PART-TIME UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR TAKES HUMAN RIGHTS SERIOUSLY
Published Saturday June 27th, 2009
Marc Gionet is taking his fight against international human rights violations online. A part-time professor at St. Thomas University and project manager and researcher with the Atlantic Human Rights Centre, Gionet recently launched a regular blog on Rabble.ca. He met reporter Chris Fox this week to talk about the blog, his work with the Atlantic Human Rights Centre and how a three-month experience working at a day care in Uruguay lead him to his current career.
Q: What was the last movie you saw and the last concert you went to?
A: The last movie I saw was Che: Part One and I can't remember the last concert I went to, honestly. It might have been Hot Toddy. Oh no, it was Ryan Leblanc.
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Q: You have been working at the Atlantic Human Rights Centre for about a year. What have you been up to?
A: Well my title is project manager and researcher so, in conjunction with the director, I take care of the coordination of our initiatives and programming. Over the past year we organized a high school conference for students to get a brief education on what the universal declaration of human rights is and its importance in society.
From there, we undertook an education initiative for Darfur, which saw the centre join up with the New Brunswick College of Craft in Design, as well as a local arts and community collective called Feelsgood to put on educational programming on Darfur that ended with an art show with live music.
That proved to be successful and it was very interesting for us to co-ordinate with a sector of society which typically we haven't engaged in previous years. Right now I am working on a teachers institute in holocaust education we are putting on in July.
That will be extremely unique because it is teaching teachers how to teach about the holocaust using the firsthand stories of holocaust survivors that now reside in Atlantic Canada.
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Q: What first peaked your interest in human rights, Marc?
A: I guess even before the end of high school I was involved with a group called Children's International Summer Villages, which kind of exposed me to the international scene and a lot of their focus was around human rights issues. I kind of built on that after high school when I participated in something called Canada World Youth, which is a developmental project for Canadian Youth where you spend three months in Canada working on a grassroots community project and then three months in what would be called a Third World country. I went to Uruguay and was really interested in that and the positive effects it can have.
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Q: What was your experience in Uruguay like?
A: Oh, it was great. That program was oriented around doing something social for three months and agricultural for three months. I spent three months on top of a mountain in B.C., on a cattle farm, and then three months in Uruguay working in a day care facility for children with mental and physical disabilities and you couldn't get more integrated in the community than that. I got hooked on that type of work then and there, I guess.
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Q: You recently started a humans right blog on rabble.ca. What are your hopes with that?
A: It is an opportunity for us to raise our profile and expand more onto the national stage and get a bit more face recognition. Rabble has a pretty good viewership, so we are very excited to be participating in that and be exposed to their membership.
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Q: How did that opportunity come about?
A: It was kind of serendipitous. We had launched the blog separately, initially, and then I saw a notice, wrote to them and they checked out the blog, were interested in it and said: 'Why not incorporate it on our site?' and we worked out a partnership from there.
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Q: So what kind of issues do you hope to address using the blog?
A: Well a couple of the key issues and some of the initial posts have been on women's rights, not only in Canada, but in Afghanistan - healthcare and international human rights issues. We are offering a pretty broad spectrum and it is an opportunity for the Atlantic Human Rights Centre to promote its mandate on human rights education and awareness.
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Q: How important is raising awareness through a medium like a blog.
A: Oh very. People can't really take action until they are aware and properly educated on the issues. In terms of international law you are seldom blessed with a mechanism for culpability, so you rely on something called soft power which is a form of shaming countries into doing the proper thing and you can't do that without making people aware of the situations and the results of policies that countries are implementing against their own people.
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Q: What is your sense? Are university students aware of some of the issues in (places) like Darfur and Iran?
A: There has been an absolute proliferation of grass roots movements and Darfur is an excellent example.
It has just spread everywhere and it has gotten to the point where it is pretty much impossible to be uninformed about it even if it is just the skeletal facts.
So it may be a common criticism to say students don't care about these issues, but I would say it is misplaced. Students are very well informed and very motivated to offer their help and their energy.
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