Learning from Students for Workers’ Rights: A Personal Reflection on Human Rights Close to Home

For her human rights capstone project, Hannah Smith wrote a self-reflection narrative about her experience as an organizer with the group Students for Workers’ Rights during the start of the 2019 Covid Pandemic. Along with this reflection, Smith provides a brief history of this period of organizing and highlights the ways in which this organizing work represented the culmination of her human rights education at Stanford. Throughout this paper, Smith delineates how successful human rights work operates by continually zooming in and out of power structures and people’s personal experiences. Smith hopes this reflection and personal narrative can be a source of reference and information for future human rights student activists at Stanford. Student project deposited by department for archival purposes. Original work unavailable for public download due to permission restriction preferences of the author.