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Author Bio

Gabriela Rojas-Martinez, LCSW, is a mental health clinician, clinical supervisor, and scholar-practitioner based in California. She works in private practice, providing culturally affirming, trauma-informed care, and supervises emerging social workers in school-based wellness settings. Her scholarship centers on Ancestral Capital, an extension of Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth, and the Cargas y Regalos framework, examining how ancestral and traditional practices function as sources of knowledge, resistance, and healing within Latinx diasporic communities. Grounded in Critical Latinx Indigeneities, Tribal Critical Race Theory, and other decolonial frameworks, her work interrogates dominant paradigms in mental health and education while uplifting intergenerational knowledge systems. Rojas-Martinez’s interdisciplinary approach bridges clinical practice, community engagement, and critical scholarship. She is committed to advancing decolonial approaches to healing, centering ancestral wisdom, and contributing to transformative practices that support collective well-being across diasporic communities.

Abstract

Pushing the Boundaries of Human Rights Education is an edited collection of chapters that seeks to challenge conventional approaches to human rights education (HRE). The volume argues that teaching human rights as neutral, universal, or primarily legal concepts is insufficient given contemporary global realities, including widening inequality, climate crisis, and enduring colonial power relations. The editors and contributors, who work at the intersections of HRE, global citizenship education (GCE), and participatory education, collectively push beyond HRE as curriculum delivery toward a critically engaged, justice-oriented pedagogy grounded in lived realities. Across the collection, the authors contend that dominant HRE frameworks often fail to address the historical and structural conditions—colonialism, racial capitalism, settler violence, and ecological extraction—that shape whose rights are recognized, violated, or rendered invisible. This book is organized as a multi-voice edited collection that brings together scholars and educators working across diverse geopolitical, cultural, and educational contexts. Rather than advancing a single linear argument, the chapters are organized around overlapping thematic concerns that include critical re-conceptualizations of HRE, decolonial and Indigenous epistemological interventions, climate justice and environmental education, and pedagogical responses to structural inequality. Some chapters foreground theoretical critiques of dominant human rights paradigms, while others attend more directly to pedagogical implications in formal and informal educational settings. Taken together, the structure reflects the editors’ intention to resist prescriptive models of HRE and instead offer a plural, context-responsive approach that foregrounds power, history, and relational accountability.

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