Dr. Pedro Gonzalez is a leading human rights advocate and Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Northern Arizona University. His expertise spans criminology, criminal justice, and comparative cultural studies. Pedro’s doctoral work in Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas informs his teaching on the Holocaust, human rights, and Latin American and Mexican history.
Pedro’s research centers on human rights, genocide, migration, memory, and state-sponsored violence in Latin America. He has held fellowships with Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy and Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, serves on the Faculty Advisory Council at Seven Generation Indigenous Knowledge Center, and received the 2025 Ed O’Brien Human Rights Education Award, recognized by Human Rights Educators USA.
Episode Summary
Dr. Pedro Gonzalez traces his commitment to human rights education to childhood experiences in Mexico City, where encounters with police repression, labor unrest, and stories of torture and disappearance left lasting impressions. He explains how his academic study and mentorship enabled him to connect these memories to broader frameworks of ethics, history, and advocacy, framing the episode around his journey from personal experience to professional engagement.
The episode centers on how Latin American history, critical pedagogy, and ethics shape Pedro’s approach as an educator and scholar. He discusses weaving human rights into his university courses by encouraging dialogue, empathy, and respect for human dignity. Highlighting his work on forced disappearances in Mexico, Pedro shares how he uses photography and public exhibits to preserve memory and resist erasure—connecting remembrance and activism to resistance against state violence, exemplified by his links to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo.
Pedro addresses contemporary challenges in the United States and Mexico, focusing on migration, dehumanization, nationalism, and polarization, and their relevance to human rights education. He describes teaching migration and human rights through historical, political, and cultural perspectives, emphasizing migrants’ lived experiences and structural causes of displacement. The episode concludes with reflections on hope, ethics, and responsibility, drawing from Emmanuel Levinas and underscoring memory and solidarity as central to advancing human rights education.
Topics discussed:
- Origins of Dr. Pedro Gonzalez’s work in human rights and human rights education
- Childhood experiences with repression and violence in Mexico City
- Latin American history, ethics, and human rights pedagogy
- Integrating human rights into university teaching
- Forced disappearances and photography as testimony
- Memory, memorialization, and resistance to historical erasure
- Cultural heritage and human rights
- Migration, borders, and nationalism
- Humanizing migrants through education
- Dehumanization, polarization, and digital media
- Emmanuel Levinas, ethics, and responsibility toward others
- Hope, dignity, and solidarity in human rights work
Full topic listing available for PDF download HERE.
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