The Inaugural Galway International Summer School on the Arts and Human Rights will take place from 9 to 11 July 2015 at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and is co-directed by Professor Micheal O’Flaherty, Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, and Dr Dominique Bouchard, curator at the Hunt Museum. The summer school will explore the intersections between the arts and human rights through panel discussions, exhibitions, performances, and three parallel workshops on the topics of literature and human rights, the visual arts and human rights, and music and human rights. This year, the theme of the event will be “Belonging”.

A photography competition is organized as part of the summer school, inviting photographers from around the world to submit photography exploring the theme of “Belonging”. Up to 20 photographs will be considered to take part in an exhibition hosted during the summer school at NUI Galway alongside the1949 UNESCO photographic exhibition that will be mounted at St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church in Galway City.

The artist selection will take place on 17 June 2015. You can register and vote here. Dr. Andrea Breslin, an alumni from the Irish Centre for Human Rights – as well as a contributor to Creating Rights – presented photography work on internally displaced persons in South Sudan, where she worked with the Human Rights division of United Nations Mission in South Sudan. Her submission can be viewed here. Her “pictures depict those caught up in the current conflict in South Sudan; civilians displaced; homes burnt; buildings and belongings abandoned; children orphaned; animals fleeing; soldiers sleeping while keeping their fingers on the trigger. No one and nothing in these photos has been able to remain in the place where they belong. Home is no longer part of their reality”.

Photograph by Andrea Breslin