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Research Guides

JSIS 495: Task Force - Winter 2015: Task Force I

This guide is for the students in JSIS 495 to help guide them in their research for their capstone projects.

Promoting Human Rights and Healing in the Wake of Civil War

Angelina Snodgrass Godoy TTh 1:30-3:20 THO 335

After periods of systematic state terror, how do societies -- and survivors -- heal? Students in this task force will partner with the UW Center for Human Rights and a Salvadoran human rights organization to design and implement a communications campaign aimed at reuniting Salvadoran families separated by the civil war that racked their country from 1980-1992. During that conflict, upwards of 75,000 civilians lost their lives; a UN Truth Commission concluded in 1993 that the Salvadoran government and its aligned death squads were responsible for over 85% of those deaths. Despite the systematic use of massacres, torture, and other crimes against humanity, no one has yet been held accountable for ordering these crimes; many survivors are still struggling to obtain basic information about the fate of lost loved ones.

During the war, thousands of children were separated from their families by the state, and given to adoptive families who in most cases had no idea that their birth families never willingly surrendered the child. Decades later, many birth families are still searching for the children that were taken from them -- and in over 3000 cases, it is believed that the children were adopted into the United States. From El Salvador, however, it's hard to locate those former adoptees, who are now young American adults. That's where this task force comes in. Partnering with the UW Center for Human Rights, students will travel to El Salvador to research specific cases and design a communications effort, including producing three short videos to be circulated on social media to help locate missing children, aiming to help address the wounds of war.

News Sources

Document Collections

Research Databases

Country information sources

Need Help? Ask a Librarian!

Glenda Pearson
Human Rights Librarian
pearson@uw.edu

Kathleen Collins
Sociology Librarian
collinsk@uw.edu

Focus on Books

UW WorldCat and UW Libraries Search (the tabs on the UW Libraries home page) are the main tools for identifying books in English and Spanish available at UW, our Summit Library partners, and other libraries around the world.

Other collections of books that might be useful include:

  • Hathi Trust  - Digital library of books and journals scanned by a partnership of major research institutions and libraries.
  • ProQuest Dissertations & Theses - includes 2 million+ full text dissertations published since 1997.
  • Google Books - "Search the latest index of the world's books. Find millions of great books you can preview or read for free."

Focus on Films

Films are difficult to search in the UW Libraries catalogs unless you have the exact title or director's name (i.e., something very specific). To add to the complications, collections of videos, such as those found in the Human Rights Studies Online collection, do not show up in the online catalog.

The Human Rights Film Directory is an out-of-date in-house film directory that includes entries for 13 VHS documentaries concerning El Salvador. You can view VHS films in the Media Center (3rd floor, Suzzallo) and you may find at least some of them streaming in database collections (Human RIghts Studies Online, for instance) or by searching the exact title in the UW Libraries Search online catalog.

See the Video tab of the AV Guide for more collections of streaming documentaries.

Editor & Coordinator materials