2012 Gallatin Global Fellows

Maggie Carter
Fellowship Location: Brazil
Brazil Foundation

Maggie is a junior at Gallatin concentrating in Latin American Studies, Anthropology and International Development. She is particularly interested in Brazil, a country of both growing economic importance and widespread inequality. Her interest in international affairs spills over into her extracurricular activities, as she is the editor-in-chief of Gallatin’s Journal of Global Affairs. For her summer project, she will be working in the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil on a small community project funded by the Brazil Foundation. Her research will focus on community participation as a path to development and the protection of human rights in impoverished communities.

Dipika Gaur
Fellowship Location: India
Himachal Pradesh State Aids Control Society

Dipika is an undergraduate sophomore at Gallatin concentrating in global health equity with a focus on HIV/AIDS. She is particularly interested in how stigmas related to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or socio-economic status affects access to health care. In the past, Dipika has worked with Amnesty International on various letter-writing and lobbying initiatives for the "Individuals at Risk" campaign. Currently, Dipika is the chapter leader of FACE AIDS at NYU, a national student empowerment movement committed to fighting HIV/AIDS and supporting comprehensive health care in Rwanda. As a Gallatin Global Human Rights Fellow, Dipika hopes to explore how socio-economic status, lack of education, and cultural taboos increase the risk of HIV/AIDS infection among women and injection drug users. She will work with Himachal Pradesh State Aids Control Society, a state division of India's National AIDS Control Organization. Dipika will visit government-funded AIDS health care facilities to examine how effectively local and national governments have reached out to stigmatized communities and to research initiatives that may be successful in the future. Also, Dipika plans to visit HIV/AIDS prevention- and treatment-based NGOs throughout India to deepen her understanding of the national effort, both governmental and non-governmental, to promote education and combat discrimination surrounding HIV/AIDS.

Nicholas Glastonbury
Fellowship Location: Turkey
Truth, Justice & Memory Project

Nicholas Glastonbury is a junior at Gallatin concentrating in memory, ethnic conflict, nationalism, trauma studies and oral history, while minoring in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at CAS. He is particularly interested in the discrepancies between modes of national and minority remembrance and in the practices and pedagogical repercussions of collective memorialization. This summer, Nicholas will be going to Istanbul, Turkey, to work with Hakikat, Adalet, ve Hafıza Çalışmaları, a transitional justice project that aims to understand and document past human rights violations in order to engage civil society in open and frank discussions of the past, work to find a solution to the Kurdish question, and move toward a more peaceable future.

Nandini Govil
Fellowship Location: Cambodia
Global ENT Outreach / IMPACT-Cambodia

Nandini is a dual MD/MPH student and is currently taking time off in between her third and fourth years of medical school at the NYU School of Medicine to pursue a Masters in Public Health (MPH) at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. During her undergraduate years at NYU's College of Arts and Science, she became interested in public policy and healthcare through volunteer work at Bellevue Hospital. Her interest continued through medical school and her first semester of MPH study, in which she focused on global health policy and the concept of health as a human right. This summer, she will travel to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to work with Impact Cambodia, a non-governmental organization that works with the hearing impaired. Through her work she hopes to explore the intersections between medicine, global public health and human rights.

Katherine Hensley
Fellowship Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Leon, Nicaragua
The Working World

Kate is an undergraduate junior at Stern studying business and its applications in the field of development. She is particularly interested in innovative grassroots approaches, such as microfinance and social enterprise. Her experience includes internships with grassroots organizations such as the Liberty Hill Foundation, Givology and Common Cents. This summer, she will work with the microfinance institution the Working World. TWW’s mission is to eradicate poverty by offering micro-credit financing to working cooperatives of individuals who have no other access to capital. Kate will support the organization by building strategic partnerships with local retailers, crafting the annual report, assisting with its forthcoming business manual, and generally offering her assistance to its accounting, grant writing and loan departments.

Daniel Jones
Fellowship Location: Brazil
Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Terra (or Landless Workers' Movement, MST)

Daniel is an undergraduate at Gallatin studying applications of network theory to building a social movement, led by the poor, to end poverty. This summer, Daniel will work in Brazil with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Terra (or Landless Workers' Movement, MST). MST is the largest social movement in Latin America, with well over a million members; it organizes landless workers to fight for land, carry out agrarian reform, and work towards the creation of a more just society. Daniel is an alumnus of the Philadelphia Student Union and currently works with the Poverty Initiative Poverty Scholars Program at Union Theological Seminary. Through his work with MST, he hopes to learn critical lessons in the development and maintenance of social movements, especially in rural contexts, and thus be able to aid in the further development of relationships between social movements in the United States and in Brazil.

