Early in 2023, colleagues gathered for the second event in the programme of the CSEAR Education Community of Practice (ECoP).  We were grateful to welcome John Ferguson (University of St Andrews), Sepideh Parsa (Middlesex University), Yingru Li (University of Glasgow) and Katherine Christ (University of South Australia) to share their experiences of Teaching Human Rights on Thursday 12 January.

All speakers shared insight from individual modules, resources and assessments while also offering practices and examples of the ways they use to support students to see the relevance of human rights to accounting and the accounting profession.

John Ferguson opened by sharing examples of his research around business and human rights. By focusing on the Human Rights Due Diligence process, we learnt about the exercises and case studies used to encourage students to consider organisational processes needed to implement the due diligence processes as well as the issues of materiality, measurement, indicators, audit, and assurance – all of which are core to accounting.

Sepideh Parsa shared experiences of teaching about labour rights reporting. Her work with students encourages them to understand governance developments and challenges to labour rights reporting, particularly across complex global value chains with reference to various corporate communications as part of a reporting module.

From incorporating human rights into modules as one topic amongst many, Yingru Lu introduced her module ‘Accounting and Human Rights’ at the University of Glasgow. Over the course of the module, Yingru invites students to reflect on the multifaceted nature of human rights, introduces them to different approaches to human rights and  explores, through conceptual enquiry, the divides between Corporate Social Responsibility and Business and Human Rights.

Finally, Kate Christ, told us about her strategies and experiences of integrating modern slavery into the accounting curriculum. Sharing her experiences of working with students on case studies of modern slavery in mobile phones, she also discussed assessments where students analyse modern slavery risk management and consider the implications for accounting and the profession. The rich grounding in Kate’s ongoing research coupled with insights from her practice offered inspiration to many of us thinking about ways to render modern slavery relevant to accounting, especially within accredited degrees.

Once again, this overview doesn’t do justice to the rich insights of our panellists. To learn more, you can access the video recording of the event and resources shared by panellists in the CSEAR Members’ Area. Some resources are also listed below.

Warm thanks to our panellists once again, for their insights, resources and inspiration.

The third ECoP event will be held on Thursday 27 April at 14:00 (BST) on the topic of ‘Pedagogies for SEA Communities’ with Diane-Laure Arjaliès (Ontario, Canada), Olga Cam (Sheffield, UK), Ericka Costa (Trento, Italy) and Xinwu He (Belfast, UK). For more information, visit the event page and register here.

Contact csear@st-andrews.ac.uk to sign up for the CSEAR ECoP mailing list.

‘Teaching Human Rights’ Resources

• Business and Human Rights Reporting and Assurance Frameworks Initiative (RAFI) developed by Shift and the accounting firm Mazars.
• de Felice, D, “Business and Human Rights Indicators to Measure the Corporate Responsibility to Respect: Challenges and Opportunities” (2015). Human Rights Quarterly 37 (2015) 511–555
• Ferguson (2023), “Accounting for Human Rights”, in Ewing, A.P., Teaching Business and Human Rights. Edward Elgar.
• Ford, J and Nolan, J, “Regulating transparency on human rights and modern slavery in corporate supply chains: the discrepancy between human rights due diligence and the social audit”, Australian Journal of Human Rights, 26 (2020): 27-45
• Hess, D. The Transparency Trap: Non-Financial Disclosure and the Responsibility of Business to Respect Human Rights. Am. Bus. Law J. 2019, 56, 5–53.
• Shift’s “Valuing Respect” initiative
• The Global Business School Network (GBSN) for Business and Human Rights (BHR) Impact Community. Joint initiative between GBSN and UN PRME – founded in 2017 by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the Geneva School of Economics and Management, and the Alliance Manchester Business School. For further information – see here