August
23, 2007
Dear Colleagues:
On behalf of the
Sakharov
Program on Human Rights, I am pleased to announce the arrival of Elena
Skryakova and
Oxana Zamolodskaya, the fall
2007 recipients of the Sakharov Fellowship, now in its fourth semester.
ELENA
SKRYAKOVA graduated with honors
in 1999 from Perm
Pedagogical University with a degree
in history. Her subsequent work has focused on political prisoners and
on the dissent subculture of 1965-1972.
Since 1996, Elena
has been actively involved in the work of human rights institutions
such as the
Perm-36 Memorial Museum Research Group and the Center for the Support
of
Democratic Youth Initiatives (Youth Memorial) in Perm. At the latter organization, she
served
as Executive Director from 2001 to 2004. In 2002 the Heinrich Böll
Foundation
awarded her a Young Researchers scholarship to study the emergence of
public
opinion and the origins of youth dissent, 1953-1964. She now serves in
a dual
capacity at the International Memorial Society, coordinating the
Strategic
Planning Group and managing the Analytical and Monitoring Group. She
also
serves as president of the Perm Assembly Foundation and contributes her
expertise to the Perm Civil Chamber’s “Future of Human Rights in Russia”
project. Elena was recently elected to the International Memorial
Society
Board.
Elena’s major
publications focus
on the history of dissent and dissident subculture, and on the future
of human
rights in Russia.
At Harvard, Elena is
continuing this research, with a particular
emphasis on the issue
of generational continuity between the “old” human rights movement,
with its
roots in past dissent, and the “new” human rights movement in today’s Russia. Elena hopes that several months’ work in the
Sakharov Archive and in the Harvard libraries will allow her to develop
a
special course on past and present trends in the human rights movement
in Russia.
This
course will serve as the basis for public debate in 18 regions of
Russian under
the auspices of the International Memorial Society in 2008-2009. While in
the US,
Elena also plans to familiarize
herself with American NGOs in order to analyze practical aspects of
human
rights activism on a comparative basis.
OXANA
ZAMOLODSKAYA graduated in 1999 from
the Siberian State Academy of
Geodesy in Novosibirsk.
She has also completed coursework on computers in education at the
Moscow State
University of Printing Arts and at the Information Technology
School of the
Russian
State Humanities University (RGGU). She is currently enrolled in a master’s program in
social
philosophy at RGGU.
From 1999 to
2001, Oxana was
director of accessibility at the Siberian Institute of International
Relations,
where she led a seminar on human rights in the modern world. She
developed an
interest in education for students with
disabilities, and
she now teaches information technology at
the Center
for Educational Technology’s School
of Distance Learning for
Students with
Disabilities in Moscow.
Her publications appear in pedagogical journals and journals on
computer-based
learning.
Oxana’s research
at Harvard
involves the comparative analysis of the legal rights of disabled
children, in
particular, their right to higher education in the US and Russia. Her
work
focuses on US equal-access legislation and the role of NGOs in advocacy
for the
disabled. She plans to develop recommendations for the legal and
socio-cultural
improvement of education for children with disabilities in Russian
schools, to
be presented to elementary and secondary schools that are not yet
prepared to work
with disabled children.
Please join me in
extending to Elena and Oxana very warm
welcome and best wishes for a
productive and enjoyable semester.
Tatiana
Yankelevich, Director
Sakharov
Program on Human Rights