Nadiya Kostyuk
Fellowship Location: Ukraine
Berezne District Central Administration

After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Psychology from Kyiv National Linguistic University in Ukraine, Nadiya moved to New York, where she graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in International Criminal Justice from John Jay College. She is currently completing her Masters Degree in International Law and Human Rights at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and volunteers at the United Nations Population Fund. This summer, Nadiya will be interning at Berezne District Central Administration in Rivne Oblast, Ukraine. Her research is focused on the impact of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster (CND) on reproductive health, and how the local administration complies with national and international laws related to the CND. Having lived in the fourth radioactive Chernobyl zone for nineteen years, Nadiya experienced the disaster firsthand and has many contacts who were affected by it, including her father, who worked as a doctor in Chernobyl in the aftermath of the disaster.

Jackson Miller
Fellowship Location: China
Xintu Center for Community Health Promotion

A Richmond, Virginia native, Jackson Miller is a junior at Gallatin studying the political and economic mechanisms of social marginalization with a focus on modern China. For the Spring 2011 semester, Jackson studied abroad through the NYU Shanghai program, where he volunteered teaching English in labor migrant communities and interned at a local NGO: Xintu Center for Community Health Promotion. Jackson remains fascinated by Chinese social policy, specifically the Hukou system, which oversees the movement of rural workers from the countryside to the cities. This summer, Jackson will return to the Xintu Center in Shanghai to manage the implementation of a project titled “City Adjustment”. The goal of the project is to help recent labor-migrants access resources to smooth their integration into urban life, including employment opportunities, housing and assistance with local laws. Jackson and his team also hope to recruit professionals to provide counseling services to the project’s beneficiaries.

Joyce Mishaan
Fellowship Location: Israel
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Joyce Mishaan is a Gallatin M.A. student examining the art of narrative as a cultural practice in film and performance. Her interest is in exploring existing ways in which we use narrative as a social and political tool, as well as the possibilities for pushing those boundaries to open up new channels of social communication. This summer, Joyce will document the activist efforts of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions in Israel’s occupied territories; she will compile testimonials by both Palestinians and Israeli settlers involved in land and house disputes. She will adapt this material into a narrative film based on the model of Greek tragedy. Joyce’s project aims to shift the conversation about Israeli and Palestinian conflict away from nationalistic, Zionistic and religious terms and towards addressing issues of human rights by exploring its consequences through the tragic lens.

Sarah Newman
Fellowship Location: USA
Fortune Society

Sarah Newman is a sophomore pursuing her undergraduate degree at the Gallatin School. She is concentrating on the intersection of cultural anthropology and public health, with a side interest in film photography. Her interest in human rights was fostered by courses at Gallatin as well as the Departments of Anthropology and Public Health. She believes that positive change has to start in your own backyard and therefore, this coming summer, Sarah will work for the Fortune Society in Queens, New York. A non-profit organization, the Fortune Society specializes in strengthening community through advocacy and support for the successful re-assimilation of former prison inmates, and promotes alternatives to incarceration. She will be exploring the link between education and human rights as well as helping to create a second chance for the program’s participants.

Ameneé Siahpush
Fellowship Location: Mexico
Global Workers Justice Alliance (GWJA)

Ameneé Siahpush is a Master of Public Administration candidate at NYU Wagner with an interest in the intersection of human rights, international public policy, and immigration issues. Her professional experience includes nonprofit program evaluation and the research supervision of an intervention designed to promote school-readiness for foster children. Internationally, Ameneé has explored human rights issues in Iran and has supported sustainable agriculture projects in Latin America. As a Gallatin Global Fellow, Ameneé will return to Mexico this summer to collaborate with the Global Workers Justice Alliance (GWJA), a nonprofit dedicated to combating the exploitation of migrant workers. Specifically, Ameneé will partner with community organizations in southern Mexico to create a system of data collection designed to explore and track the migratory trends of laborers. These data will then be used by GWJA to provide migrant workers with pre-departure educational information on industry- and state-specific rights and resources, thereby reducing the risk of human rights abuses that may occur during labor recruitment, migration, and in the U.S. workplace.