Ep. 2 - Be compassionate! This is how people will trust you more!

09/15/22 • 32 min

The second podcast of the series ‘The Road Less Traveled’ features Iryna Matviyishyn who is currently working as an independent journalist and producer based in Liev, Ukraine.
After a degree in journalism, Iryna felt the need to specialise. She realised that she had always been interested in human rights but did not have the word for it. “I just did not know that this concept and this education existed. I never thought about it in terms of a degree. When I was researching for a master’s degree, I was mostly looking for a degree in international relations, but then, out of the sudden I saw a degree in human rights. I immediately understood that this is what I wanted to do.”
She considers that the knowledge acquired studying human rights helps her to make her news coverage deeper and also more focused. When the full-scale war started, she felt the urgency to write in English to inform people outside Ukraine about the horrors and the terror they were witnessing.
Her advice to journalists who want to specialise in human rights is to keep an open mind but more importantly to be human and compassionate as this is how people trust you more. She insisted as well on the need to comply with the ethics of journalism, to network and keep practising.
This episode closes with a call from Iryna to all of us to keep speaking about Ukraine and not to succumb to war fatigue. Inform yourself and share information about what is happening in Ukraine.

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Ep. 1 - To create a better world requires critical thinking

The first podcast episode of the series ‘The Road Less Traveled’ features Dumiso Gatsha who works at the nexus of human rights and sustainable development.
Coming from auditing, Dumi pivoted to activism and graduated from the LLM/MPhil in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa (HRDA) from the University of Pretoria. They started their own NGO in Botswana, Success Capital, as a result of recognising that there are significant gaps around youth agency, autonomy representation, voice and visibility.
Dumi explains how they work on eliminating the barriers between grassroots experiences and global policymaking, what are the challenges and the rewards in running your own NGO or campaign and which skills make a difference in occupying those governance spaces for people with lived experience.
Enjoy this extremely rich and lively discussion in which our guest feels as comfortable quoting Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelo as referring to Madonna and Oprah Winfrey.

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Ep. 3 - Don’t fit in! Deconstruct from the classrooms!

The third guest of our podcast series ‘The Road Less Traveled’ is David Nnanna Ikpo, a Nigerian lawyer, storyteller, researcher and filmmaker. He finds all his passions quite complementary and despite the growing acceptance of intersciplinary teams, he still finds that he is stuck with assessments that are incomplete and stay in the limbo. There is no protocol for a lawyer who is at a filmmaker and a researcher at the same time. “How do you evaluate my work?”
A ‘superhero’ combining all his passions, David is finalising his PhD exploring "a place for indigenous storytelling in Nigerian queer rights advocacy". He also contributes to the diversity of narratives by creating a more complete and complex picture of being queer in Nigeria with his novel Fimisile Forever, a loveaway from the dominant construction of masculinity.
In his opinion, art can bring a lot to human rights. “The most striking the most important thing art does for human rights in our world today is questioning. Art questions the scope of it, the depth of it.”
He concludes the conversation with a piece of advice for students and alumni of human rights masters who want to use their creativity in their work: Don’t fit in! Deconstruct from the classrooms! He adds a wish for the universities: that the internships offered to students after those masters also include galleries or museums and that students could be co-superivsed by curators and artists.