Past Funding | Right 4 Time

What is Rights for Time?

Rights for Time is an international research network generating ambitious collaborative research on humanitarian protection challenges to bring direct benefits to people and communities in the Global South. We engage extensively with communities, NGOs, CSOs, cultural organisations, policy makers and other stakeholders. Rights for Time is funded by the United Kingdom Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). We invite funding proposals for humanitarian protection research that will take place in one or more low-and-middle income countries.

The principles underpinning our Network that we have developed collaboratively include:

Redistribution

To support and champion research activities that reduce poverty and serve the needs of people in the Rights for Time Network;

Grassroots - led

To be led by the needs of the people in our Network

Redress Evidence Hierachies

To amplify the voice of communities to reach a wider audience, and facilitate research to be led by Global South academics, NGOs, and policy practitioners

Transparency

To commit to transparency in the administration of Network projects

Respect

To value difference, appreciating skills and capacities of others, and understanding the different goals individuals and groups will have in their involvement with the Network.

What kinds of projects does Rights for Time fund?

Rights for Time is currently supporting research projects created and conducted by Network partners in Kenya, Rwanda, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon, where long periods of violence have produced enduring challenges for vulnerable groups, such as refugees, people who have been displaced, women, and children. You can explore the information and projects on our website – The projects listed below are excellent examples of the types of research we hope to fund:

Managing Time

The project seeks to improve sexual violence responses by changing the way we gather survivor testimony and use evidence to document cases. In Kenya, an estimated 11 million women have sustained sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), yet few cases are prosecuted (DHS, 2014).

Surfacing Time

This project used participatory photography to surface and share stories about long histories of discrimination experienced by a historically marginalized community in North West Rwanda.

Trauma and Time

Humanitarian protection has increasingly involved interventions in the field of Mental Health. Much of this work follows a PTSD-informed approach, or is undergirded by the assumption that Mental Health is impacted by the experience of a time-limited and single catastrophic event; whether this is war, the COVID-19 pandemic, an assault, or natural disaster.

Language and Time

The Jordan case study tackled the issue of language and time by taking a multidisciplinary approach. We took recourse, in particular, to tools from history, philology, and ethnography in order to understand how language operates over time in constraining or otherwise liberating displaced people in the Levant.

Policy and Time

The Lebanon case “Policy and Time” of the Rights for Time Project explores how historical legacies, accumulated practices, and recurrent policy cycles have informed the crafting of Lebanon’s politics of reception towards refugees,

Rights for Time projects demonstrate the impact of the long times of violence and trauma, and present solutions developed by communities to create lasting and meaningful change with regard to humanitarian protection. We are also interested in mediating and enabling spaces and processes that bring about change including, but not limited to, family and community spaces, media and technology, civil society and activist organizations, and social movements, just for some examples.

We especially invite projects that align with one or more Rights for Times research themes. The themes give a directional pull through both time (past, present to future) and the journey from research to action, in culture, policy, protection and law.

Themes

The themes are:

Protracted Times: Focusing on long-times through memory, trauma, transgenerational transmission, aftermath, and archives;
Protection Times: Focusing on the institutionalisation and instrumentalization of time in policy, law, prevention and change;
Open Times: Focusing on the creativity opened up when ‘crisis’ and linear time are put aside, in particular forms of long-time expression that emerge across languages, art forms, archives, methodologies, and solidarities that operate beyond existing frames. See the figure below.

The themes are central to the analysis and provide considerable scope for interdisciplinary and intersectoral research collaborations and stimulate debate about humanitarian protection and human rights legal frameworks. Invisible harm can be explored across themes by examining why policies and laws, as well as interpretive cultural frames, lead to exacerbating vulnerability and marginalization. The themes also allow for exploring questions of why reversing, or reforming, the effects of violence requires a deep-rooted understanding of the processes that have shaped it, and of the convoluted, complex and dynamic temporal and spatial dimensions of long violence.