Ideas Improving World Order at a ceremony at The University of Louisville. Courtesy photo
Encinitas resident Dr. Terra Lawson-Remer has received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order at a ceremony at The University of Louisville.
In awarding the prize, the university cited Lawson-Remer’s 2016 book, Fulfilling Social and Economic Rights, as making a “significant contribution to world order” through its ability “to inform domestic and international policies, aid in the work of non-governmental organizations and provide a way to evaluate performance in a truly comparative perspective.”
The Grawemeyer Award is accompanied by a $100,000 prize, which will be split among Lawson-Remer and her co-authors, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Susan Randolph. The book was previously named the 2016 Best Book in Human Rights Scholarship by the American Political Science Association.
Lawson-Remer and her co-authors used the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights as a basis for their work, creating a new tool, the Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment Index, to measure nations’ progress toward human rights goals. Their book also sheds light on policies that advance human rights and explains how use of these policies and public pressure can lead to results.
A San Diego native who received her J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University, Lawson-Remer was a senior advisor to the Treasury Department during the Obama Administration. She moved home to San Diego County in 2015 and most recently co-founded Flip the 49th! Neighbors in Action. For the past two years she has worked to build grassroots Democratic power in California’s 49th Congressional District, culminating in the election of Mike Levin to Congress.
Lawson-Remer is the founder of Catalyst Project, a social change strategy firm, a lecturer at UC San Diego, and a recent fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is also a 2020 candidate for San Diego County Supervisor in the 3rd District.