The Road Less Traveled
The Road Less Traveled
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The podcast series ‘The Road Less Travelled’ will give you an insight into less usual careers and career paths after a master in human rights.
Each podcast is an in-depth and honest conversation between the host Véronique Lerch and a graduate of a human rights programme who has ‘taken that road less travelled’. The interviews focus on the learnings from those less usual paths and shows all the different ways in which human rights can be applied in our lives, at the personal and professional levels.
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Available episodes
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Oldest first
Mar 9, 2023
Ep. 12 - Do not underestimate your influence!
The guest of our 12th episode is Lydia Malmedie, a graduate of the European Master in Human Rights and Democratisation, who currently works as Deputy head of the LGBTI Unit at the Berlin State Ministry for Justice, Diversity and Anti-discrimination.
Sub-national level is getting more and more important with several networks of cities and public authorities working on different human rights issues. Lydia talks about the leverage that one can have at the local level. “I can see the change I am part of when I walk the streets of Berlin.” Public administration needs to reflect its constituents and therefore need diverse expertise that people coming from all walks of life can bring.
It feels quite empowering for people to know that they can change the place where they live. “I would like to see people engage more where they live and connect with their neighbours.”
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Dec 22, 2022
Ep. 11 - Music transforms our reality! Doors will open if you do what you love!
For this episode, we have invited the creative alumna of the European Master in Human Rights and Democratisation who conceived the jingle for the podcasts _The Road Less Traveled_: Laura María Calderón Cuevas.
Laura grew up in a family who enjoyed the arts and encouraged her passion for music and dance. She started being aware very young of the inequalities in Colombia. She understood the power of singing and bringing people together, while working in New York at the UN during the day and playing in a band at night. She realised that music could be a catalyst for change and that she could link her art to her activism.
For her master thesis, she based herself on the multicultural system of human rights and the concept of the right to knowledge as conceived by Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos. *Music transforms our reality. How do we put into practice our human rights knowledge? How do we transform that knowledge and integrate the arts?*
Since she graduated, she has been doing music workshops in the refugee camp near Thessaloniki. She also started a new project: composing lullabies with migrant mothers on an individual basis. In most of those songs, the mothers talk about their wishes for their children and their wishes for a better life. What brings her joy in her work: the smiles of people at the end of the workshops. During the workshops, everyone feels equal and is at the same level of vulnerability.
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Dec 21, 2022
Ep. 10 - Ask professionals you admire about their experiences, perspectives, and opinions!
The guest of this episode is wearing many hats: Barbora Vágnerová, a graduate of the European Master’s in Human Rights and Democratisation, created her own company, works for a foundation and is a jazz singer.
Because of her own experience of caring for a sick relative, Barbora got involved in issues related to health and health care workers. She started her own company, which offers hospital placements in the Czech Republic for individuals interested in such a career in their own country and wanting to experience another health system. *I always look for new challenges and like to think of problems and the solutions to that problem in a systemic way.*
Since April 2022, additionally to her own company, she started working for the Vlček Family Foundation, a newly-established foundation focusing on palliative care for children. Barbora explains that palliative care for children should be encompassing, from the moment of diagnosis to the bereavement process. *Palliative care might be an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people so we are trying to find other ways to communicate about it. The objective of palliative care is to improve the quality of life of the children and their families. Children and families should be asked in every single meeting what they need.*
Barbora explains that what brings her joy in her work is the fact that my work makes sense and seeing that you can see the impact of your work (as part of a collective work) on the quality of life of families.
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Dec 19, 2022
Ep. 9 - Lean into the power of persuasion!
The guest of episode 9 of our podcast is Godfrey Odongo, a human rights graduate from GC Africa, currently working as* *Senior Program Officer with the Human Rights Program at Wellspring Philanthropic Fund in New York. Godfrey got motivated to work in human rights because of his desire to use the law as one of the tools to help others. *What keeps me hopeful is giving hope and building the resilience of human rights activists. What makes me especially hopeful at the moment is seeing in action a multi-disciplinary approach: people from all walks of life working together.* *It is important that we do not hang on the terminology of human rights. *In his opinion, the role of foundations is not only to distribute grants to human rights organisations but as well to act as a connector and a convenor. Foundations can play this role because they have a bird-eye view, which enables them to bring very different organisations at the table and propose different strategies.
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Oct 27, 2022
Ep. 8 - Don’t be afraid to wear all your hats at the same time!
Our guest in this episode is Sinead Duffy, a graduate of the European Master in Human Rights and Democratisation, who founded Yogandha, a range of multi-awarded meditative oils.
For her primary degree, she chose to study philosophy out of interest for ethics and morality, modalities of thoughts, concepts of existence and all aspects of the human condition. She then took a meandering route from philosophy to human rights. After having been taught western philosophy, which is ‘rationalistic’, she discovered Daoism and Eastern philosophy, which in turn led me to study meditation. Through mediation, she experienced interconnectedness and universality and that in turn led her to human rights.
She wished that we learned that human rights the way it is taught comes from a particular philosophical perspective and wished that the students would learn as well about the existence of other philosophical perspectives. In her opinion, this radical shift is necessary as the human rights tradition seems to be currently failing, especially regarding environmental issues. We need to move away from this anthropocentric vision of human rights.
