Student Highlight
Julia Brito ~ M.S. Humanitarian Studies 2021
Hi all! I'm Julia Britto, and I'm a graduate student in the accelerated master's program in Humanitarian Studies. I am so excited to be taking a CEL course in my tenth and final semester at Fordham–– what better way to round out my Fordham experience than through mutual engagement with the community outside of our virtual classroom? On February 1st we began Contemporary Issues in Humanitarian Action under the instruction of Dr. Nora Lester Murad, an experienced practitioner of humanitarian, organizational development, and social justice advocacy and consultancy. The course will introduce pressing issues and acute challenges of contemporary humanitarian response through three modules on (1) Threats and Vulnerabilities, (2) Accountability in Humanitarian Response, and (3) Innovations in Humanitarian Response, the overall aim of the course being to examine how the international community forms consensus regarding best practices, and how this, in turn, informs humanitarian practice. Within these modules we'll be studying of-the-moment topics of climate, debt, and anti-terrorism as they influence the humanitarian space.
Our community partner this semester is the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network (AfSDJN), a newly-launched coalition of citizens, scholars, civil society actors and church groups committed to exposing the adverse impact of unsustainable levels of African sovereign debt on the lives of ordinary citizens. Through research and writing on the current realities of Africa's debt landscape, our class will support AfSDJN in their primary objective of strategizing around the changing nature of debt in Africa toward restructuring measures that promote increased transparency, accountability and responsibility of lenders and African governments about how sovereign debt is procured, spent and repaid.
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(Update: February 24, 2021)
My CEL course, Contemporary Issues, is underway with our first module of the semester: Climate. This is such an important and timely aspect of current affairs, where we see all nations, sectors, and people either as causes or carriers of the impacts of climate change. We've been diving into readings and reports like the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement, and we even had an early viewing of The New Corporation, a documentary revealing the intersections of the corporate world, climate change, and inequality, and the realities of CSR as related to the power corporations hold over both consumer and climate. In applying the topics of climate, inequality, and aid to our work with the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, we are doing independent research on aid and climate action in Africa. I happen to be writing my graduate thesis around the theme of climate displacement with case studies of African nations in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, so I am really excited for this opportunity to carry my knowledge and new learnings between this course and my personal research, as well as the real-world application with AfSDJN. On March 1, Bernard Ochieng Oluma from Narrative Hub in South Sudan will be giving us a virtual talk about climate and related issues in South Sudan from a grassroots perspective– so stay tuned for exciting class updates ahead!
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(Update March 9, 2021)
These past couple of weeks are drawing the Contemporary Issues class' Climate module to a close. Last Monday we had an additional, morning, session to accomodate the time difference of guest speaker Bernard Ochieng Oluma, a Kenyan aid worker based in South Sudan. Bernard is the founder of the organization Narrative Hub, whose mission is to change the narrative of humanitarian work in South Sudan. It was fascinating to learn of Bernard's experiences and insight into climate change in South Sudan, where its effects are adverse to the logical flow of local weather patterns: while South Sudan itself is dry, flooding that originates from the Nile and other external bodies of water are displacing people en masse. With climate change remaining largely under-discussed on the local level, according to Bernard, the general person will attribute what's happening to a curse or punishment from the gods in retribution for the nation's violent, years-long civil war. Bernard's partial solution is to advocate for the inclusion of climate change messaging into humanitarian intervention– not only to help shape South Sudanese understandings of climate change, but also so that local perspectives and indigenous knowledge can be brought to the forefront of localized conservation efforts. While plenty more was discussed in our session with Bernard, I will leave it at that, because I could potentially go on for days! I'm so grateful our instructor, Nora, gave us this opportunity to learn with him. In other class news, we are preparing to deliver our individual analysis papers on current climate change-focused aid/development projects and policies in Africa. In a move that will also be helpful to my thesis research, I am writing about policy efforts in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, which are two highly impacted, complex regions in Africa deserving of an improved multilateral effort for relief. Perhaps more on that next time; for now, thank you for reading!
