Our Work
Promoting the Dignity of Persons with Disabilities throughout the World
HPOD's Founders Reflect on over 20 Years of Scholarship and Advocacy
For over two decades, HPOD has worked to foster the dignity of persons with disabilities through cutting-edge scholarship, innovative teaching, and timely contributions to policy and advocacy efforts across the globe.
Harvard Law Today (HLT) recently sat down with HPOD's co-founders, Professors Bill Alford and Michael Stein, to discuss the project's ethos and evolution since its founding in 2004. Professors Alford and Stein were motivated by a shared desire to conduct research and advocacy that would empower the world's 1.3 billion persons with disabilities at a pivotal time for the global disability rights movement amid the negotiations of the United Nations' path-breaking Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Since then, HPOD has worked to enable individuals and groups and especially persons with disabilities and their representative organizations to undertake informed human rights advocacy in over 40 countries.
From its outset, HPOD has built on the foundation of Harvard Law School's prestigious East Asian Legal Studies program. For example, in 2007 Professors Stein and Alford held the first-ever conference on disability rights in the People's Republic of China. The next year, HPOD collaborated with Renmin University to introduce a first-of-its-kind course on disability law. Since Dr. Fengming Cui joined HPOD in 2008 as the China Program Director, HPOD has continued to foster enduring collaborations with faculty at Chinese universities to organize similar courses and law clinics for students in Beijing, affording students hands-on opportunities to practice applying domestic disability policies and encouraging robust scholarship and teaching in this under-explored area.
HPOD's China Program Director, Dr. Fengming Cui, has helped sustain impactful relationships with academics, educators, and community members in East Asia.
HPOD has made the impact of its work felt from traditional halls of power, including intergovernmental organizations and ministerial delegations of G7 nations, to grassroots communities, including parent groups in the Philippines and disaster-affected households in Bangladesh. Across cultural contexts, core aspects of HPOD's approach have remained constant through the years. As Professor Alford shared:
"[W]e work collaboratively with persons with disabilities and disabled peoples’ organizations in whichever country we’re in. But it’s also iterative in that we learn something in one country that we then bring to other nations —and to our writing and teaching."
HPOD's Chair, Professor Bill Alford, has helped ensure that HPOD's iterative approach translates into positive change across differing legal and cultural environments.
HPOD has also continuously adapted its programming to meet the challenges of the day. For instance, as the global climate change crisis has mounted, HPOD has shone a light on how persons with disabilities are nearly forgotten in terms of nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement through an array of awareness-raising, advocacy, and scholarship activities. These include seminal publications in The Lancet and Nature, interdisciplinary convenings of academics and practitioners, and impactful interventions before international human rights tribunals.
Throughout its two decades of programming across continents, HPOD has also stayed true to its founders' special focus on persons with intellectual disabilities. From inviting persons with intellectual disabilities to educate Harvard students, to using inclusive methodologies to conduct field research, to publishing timely informational and educational resources in accessible formats, HPOD has worked to amplify the voices of persons with intellectual disabilities, who experience exacerbated forms of marginalization. Critical in this regard have been the contributions of Anne Fracht, HPOD's Self-Advocacy Associate, who recently laid bare the stakes of recent changes in federal assistance programs on which many of her peers rely to avoid institutionalization.
HPOD's Self-Advocacy Associate, Anne Fracht, has helped uplift the voices of persons with intellectual disabilities.
Fundamentally, HPOD's wide-ranging academic and awareness-raising activities all contribute to enabling individuals and their families to act as change agents in their own lives. In this vein, HPOD has helped to bridge historical divides by putting stakeholders in direct communication with prominent leaders and by channeling the latest scholarship and research to community members, so that persons with disabilities can contribute to positive changes in their communities. As Professor Stein summarized:
"Together, we teach people about their rights. They decide what they want to pursue or not pursue, and we help enable them to speak for themselves. It’s not one-size fits-all[.]"
HPOD's Executive Director, Professor Michael Stein, pictured here with celebrated disability rights activist Judy Heumann, has drawn on his unparalleled disability rights scholarship and his experiences directly participating in the CRPD negotiations to inform policy-making and advocacy throughout the world.
