Beginnings

My path towards Namaste started in a classroom my junior year at the university. Prof. Emma Gilligan was Teaching Genocide in the 20^th century and I was sitting in her classroom, taking part in my first human rights class. I think originally I was taking the class to fulfill a political science requirement, however by the end I had been effectively re-directed towards human rights. Her class was filled with free and open discussion on an assortment of human rights related topics and these discussions helped to foster a curiosity and eventually a passion in the human rights field. Following this curiosity I took a few more human rights/political science cross over classes and became more and more engrossed in the human rights field. Then while in Prof. Shareen Hertel’s competitive human rights class, she took the opening of class one day to express the existence and more so the merit of the universities human rights minor. I decided to look into it and went over to the Dodd center, were I was pleased to find out I had three of the four required classes done. I decided to fit one more into my schedule and then start looking into what they were calling “internship” opportunities. A few days later with few exciting ideas, I called up a friend and fellow human rights minor Chris Martin. Chris told me about the journal and how it was a fun if demanding option in the field of human rights internships. He told me that the journal offered a lot of creative freedom and had tangible end results. Both of these were enough to sell me and I went back to the Human rights institute and asked what I needed to do to get on board. After sending in and getting an application accepted that last steps of a long journey towards the journal were

completed.