Student Fellow Spotlight: Team Collaborates to Create Change

Student fellows Olivia Brimhall, Trevor Riedmann, and Emma Wells want to change the public narrative about migration and asylum seekers. The group, led by Dr. Lara-Zuzan Golesorhki, is taking the 70th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions as the occasion to tell a new story about migration that takes gender into account. To do this, the team is creating a multi-pronged publicly-engaged project that includes: an interactive timeline that Wells notes will be more accessible to the public than traditional academic research; a partnership with The Rosewood Initiative to create an oral history archive of migrant women’s stories; and a series of workshops to help the community better understand the issues asylum seekers face. By centering the experience of asylum-seeking women, the group hopes to intervene in harmful negative depictions of migrants and show that the migrant experience is not monolithic, but deeply informed by gender and sexuality. For Brimhall, the ultimate goal is to “build empathy” through this work. Or as Reidmann puts it, “If the project can change one person’s mind or opinions…then that’s a win for me.”

Watch the group discuss their project in more detail below.