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(Update March 24, 2021)
This week in Contemporary Issues in Humanitarian Action, we are beginning our deep-dive into the Debt module: that is, the role of external debt in international development and assistance. The goal here is to understand how loans and debt have been used in the field of development and humanitarian assistance and the impact on specific countries. Yet, although we're moving on in class, our Climate module hasn't exactly concluded. Having submitted our climate papers last week, we received constructive feedback over the weekend for our paper revisions, which is "actually where the learning occurs," according to our instructor, Nora. And I fully believe her! In fact, her comments have been some of the most helpful I've received in a long time, on any paper–– with a lot of my recent coursework in other classes consisting of projects and only a singular final written assignment, I often haven't received any written feedback at all beyond the letter grade. With the detailed feedback I've received for this paper, I appreciate that I have a really clear map of how I can reflect and improve upon my ideas so that I emerge from the first-class module with a clear, well-rounded understanding of what I set out to research. Switching back over to Debt, as we've begun to cover, we started off with some selections from Jason Hickel's The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets and a chapter from Eric Toussaint titled, “Transfers from the periphery to the center, from labor to capital." In these, we read about the infuriating historical truths of aid and development funding, where loaned funds and resulting debt further drive the divide between the Global North and South and render the South deeply dependent upon continuous aid rather than fostering independence. While it's a given that this is inefficient, the infuriating part is in recognizing the tactics used by the Global North to manipulate aid to uphold their own power and influence globally. It's enough to fire up any burgeoning humanitarian worker, that's for sure! We will look forward to keeping these understandings in mind as we get into collaboration with our community partner, the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network in applying these concepts to debt in Africa, specifically.
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(Updated April 6, 2021)
Contemporary Issues in Humanitarian Action is making its way through debt––international debt, that is–– and getting started with our blog post project with our community partner, the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network (AfSDJN). In yesterday evening's class, we had the honor of hearing from AfSDJN member Oluseun Onigbinde, social entrepreneur and the founder and director of BudgIT, a civic organization based in Nigeria (and currently expanding to other African states), focused on data transparency and increasing access to public finance information to strengthen the capacity of citizens to hold governments accountable. As a fiscal transparency and open data advocate, Oluseun is a key player in the debt justice movement in Africa as pertains to sovereign debt and other economic justice issues on the African continent. His talk was fascinating, though I will admit it was so much information to take in very quickly, and in complicated topics such as economics and debt, a lot went right over my head at the moment! I was glad to know I wasn't the only one who felt that way, as several classmates and even our instructor echoed similar sentiments; we'll all look forward to reviewing the Zoom recording in our own time, as this talk was certainly full of knowledge gems. Oluseun's visit also informs our blog post project, where we are focusing on writing specifically about debt and climate financing in Nigeria. Our working post, titled, 'Is Climate Financing Worsening Nigeria’s Debt Crisis?' will outline Nigeria's debt crisis, its climate crisis, the concept of climate finance and how it is implemented in Nigeria, and African responses to debt and Nigeria-specific policies relating to debt. We are each doing research on a different section of the post, mine being on international climate response in Nigeria, and are collaborating via a class-wide Google doc where we can see how everyone's research is going and tie all our ideas into one finished piece. I'll be sure to link the end product in my next update–– until then, thanks for reading!
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(Updated April 30, 2021
Greetings from Contemporary Issues in Humanitarian Action! This will be the final update from my CEL graduate course–– I can't believe we're already at the end of the semester! In the thick of our Anti-Terrorism module, readings about the United Nations counter-terrorism complex, the conditionality of aid to NGOs in Palestine, and international coalitions such as the Charity & Justice Network, which is dedicated to protecting aid organizations and nonprofits operating in the peacebuilding realm, are informing our understandings and approach to tackling this complicated feature of humanitarian work. Also as part of this unit, we are assigned to individually reach out to local NGOs/CBOs working with populations in U.S.-ascribed "risky" locations internationally, to inquire how U.S. counter-terrorism policy and rhetoric impact their daily work. As a class, we will be putting together some individual research on the topic of counter-terrorism to collectively build a comprehensive guide of 8 things all humanitarian practitioners should know about counter-terrorism and anti-terrorism, as our final project of the semester. I think this is such an interesting and cutting-edge assignment because as students, we are working to develop a concrete resource intended for others entering our field while we develop our own proficiency in the area. In addition to this, we are finalizing our written blog piece on Nigerian climate debt for the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, the edits for which are currently underway. As a characteristic of CEL coursework, these two class outputs are fantastic, real-world applications of the course material that we as individuals can add to our portfolios and expertise within humanitarian studies––how exciting is that? Considering that I will graduate from the program in a few short weeks, I really value how I get to add these concepts to my humanitarian "toolbelt" as I continue into the professional space to challenge these very pressing global issues. And with that, I will sign off; thank you to those who have kept up with me this semester, and many thanks to Professor Nora Lester Murad and CCEL for developing this immensely engaging course experience!
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