The Women Achievers Of The Landecker Democracy Fellowship Award 2022
The Alfred Landecker Foundation, in collaboration with Humanity in Action, has announced the participants of the third cohort of its Landecker Democracy Fellowship.
The Landecker Democracy Fellowship supports community leaders and young professionals in addressing systemic inequities in Europe and the United States through innovative grassroots projects. The projects take place at the intersection of technology and social justice and may vary widely in focus, methodology, scope, and target groups. The projects seek to engage with a variety of questions: How do they engage the factors and actors (de)stabilizing democracy in the digital age? How they will employ technology to advance inclusive democratic placemaking? How it will leverage the opportunities and address the dangers inherent in technology? In what manner they will employ digital means to counteract hate and bring people together?
The main objective for this year’s program is supporting its Fellows as they seek to tackle these challenges and harness these opportunities, while also building a cohort of leaders whose approaches to these questions further their development as champions of democracy, community, and social justice.
“The Landecker Democracy Fellowship is a unique opportunity…to defend our democracies and open societies in the digital age” – Luisa Maria Schweizer, Programme Director of the Alfred Landecker Foundation
30 community leaders and young professionals were selected through a rigorous admissions process from a pool of 90 finalists. The Fellows’ propositions will be supported, including a monthly stipend (10,000 Euros in total), seed funding of 5,000 Euros for their projects, guidance, and intense training to increase their individual impact on political discourses, policy-making, and social realities.
According to Dr. Judith S. Goldstein, Founder, and CEO of Humanity in Action, “The Landecker Democracy Fellowship is a special part-time program that allows young professionals to make a material impact on their community”.
INTRODUCING THE 2022 AMAZING WOMEN OF LANDECKER DEMOCRACY FELLOWS:
- Chandra Vadhana Radhakrishnan
Dr. Chandra Vadhana is the first Indian to win the UNCTAD Empretec Women in Business Award 2018 and is one of the eight women entrepreneurs representing India in the International Visitors Leadership Program of the U.S. Department of State (2019). She has won the USIEF Fulbright Scholarship and is currently pursuing her post-doctoral fellowship at the Gendered Innovation Lab, Stanford University in the domain of Startup Social Equity and Sustainability.
She has a double Master’s degree in Psychology and Management along with a Ph.D. in Management with a total of 18+ years of professional experience in L&D and Entrepreneurship Education.
Her social initiative Prayaana Labs is a CSR-approved NGO in India supporting various corporate and government bodies with their gender equality initiatives. On the other hand, she also has directed a short film, The Identity, released in 2022, and is the author of The Woman in me and The Girl in me Poetry books.
2. Alina Jabbari
Alina is a lecturer in Social Sciences at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, and conducts independent research. Moreover, she is an interdisciplinary scholar who is passionate about creating decolonial inclusive communities and envisioning practical ways to manifest transitional justice. Generally, her research interests are in the field of religion, power, resistance, and collective memory, exploring how religious texts can be (re)interpreted to challenge structures of social domination, including poverty, patriarchy, racism, and empire.
Besides, she also worked as a Project Leader and trainer at a local organization committed to vulnerable communities and individuals in Amsterdam. She has also served in other roles as a legal consultant for women with dependent residency who were dealing with issues regarding divorce and domestic abuse.
3. Anna Duensing
Anna Duensing is a historian, curator, and public scholar, who also achieved a Ph.D. degree in History and African American Studies from Yale University in 2022. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, where she is teaching and working on her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Fascism Is Already Here: Civil Rights and the Making of a Black Antifascist Tradition. Anna is also part of the collective of scholars and activists that manages the April Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to research and education about fascism and antifascist resistance in the United States, past and present.
4. Esra Karakaya
Esra Karakaya has been a part of the 2017 John Lewis Fellowship before the Landecker fellowship 2022. She is an award-winning journalist and the Founder of Karakaya Talks, a talk show and news content startup that centers on traditionally marginalized communities. Among many other prizes, Zeit Campus 2020 named her as one of the 30 under 30 Changing Germany. She also won the Hildegard-Hamm-Brücher Prize 2021 for democracy, and Karakaya Talks was the winner of the 2020 Grimme Online Awards for culture and entertainment.
5. Judith Blijden
Judith Blijden is a Senior Policy Officer of the Digital Transition, Social and Economic Council of The Netherlands. Her aim is to raise awareness and understanding about the impact of technology by translating information into creative and inspiring storytelling productions. The fellowship allows her to work on her first production: the Digital Period – the podcast will tell the story about what happens behind the user interface of period tracking apps. The impact of technology on society has been a central theme in her work. Judith has worked as a consultant. She consulted on legal and policy issues regarding the use of technology.
6. Lili Balogh
Lili is a bio-engineer and tropical agronomical engineer, involved in the international Food Sovereignty and Agroecology movement for the past decade. She has worked in several eco-political NGOs to promote agroecology and regenerative food systems in different parts of the world.
In February 2022, Lili became the President of the Agroecology Europe Association and the Hungarian Agroecology Network Association. She began her own farm in West Nógrád in 2018, where she started applying holistic management, regenerative agriculture, permacultural, and agroecological principles.
7. Marta Rozmysłowicz
Marta is a union organizer at OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza (Workers’ Initiative), a rank-and-file labor union in Poland. In her role, Marta is responsible for running the union office, located in Poznań. She is the first point of contact for workers who want to start or join the union.
From 2018-2020, Marta worked as a warehouse associate at an Amazon fulfillment center in Poznań. She was elected as a shop steward and representative in the warehouse occupational health and safety commission. During this time, Marta became aware of the harmful effects on workers’ bodies of technology like algorithms, used by employers to enforce high productivity rates under great time pressure. This experience led her to law school and become a certified occupational health and safety inspector.
8. Melissa De La Torre
Melissa De La Torre is a Contracts Analyst, at Coinbase and a U.S. Citizenship Interview Coach at Make The Road New York. In her role at Coinbase, she negotiates commercial contracts with suppliers and is launching a supplier diversity program to create more business opportunities for companies owned by ethnic minorities, women, and the LGBTQI community.
9. Nicole Reiber
Nicole is a psychologist and media scientist, with a focus on media, digitalization, and democracy. After finishing her Ph.D. in Psychology in 2012, she studied media science at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. She directed a documentary about refugee children, their flight, and life in Germany, which won the LFK Medienpreis in 2017.
In her work, she focuses on digital peace education, particularly in phenomena like mis- and disinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories, and what influence those have on individuals and (democratic) societies.
10. Saijai Liangpunsakul
Saijai works at the intersection of technology and human rights. When she moved to Myanmar in 2014, Myanmar was at the start of a change – the country was just coming online. Her work focused on using technology as a force for civic engagement and democracy. She helped Myanmar’s government set up a national mHealth system to combat maternal mortality.
11. Solomiia Stasiv
After graduating from the University of Opole with a journalism degree, Solomiia lived in Canada for over five years, where she gained most of her professional experience. She worked in various fields including law, aviation, media, and advertising. Currently, she works as a consultant and representative of the Clooney Foundation for Justice on accountability in Ukraine.
12. Sujin Julia Noël
Sujin is a consultant to organizations that aim to build an inclusive work culture and a coach to BPoC activists who are stepping into their leadership power. Sujin’s tribe is the Leading Change Network (LCN), a global network of community organizers.
13. Yasmin Al-Douri
Yasmin is a Politics and Technology Graduate Student at the Technical University Munich focusing on the regulation of emerging technologies and AI ethics. She also works as a Business Program Manager at Microsoft, where she engages in ‘Responsible AI’.
Credits: Humanity in Action
