When Ecuador became the first country to grant nature the constitutional right to “its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes,” it was more than just a victory for environmentalists and Indigenous peoples. It was the first shockwave of a seismic paradigm shift that has continued to rumble across the globe.

That was nearly two decades ago. Since then, activists fighting for legal recognition of nature’s rights in other countries have continued to wage an uphill battle. The assumption that nature is property whose purpose is to fuel consumption is embedded in legal systems throughout the world, says Kauffman, who has been studying such efforts for the past 15 years.

“The whole point of these laws is to transform the underlying paradigm of the legal system,” he says. “Anytime these efforts succeed, it’s surprising to me. You’re going up against a really dominant norm that says you should value above all else the exponential growth in consumption our entire society has been built around.”

To add to their difficulty, rights-of-nature laws are complex and specific to the communities in which they’re developed—and environmental advocates often disagree on how, or even whether, they should be implemented. For example, some Indigenous groups argue that rights of nature are consistent with their customary law going back millennia, while others view them as a problematic Western construct associated with colonialism.

“Some advocates of ecological law are working at cross purposes, framing their struggle in different ways that can come across as competing rather than collaborative, when they could be working in ways that support one another to produce a multiplier effect,” Kauffman says.

With the help of a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Kauffman collaborated with the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, the United Nations Harmony with Nature Knowledge Network and other organizations to develop the Eco Jurisprudence Monitor, an online portal that tracks the growth of Earth-centered laws throughout the world.

"At minimum, we’re helping people see where these movements overlap and where the areas of conflict are,” Kauffman says. “The monitor has helped animal rights and rights of nature as well as ecocide and Indigenous rights movements talk to one another in a more productive way.”

Since launching the initial site in 2020, Kauffman’s team has received an additional $235,000 in funding to expand the platform and provide additional resources to help researchers, lawyers, policymakers and activists analyze, interpret and develop rights-of-nature policies across the globe.

“Activists understand there’s other stuff happening around world, but they don’t have the time, energy or resources to take a step back and look at the big picture—nor should they,” Kauffman says. “They’re knee-deep in the struggle in their particular location. But it’s useful to them to understand that others are going through similar struggles elsewhere and to share information and lessons learned.

“That’s what social scientists like me can contribute.”

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Students who enroll in the Learning How to Learn Languages linguistics course this spring won’t have to buy a textbook. Instead, they'll be working with a collection of resources developed by students—and one that’s entirely free.

“In the past, this course did not have a coherent central text beyond one being used in bits and pieces, and it was 20 years old,” says Keli Yerian, Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Linguistics department and director of the Language Teaching Studies master’s program.

With $53,000 in grant funding from Open Oregon Educational Resources, the Williams Fund and CAS dean’s office, Yerian marshalled a group of students to develop their own open educational resource (OER), a collection of course materials that are freely and publicly available for anyone to download, use, remix and repurpose.

“I am committed to the principles of educational equity, and I believe that making textbooks open and free of cost is a crucial step toward moving the needle on achieving equitable outcomes for all students,” says graduate student Bibi Halima, who managed the work the undergraduate students produced. “If we believe that education is a basic human right, then open educational resources are a powerful tool to protect that right.”

In a higher education landscape that is becoming increasingly expensive for students, OER have the potential to help keep education costs down and make access to higher education more equitable. Open Oregon Educational Resources estimates that its grant programs have saved students more than $24 million since 2015.

During the 2024 fiscal year, the organization awarded grants to several CAS faculty to develop or test OER, including Lara Ravitch, senior instructor of Russian, East European and Eurasian studies, and sociology Instructor Stephanie Wiley, director of the criminology minor.

OER can help fill the gap for instructors who have difficulty finding appropriate textbooks for the courses they teach, providing access to a wealth of alternative materials as well as a framework for developing their own.

While creating a new Intro to Criminology course for the Sociology department last year, Wiley had trouble finding a textbook that fit her curriculum. When she finally came across a book that would work, it turned out to be a free resource for students—and she was able to get a $2,500 grant from Open Oregon Educational Resources to test it out and provide feedback for the next edition. The grant also provided an instructional designer who helped her to design the course around the OER.

“This was my first time working with an OER in full,” Wiley says. “Especially for an introductory-level class, it was really good. They included a lot of videos and examples, as well as website links to illustrate their points. I was able to use a lot of that in my class, so that was really helpful. And obviously the no cost to students is great.”

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Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve health care in innumerable ways, such as assisting the recovery of severely ill patients. But AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on—and a lack of representative data can be disastrous for the most vulnerable patients.

As biomedical researchers prepare for the widespread adoption of AI to address complex health challenges, Ashley Cordes is helping to ensure those vulnerable voices are reflected in the data used to train AI tools.

The assistant professor of Indigenous media in environmental studies and data science received $119,924 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help develop standards for ensuring the ethical use of AI in clinical care, particularly when treating patients with acute illnesses.

Ethical data, according to the NIH, is data that is collected with consent from participants, minimizes bias and is used in a way that prevents harm to either the research participants or society at large.

“Thus far, health systems have not done a great job of representing certain groups, and this is a historical result of significant exploitation, abuse and bias,” says Cordes, who advocates for data sovereignty for Indigenous populations as well as more rigorous AI practices.

Her project, Collaborative Hospital Repository Uniting Standards (CHoRUS), is part of Bridge2AI, a national effort to accelerate the widespread use of AI in biomedical research. She’s collaborating with Ishan Williams, a professor of nursing at the University of Virginia, to lead an ethics team that is working to generate a patient-informed framework for ethical and trustworthy data collection and sharing.

"Our team is informing a more ethical process around informed consent in data collection, as well as best practices for data generation, privacy and algorithmic justice,” Cordes says.

Her team has assembled focus groups and engaged in community outreach to collect perspectives not only from participants of the most populous Tribal Nations, but also citizens from both federally recognized and non-federally recognized Tribes; Kānaka Maoli; Alaska Natives; Urban Indian populations; and peoples of Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent.

“The active fear of AI and concerns for privacy were more prominent among certain groups, highlighting a need for work on privacy and self-governing mechanisms when it came to AI systems in health,” Cordes says. “People want the tools and support to protect and take action over their personal data. They want the ability to retract the use of their data in alignment with their morals.”

AI systems, which rely on harvesting vast quantities of human data, put medical information at risk of new types of privacy breaches, she adds.

“I tend to be the squeaky wheel, asking about alternatives such as synthetic data practices, the integration of new technologies such as blockchain that can better secure certain types of data, and advocating for data management practices that enhance privacy.”

By addressing these needs, Indigenous-centered AI protocols provide a helpful example for considering what our relationship to AI should be in health care and other domains.

“People should be nervous about AI but also should be empowered to create and learn about AI in a different way that is guided by ethics and care rather than purely profit and Western ways of seeing the world,” Cordes says. “We need to better honor not just Indigenous thought regarding data sovereignty but look to their robust guidelines for more ethical-centered AI design from start to finish.”

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