Joseph Wronka

Joseph Wronka is Professor of Social Work, Springfield College, Springfield; MA; Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, for the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW), which has special consultative status with ECOSOC; and Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar within the discipline of Social Work with specialities in social justice and poverty and subspecialties in human rights, phenomenology, and psychology . He has taught human rights, social policy,social justice, qualitative research, humanistic and existential-phenomenological psychology. and other courses in the helping and health professions for roughly 25 years. He has done research on the world of the street musician, while living in the South of France in his twenties. It was a participatory-action project, where he played his accordion in the streets. He also lived in the arctic and subarctic regions of Alaska in his thirties where he worked in primarily an Indigenous community developing a generalist counseling program among other things. He has also worked in areas of extreme poverty, such as the inner cities of New York and for some time in Appalachia and Mississippi. His doctorate in social policy is from Brandeis, the Heller School, where he also served as Principal Investigator of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Project, which originated in Heller's Center for Social Change.

He is the author of four books: Human Rights and Social Policy in the 21t Century: A Comparison of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights with United States Federal and State Constitutions i(University Press of America, 1992, 1998 [rev. ed.]); the Dr. Ambedkar Lectures on the Theme Creating a Human Rights Culture (National Institute of Social Sciences and Social Work, Bhubenaswar India, 2002); and Human Rights and Social Justice: Social Action and Service for the Helping and Health Professions (Sage, 2008). (Note that Human Rights and Social Justice comes with an Instructor's Manual, lecture notes, PowerPoints, examination questions (objective and essay). However, you need to be a professor for an examination copy, which would also include the Instructor's Manual. If interested, please go to the Sage website at: www.sagepub.com and enter author's name "Wronka".

He loves the outdoors (as you can tell from the photo, like kayaking, bicycling, swimming. He also plays the accordion and piano. There he is on the right in a short video at Occupy Wall Street. His homepage is: www.humanrightsculture.org