The Music and Human Rights Project (MHRP) is an international not-for-profit organization that currently employs the transdisciplinary research developed by Vernita Pearl Fort on music, human rights, and their relationship in today's environment of unprecedented challenges and possibilities to fulfill its mission. The research guides MHRP's initiatives in citizen pedagogy, citizen empowerment, and public policy concerning music and human rights as social and moral languages,  thCommunities around the world have long entwined music and human rights in struggles for survival, justice, and dignity. The Project supports global citizens in using music and human rights as discursive, deliberative, performative, legal and ultimately democratic instruments in collectively shaping a shared future that can work for everyone on a finite earth. Through the Music and Human Rights Project, and drawing on her academic transdisciplinary research, Vernita Pearl Fort:

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• Won Award for the Best Visual Display of Research from the International Communication Association for multi-modal translation and public reach of Project’s scholarly study, Music and Human Rights: Their Relationship through a Critical Transdisciplinary Frame of Political Economy, Neuroepigenetics, and Ethnography;

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• Conceived and designed a transdisciplinary Human Rights Institute for building capability to address local, national, regional, and global systemic causes of human rights failures and violations around the world, and to also design and implement corresponding solutions.  While originally developed for the the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the institutional design for the transdisciplinary Human Rights Institute is easily adaptable to suit the needs of other universities and institutions around the world;

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• Developed video and literary library on music and human rights, containing footage of and transcripts of interviews Vernita Pearl Fort undertook with more than 100 members of Jamaica's music and human rights communities;

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• Directed international artists in collaboratively repurposing La Púrpura de la Rosa, the first opera of the Americas (1701 Peru), from empire to empowerment, using Boalian/Freirean technique, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL

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• Served as Special Advisor to the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts,  the Caribbean's regional tertiary arts institution based in Jamaica. It consists of the School of Music, School of Dance, School of Drama, School of the Arts, School of Arts Management and the Humanities, and School of Continuing Education;

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• Made presentations delivered papers globally, on music, human rights, and humanity's civilizational shift in Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and the U.S. They focused diversely on music and human rights as social and moral languages, performative and legal instruments, and cultural and political movements that are instrumental in collectively deliberating, choosing, and guiding the course.

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• Directed and produced several film shorts, including films such as Children Moved by Music, Move Society, focused on the National Youth Orchestra of Jamaica, and animated film shorts on the Neuroscience of Music and Morality. For the full list of films, please find them under the "Film Works" tab of this electronic CV.

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• Conceived and collaboratively designed the 2018 International Human Rights Festival with Jamaica's music and human rights communities. I designed the Festival to facilitate public participatory pedagogy about human rights and the structural requirements for all human beings to experience them. I designed it to inform, empower, problem-solve, unite, heal, and inspire, as the world and Jamaica marked two human rights milestone events: the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and the 50th anniversary of the International Year of Human Rights conceived and led by Jamaica and the Global South, with their initiatives in the 1960s fundamental to the making of "international" human rights. All components of the Festival design drew heavily from the findings of my  transdidciplinary research that serves the Music and Human Rights Project. The research findings also empirically defined the Festival's targeted benefits and impacts which include: a)  increased citizen awareness about human rights; and b) increased citizen capability to deliberate and negotiate human rights and responsibilities within and across communities, nations, and regional and global institutions. Elements of the proposed International Human Rights Festival included:​​

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  • Immersive short film of the 5,000 voices singing for human rights, made and delivered to millions of screens around world; 

  • Launch of the Egerton Richardson Institute of Human Rights Education;​

  • Apparatus to raise US$ billions during the People's Choir event and beyond;

  • Songwriting competition on the right to a world order that enables human rights; 

  • Performative Documentary Film on the history, power, and transformative potential of music and human rights.The film tells this international human rights story through the Global South and its diasporan communities and also through the music score itself.

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• Massive People's Opera Event  5,000 people to participate/join the 3-hour event; The Music and Human Rights Project garnered commitment from the European Union to implement this civic and music event of public pedagogy and participation, now postponed until the coronavirus pandemic is controlled and would ensure health and safety for all. 

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• Island-wide town hall meetings on human rights in multiple parishes: The recommendations proposed town hall meetings in every parish.  The Jamaica Human Rights Network, specifically the Independent Jamaican Council for Human Rights, implemented several around the island during human rights month.

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• Human rights symposia, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica; Identified national, regional and global scholars and experts as potential speakers.  The Independent Jamaican Council for Human Rights implemented its annual lecture in honor of International Human Rights Day.

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• Scripted Performative Documentary with award-winning filmmaker, Alla Kovgan. The film shall tell the global human rights story and its possibilities through the International Human Rights Festival and through the research, footage of 120 interviews, B-roll content, artwork, and film shorts that the Music and Human Rights Project has already developed. The human rights story, captured cinematically, musically, and digitally, uniquely supports the goals of the Festival, to inform, empower, problem-solve, unite, heal, and inspire. But it will do so over an extended period of time, living well beyond the 2020 event as it also travels the world to urban and rural areas, to theater houses and schools, and to community meetings, living rooms, and mobile phone screens.  

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• Currently finalizing research for book publication that informs the above listed works.   The title for the written body of work is Music and Human Right in the Great Turning.  The Prologue of this transdisciplinary work conveys its impetus through the personal narrative of the author who grew up on the music and movements of the 1960s, and who became a systems ecologist, an economist, and a United States career diplomat, always with tools and balm of the performing arts. The Introduction historicizes music, human rights, and the socio-political shifts in which they often meet and it provides the road map for the full text. The opening chapter employs selected philosophical traditions to define music and human rights and to defend their significance in collectively shaping humanity's shared future in the face of the combined unprecedented challenge and opportunity, named the Great Turning through systems science. The core chapters go on to examine the relationship between music and human rights through political economy, critical neuroepigenetics, and then critical ethnography. The Conclusion chapter synthesizes the findings as it affirms the need for increased systemic thinking and transdisciplinary endeavor among citizens to comprehend and knowledgeably respond to today's complexities and possibilities. It reasserts the power of music and human rights as languages, instruments and movements of citizen agency and care in directing the course of an inevitable transition, but one that restructures political economy systems and systems of thinking towards enabling flourishing for every human being and longterm survival on a finite earth. But it also concludes that the same citizens have the human right to develop their capabilities in music, citizen philosophy, and deliberation, given the human agency that such individual and group capabilities bestow in the areas of cognition, emotion, reason, communication, collaboration, and democracy itself, an agency required in collectively directing humanity's course. The task is urgent.

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