HRTS Faculty Spotlight: Prof. Mette Brogden
Prof. Mette Brogden plays many roles within the Human Rights Practice Program: Assistant Professor of Practice, Executive Committee Member, Director of Graduate Studies, and perhaps most of all as an advisor and mentor to our graduate students.
In honor of Mette's tireless efforts on behalf of our students, she was named the 2023 Maria Teresa Velez Outstanding Faculty Mentor by the University of Arizona’s Commission on the Status of Women. The Outstanding Mentoring Award recognizes individuals with an outstanding commitment to mentoring within The University of Arizona. This prestigious award honors and celebrates people who are making a difference through mentoring and who have significantly demonstrated a commitment above and beyond, through their individual mentoring accomplishments, their creation of high quality mentoring experiences for others, and their efforts contributing to building a mentoring culture at the University of Arizona.
Congratulations, Mette and thanks for all that you do for the Human Rights Practice Program, for your long-term project partners in Ghana, and for human rights and social justice!
About Prof. Mette Brogden
Mette Brogden, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Practice in SBS/Graduate Programs in Human Rights Practice (HRTS). She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who has overseen the resettlement of over 6,000 refugees to the U.S. while serving in leadership positions in government and NGOs. Her work has included refugee reception and placement, policy development, program administration, evaluation, and research on the refugee resettlement experience among refugees and receiving communities after 9-11. Her previous careers were in environmental and public policy conflict resolution, and as a psychotherapist in community mental health centers. She facilitated numerous multi-stakeholder policy-development processes across local, state, and national levels while managing the Environmental and Public Policy Conflict Resolution Program at UA’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy.
Mette's research interests include international migration; trauma impacts and social healing from extreme violence, human rights violations and colonial legacies; environmental justice, rights of species and ecological systems; facilitation of multi-stakeholder policy development processes; how NGOs gain traction from start-up to scale-up; and developing communities of practice that provide social capital and collegial support among people working to address complex, intractable troubles. Her current research site is in northern Ghana, with World Institute of Africa Culture and Traditions (WIACT), an indigenous education institute which focuses on documenting tribal elders’ knowledge.
Mette holds an M.S.W. from Tulane University, M.A.s from The University of Iowa and The University of Arizona, and a Graduate Certificate in Refugee Trauma and Global Mental Health from Harvard Medical School. She directed a refugee resettlement program at a social services agency in Tucson, and later served as the organizational mentor for three refugee-led mutual assistance/community-based non-profit organizations in Tucson and Texas. She also provided national technical assistance for HIAS/U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement programs focused on refugee family strengthening.
Between 2010-2016 Mette served as the State Refugee Coordinator for the State of Wisconsin, taking a year out in Baltimore to serve as the Director of Program Evaluation at Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services. She served as Deputy Director of the City of Seattle's Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs from 2016-2017 before accepting an appointment with the HRTS program in 2017. She currently teaches classes in human rights NGO management, migration, and Human Rights Crises & Trauma.