

There’s also not a particularly large network of human rights scholars here, and even fewer within my discipline. The idea of staring at pictures of burned down and bulldozed homes, of pictures of children’s clothing amongst a pile of rubbish, of videos of police or military pointing weapons at protesters … my corporate law colleagues can’t understand that. It’s simply not part of their world.

And even amongst the few who work on human rights and humanitarian law issues here, I’m not sure how much they engage with the reality of what we do as opposed to the legality of it. 

If I wanted to, I could do that… analyze legal issues without engaging in the context in which they are raised.  But, that seems so empty to me, pointless, and almost cruel or inhumane as the solutions I would offer have little in the way of relief to those actually facing the issue.

I don’t think my colleagues do that, either, but we’ve never discussed our work beyond its legal scope.  So maybe I really am alone on this?

At least some of my colleagues here would likely tell me to stop looking at the images, not understanding their significance for my work. 

Right now – without getting too specific – my work is focused on human rights violations in armed conflict situations. I am trying to identify trends to determine the adequacy of the law and how best to address accountability gaps. I have to read first- and second-hand accounts, watch videos, and sift through pictures from those who have suffered direct violations.  Soon, I’ll be conducting interviews and surveys of victims. 

On the very good days, I’ve mentally prepared myself to experience secondary trauma. I am able to distance myself from the experience; these are not my stories, and my role in this experience is to gather information to inform better responses.

On the less good days, I’ve realized I’ve finished one set of legal questions and need to move on to the next pattern / story / concern. I flip modes a bit slowly. It takes time to adjust from the mindset of drawing legal conclusions to that of fact gathering, to go from This law does A, B, and C but fails to address D-Z to How exactly did this person’s house get burned down and why? Who did what to whom and when? How did they know it was this group? What was the response from the government?

Often, there is no response from the government.  That’s when the work is hardest – realizing the lack of justice in the world can be oppressive.

On the worst days, a new image or article comes across my desk without warning. Often a well-meaning friend or colleague sends me a link with a quick note. What do you think about this? Or, have you seen this? I thought it would be good for your research. I click expecting some mundane article – they come across my desk with greater frequency than anything else -- only to find myself reading a blog post or looking at a youtube video. 

I was in an accident once – I caused it.  Thankfully, I was going under 15mph, but I remember the feeling of my car hitting the one in front of me.  My head and body being jerked around as the airbags deployed – the temporary moment of disorientation and the series of questions and thoughts that came not in a real order but more like a pile of questions all at once being dropped into my head: What just happened? Oh my God, I think I was just in an accident. Am I okay? I can’t breathe. Is that the airbag? Am I okay? I can feel my toes, right? Thank God no one else is in the car with me. What about the other driver? Oh my God, what if they had a child in the car? Dear God, please let everyone be okay. Where am I? Oh my God, that poor driver – he must be so scared. I hope he’s okay. What if he’s old? What if he’s young? I want my mom and dad.

Opening up a link on the worst days is like being in a low-grade car crash. Nothing serious enough to leave you injured or bruised; just enough to leave you disoriented.

The problem with being an academic in my area is that there is that there is no one really responsible for my well-being. My Facebook newsfeed lately has read like a Humanitarian’s Guide to Survival as story after story comes across talking about the need for organisations to better care for their staff.  But those stories are aimed at the organisations whose purposes are humanitarian relief.  Academia, I am reminded by the likes of Tim Hunt, is not a place for emotions.  We are not humanitarians.

My passion drives my work and the emotions make me double down on the important issues.  I am not willing to cede ground to my counter-narrative just because it’s the more regularly accepted standard amongst the world’s privileged.

But that same passion is slowly eating away at me. It leaves me isolated from the “norm” in academia while still not rendering me a humanitarian.  It’s a double solitude.  And it’s one I’m still trying to get used to.