Researcher indicated by the IEA is selected for the second edition of the Intercontinental Academia
| Akemi Kamimura |
The Scientific Committee for the second edition of the Intercontinental Academia gathered in late October and chose lawyer and human rights activist Akemi Kamimura to be one of the 21 young researchers members of the project.
The Intercontinental Academia is a program of the University-Based Institutes for Advanced Study (UBIAS), a network that brings together 36 institutes of advanced studies from all continents. The first edition of the program, organized by the IEA-USP and the Institutes for Advanced Research of the University of Nagoya, is still ongoing and focuses on Time.
The second edition's theme will be Human Dignity. The organizers are the University of Bielefeld's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) and the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Both meetings of the projects will take place in 2016: Jerusalem will host the first phase in March while Bielefeld will host the second one in August.
According to the organizers, the theme of the second edition is related to ethical and practical debates, which are crucial in several disciplines: "Human dignity is referred in research on terrorism, torture, war, big data and data protection, care in the long term, poverty reduction, social security, minorities, history of human rights, assisted suicide, border control and genetic engineering, just to name a few areas."
Each phase of the Academia will feature three or four master classes given by prominent intellectuals. Some of the topics to be addressed are:
- the constitutional right to human dignity;
- dignity as the core of human rights;
- the recognition of human dignity after its denial;
- human dignity in religion.
Profile
Kamimura holds a Masters in Human Rights from the USP's Faculty of Law, where she has also completed her bachelor's degree. In 2014 she was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg. In 2010 she was a student of the course Human Rights and Women: Theory and Practice at the Universidad de Chile's Faculty of Law.
She has been working in projects and institutions linked to human rights since 2000. In 2013/2014 she was a consultant of UNESCO for the coordination of a systematic project on human rights recommendations made by UN agencies and the Organization of American States (OAS). The aim of this study is to propose a monitoring mechanism for the implementation of these guidelines by the Brazilian government.
Kamimura hopes that her academic and professional experience can contribute to the debate about the international legal framework on human rights to be discussed at the Intercontinental Academia, especially with regard to equality and non-discrimination of gender.
Photo: Camila Rodrigues/SJESP