Group Region: Oceania

Vlad Sokhin is an award-winning documentary photographer, videographer, and multimedia producer with significant experience covering social, cultural, environmental, health, and human rights issues…

The Papuan Archive Project is an initiative that promotes sustainable peace and respect for indigenous rights in West Papua through facilitating justice and accountability for abuses seen in the past and, sadly, still to this day. Recording human rights, cultural, and environmental abuses suffered by the West Papuan people during the Indonesian occupation, the archive is a public record for the world to see. It exists as an interactive website allowing viewers to search the events that collectively comprise the slow motion genocide of the indigenous people of West Papua.

Thanks to a collaboration between the Cultures of Resistance Network and the American Friends of SOAS (AFSOAS), two postgraduate scholarships will be available in 2014/15 at SOAS, University of London. Valued at £24,000 per student, the scholarships will be used to help their recipients meet the costs of tuition fees at the overseas rate and also help them meet any additional costs (e.g. transport, purchasing books, research costs) associated with their stay in London.

West Papua Media (WPM) coordinates a network of journalists inside and outside the West Papua Province. Aside from operating under Indonesian military occupation, one of WPM’s key challenges is the Indonesian government’s media ban on independent reporting from inside West Papua. The organization monitors the latest independently verifiable news from West Papua, where journalists, Papuan and outsiders alike, are under constant threat of imprisonment or even death. WPM supports these journalists and specializes in reporting human rights violations and civil resistance inside West Papua. B

The Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation is a New York-based nonprofit that fortifies potent creative voices in global contemporary art and fosters local youth empowerment in Vanuatu at the Tanna Center for the Arts, a carbon-negative artists center in the Melanesian South Pacific.

Support from the Cultures of Resistance Network helped fund the Tanna Center for the Arts.

Website: www.the-vpf.org

KARAPATAN (Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights) is an alliance of individuals and organizations working to promote and protect human rights in the Philippines. The alliance gathers information both on particular human rights violations and on the general human rights situation in the country, which it uses for legal action and to raise public awareness of human rights issues.