Moderator: Professor Jacqueline Bhabha:
Jacqueline Bhabha, JD, MsC is a Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She is the Director of Research at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard’s only university-wide human rights research center. From 1997 to 2001 Bhabha founded and directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the author of Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age (Princeton University Press, 2014), the editor of Children Without A State (MIT Press, 2011), and of Human Rights and Adolescence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Her current research focuses on adolescents at risk of violence, social exclusion or discrimination. She is actively engaged in several research projects in India, examining the factors that drive access of low caste girls from illiterate families to higher education, and that transform gender norms among children and adolescents. She also works on similar issues within the Roma community in Europe. Bhabha serves on the board of the Scholars at Risk Network, the World Peace Foundation and the Journal of Refugee Studies.
Professor Robert Fatton:
Robert Fatton Jr. is the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia where he has taught since 1981. He served as Chair of the Department of Politics from 1997 to 2004; and Associate-Dean of the Graduate School from 2010 to 2012. He is the author of a large number of articles and several books on the political economies of Sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. His publications on Haiti include: Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy (2002); The Roots of Haitian Despotism (2007); Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery (2014); and the recent volume, The Guise of Exceptionalism: Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States (2021). He is the recipient of the 2011 “Award for Excellence” of the Haitian Studies Association.
Jacqueline Charles:
Jacqueline Charles is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Emmy Award-winning foreign correspondent for the Miami Herald with responsibility for Haiti and the English-speaking Caribbean. She began her journalism career at the Herald as a 14-year-old high school intern and was hired upon graduation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first overseas assignment – the Return of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide – came shortly after.
As the Herald’s Haiti correspondent, Jacqueline was again on the front lines for the (second) return of Aristide, and was the first journalist to inform readers of his arrival to the island-nation, just days before Haiti’s historic 2011 presidential runoff. While best known for her consistent and prolific coverage of Haiti, Jacqueline also made her mark as a local Herald reporter covering Miami’s impoverished communities, Broward County schools and government, the Florida Legislature, immigration and social services. Among her prize-winning work: a series of reports on the waste in Broward schools’ construction program and the impact of school crowding. She was a member of the education team that produced the Herald’s award-winning series Unequal Schools: Broward’s UnKept Promise. The three-day series detailed the inequities between predominately black and white schools in Broward County.
Jacqueline is as diverse as the communities she has covered: She was born in the English-speaking Turks and Caicos Islands of Haitian descent, and was partly raised in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood by her Haiti-born mother and Cuban-American stepfather.
In 2006, Jacqueline officially became a full-time member of the Herald’s World Desk. Her assignments have taken her throughout the Caribbean where she wrote about race in Cuba and whale hunting in St. Vincent, and as far away as Italy, Kenya and Liberia.
Jacqueline is a founding member of the Carolina Association of Black Journalists; a past president and scholarship chairwoman of the South Florida Association of Black Journalists and a former assistant director of the University of Miami/Dow Jones High School Journalism Workshop. She currently serves on the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism’s Board of Advisers.
