Research, Impact, and Learning
Understanding how to confront challenges to human rights — through community-driven research built on relationships, equity, and action
Grounded in trust, UUSC’s research approach is led by communities and designed to fuel advocacy with actionable insights.
Our approach to research
We acknowledge that formal institutional research often perpetuates extraction and colonialism. In contrast, UUSC’s methods involve community-based participatory research, which consciously centers the community experts, following their leadership and ownership of the entire research process.
What does this look like?
- Respecting experience, local knowledge, and traditional wisdom with communities to identify challenges and drive grassroots solutions
- Developing research reports and publications with partners that will directly impact their work
- Collecting and analyzing information in creative ways
- Using high-quality data to advance advocacy campaigns
- Grants to support partners’ research
- Research training and skill-building
Our process
Because PAR requires relationship-building, which takes time and produces meaningful collaborations, it is especially important that the research relationship be viewed:
- FIRST as a relationship
- SECOND as a process
- THIRD as specific products
We have found that by focusing on relationships and process, we not only build stronger research collaborations, but we increase and diversify the opportunities for tangible outputs that are targeted to partners’ needs.
UUSC’s Participatory Action Research Model
Latest research & reports
We aim to produce research publications that support the work of our grassroots partners. Below are examples of work we have contributed to.
2023
- “How can we survive in the future?”: Atrocity Crimes in Karenni State (Full Report)
- “How can we survive in the future?”: Atrocity Crimes in Karenni State (Executive Summary)
2021
2020
- Extractivismo: Zonas de Sacrificio o Desarrollo (Spanish Webinar)
- The hidden connection between a US steel company and the controversial Los Pinares mine in Honduras
- La conexión escondida de una siderúrgica de EEUU con la polémica mina de Los Pinares en Honduras (Spanish)
- Disaster Justice Learning Circle (Webinar)
- The Work is All of Us: Undocumented and disabled
- Rights of Indigenous People in Addressing Climate-Forced Displacement
- La Crisis de Derechos Humanos del COVID-19 y las Prisiones en Honduras (Spanish Webinar)
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