The Donia Human Rights Center (DHRC) welcomes Volha (Olga) Chykina as a 2018 visiting scholar. She will serve as a research associate, working on the Campus Human Rights Index. The Index is an innovative, multi-university collaboration to measure, document, and comparatively analyze university commitments to diverse political and civil rights on college campuses. The long-term goal from this effort is to create a valid and useful measure that can be adopted widely in order to evaluate human rights across universities and colleges.

This project is supported by MCubed, and is led by: Michelle Bellino and Christian Davenport, Co-Directors of the International Institute’s Conflict and Peace Initiative; and Kiyoteru Tsutsui, DHRC Director.

Volha Chykina is a doctoral candidate in both the Educational Theory and Policy, and the Comparative and International Education programs at Pennsylvania State University. Her research explores how educational outcomes of immigrant and minority students are affected by different characteristics of the communities they inhabit. She is also interested in how the characteristics of educational systems influence educational expectations, achievement, and attainment across countries.

Her work has been published in: Sociological Science; The Social Science Journal; Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education; Globalisation, Societies and Education; and European Education.