Her decision to start her business was mission-and passion-driven. The biggest reward of owning her company is the creative side of it as well as the feedback from the users of her oils. She feels that she helps people out of their thinking minds.
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Oct 20, 2022
Ep. 7 - Having the sense of accountability is invigorating!
The guest of our 7th episode, Marco Blanco, is the founder and CEO of Child Safeguard, an award-winning consultancy firm, that helps organisations implement strategies to prevent harm and abuse to children through the implementation of Child Safe Best Practices.
From a young age, Marco had a strong interest in human rights and sense for social justice through his volunteer work. Marco worked first for not-for-profit sector and realised that a lot of the time was spent on fundraising and that this fundraising was influencing the organisations receiving the funds and making them quite fragile. The challenges in the not-for-profit sector I encountered compelled me to open my own organisation where I had a bit more control to take it in the direction I would like to continue to work.
After 10 years abroad, he came back to Australia when the Royal Commission investigating historical claims of sexual abuse in institutions caring for children was delivering their results. The combination of his strong passion for child rights, his experience in child protection and the local context led him to create his own organisation. The timing was opportune as there was more community awareness for the issue of child safeguarding and an enhanced regulatory framework following the report of the Royal Commission.
Setting his own business gave him the sense of accountability. Having a business model made it easier for us to be effective. Our point of difference with the not-for-profit sector is that we are a legal firm so we can support our clients with their legal compliance.
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Oct 13, 2022
Ep. 6 - Most journalists are human rights defenders
The guest of our sixth episode is Marina Shupac, an award-winning journalist, self-shooting documentary filmmaker and human rights practitioner from Moldova.
Since she was a child, she wanted to be a journalist but was also already taking a stand on injustice due to her family’s commitment to a more just society in Moldova. She did not perceive it at that point as human rights but more as a political fight. As she grew up in a small town, she only learned about human rights principles when she moved to the capital for her studies.
Studying human rights gave her more self-confidence to cover those issues as a young female journalist. It also gave me a practical understanding of human rights obligations of my government and gave me more instruments to put pressure on government representatives when I interviewed them. I could ask more precise questions knowing the recommendations from human rights bodies. It made my work more credible.
She is currently working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and considers that the challenges related to human rights are multidimensional and require people with different skills, and not only lawyers. She sees journalists as human rights defenders and worked on a human rights academy for media professionals. Most journalists are already human rights defenders even though they would not identify themselves as such. I really advocate to perceive journalists as people who also shape policies and hold authorities accountable. I really advocate to include journalists in human rights circles and human rights discussions.
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Oct 6, 2022
Ep. 5 - Slowness is about finding ‘il tempo giusto’
The guest of our fifth episode is Vanessa Trapani is a graduate of the European Master in Human Rights and Democratisation. She currently works as an independent consultant for the social innovation of SMEs and co-founded an NGO called Sloworking, which is committed to spread a work-life balance culture and support women in their professional and economic empowerment.
Her passion for diversity brought her to the European master in human rights and then led her to an eclectic path. She thinks of diversity as an external concept but as well as a concept that applies to ourselves. We are multidimensional beings and we have to find the balance between all the identities within ourselves. We have to defend that right to be who we are and who we are becoming in order to be coherent with ourselves.
What helped her to be coherent with herself was slowness. Slowness is not about working less but about working better. It is about quality, about relationships, about finding the right time - ‘il tempo giusto’ in Italian-, about making sense of what you do.
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Sep 29, 2022
Ep. 4 - Networking is connecting authentically with people
In this conversation, Niamh Walsh, a leadership and career coach, looks back at what brought her to coaching and her human rights education underpins her work. The conversation is rich in advice and will give you an idea of what rights-based coaching might look like. Niamh, a graduate from the European Master in Human Rights and Democratisation, started working as a coach and mentor after a more conventional career with the OSCE and the EU.
A move to Oxford and the lockdown caused by the pandemic helped her to pivot from this international career working for inter-governmental organisations to coaching. “I came to coaching very much from my own perspective in terms of experiencing a coach. When I was taking on management roles myself, I was coaching informally and did not have a word for it at that stage. Now I look back, I was coaching and mentoring. It was a part of the job I enjoyed a lot. It brought me a lot of fulfilment. I could see how it impacted others.”
She insists on the importance to stay in touch with your alumni network and gives examples on how it made a difference in her career path to ensure that she always remained involved in the community even when work does not leave you with much headspace. For instance, she found the coach she employed for herself through the mentoring programme of the EMAlumni Association.
She thinks everybody should consider themselves as a coach and consider what coaching skills can bring to their work environment and what it can bring to themselves as a manager, as a leader, as a colleague, as a team member. She describes some of the essentials of coaching: the ability to listen properly, non-judgement, positive action and empowerment.
Looking back, she wished that when she studied somebody told her about the importance of career planning – taking time to think about the type of career you want and setting goals – and also told her that “it is not all about getting a permanent job at the UN and that there are so many paths you could take to have a fullfilling impactful career.”
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Sep 22, 2022
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.
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Sep 15, 2022
Ep. 2 - Be compassionate! This is how people will trust you more!
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…
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Sep 8, 2022
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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