At Alumni Weekend back in April, the Hendrix College Alumni Association presented me with the Hendrix College Humanitarian Award. Given to “living alumni who have significantly improved the quality of life in the world through their service and dedication to humanity,” it’s one of the greatest honors I’ve ever received. Getting an award like this from my undergraduate alma mater, which has already given me so much, filled me with gratitude. I was so thankful to get the chance to express that gratitude in my acceptance speech. However, I was receiving this award in 2025, a year that, even in April, had already filled me with quite a few other emotions, such as anger, disappointment, and, more rarely but equally potent, hope. I tried my best to share all of those in my acceptance speech, which you can read in full below (minus a few adlibs and plus some pictures from that day). A full video from the event can also be viewed at the bottom of this post.
An occasional blog on human rights, data, and other things I can’t stop thinking about
I am the co-founder and methodology research & design lead for the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), the co-Principal Investigator of the Sub-National Analysis of Repression Project (SNARP), and formerly the co-director of the (now archived) CIRI Human Rights Data Project. I am also an associate professor of international affairs and the director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS) within the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, where I am also the creator of the GLOBIS Human Rights Research Lab. I have spent the last 20 years dedicated to measuring, studying, understanding, and teaching human rights. I’m K. Chad Clay, and yes, I’m a “human rights person.”
And here’s the thing: I think you might be a human rights person too, even if you don’t know it yet. That was the premise of a TEDx talk I gave at the University of Georgia in 2023: human rights are at the core of what so many of us believe in and want for others, but we don’t frequently think about the things we value in those terms, to our detriment. I was lucky enough to find human rights thanks to meeting the right professor at the right time, and now I’ve dedicated my life to trying to do the same for others. You can check out the talk here:
Ever since the video went up on YouTube, people have intermittently approached me just to say, “I’m a human rights person.” As a result, I’ve started to believe that there’s maybe a little more power in that phrase than I realized. In the current political environment, declaring that human rights are core principles that help to define the expectations you have for your government is somehow radically positive. It is an expression of support for building a dike against the rising tide of authoritarianism and cruelty that currently seems to be taking the world by storm. So, as I started brainstorming a name for this project, I kept returning to this phrase. I am, in fact, a Human Rights Person, and that’s probably the best description for the content I’m likely to create and the effect that I hope it has on you.
I have grand, multimedia ambitions for Human Rights Person, which I admit I may never come close to fulfilling. I can’t even commit to a regular posting schedule at this point. If I manage to average one post per month, I’ll be proud of that. However, if you are interested in learning more about human rights, data, and/or their intersection with various other topics that I’m interested in (e.g., sci-fi, tabletop RPGs, music, and other varied nerdery), I hope you will subscribe. The world needs as many Human Rights People as possible right now.
*This content represents the opinions of the author. It carries no endorsement of the University of Georgia*
Human Rights Person 