Scholar biographies
Oliwia Berdak
Oliwia is a PhD candidate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Her interdisciplinary research, under the working title ‘Exception, Normality and Gender in the
Croatian Nationalist Struggle’, investigates the creation of new national and gender normalities, pressures and resistances in a nationalising state. At UCL, she teaches on an undergraduate course Introduction to
Politics, as well as on a master’s course called Nations, Identity and Power in Central and Eastern Europe.
Before commencing her doctoral research, Oliwia obtained her BA in European Studies from Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and her MA (with distinction) in Politics, Security and Integration from UCL. Her MA thesis, entitled ‘Gender and Ethnicity in Transnational Contexts: Policing the Boundaries of Polishness in Multicultural London’, explored the creation of gender and ethnic boundaries amongst the Polish migrants in London.
Mohamed Hafeda
Mohamad is a founding partner of Febrik, an NGO for community art and design projects works in refugee camps in the Middle East. He has taught design in the department of architecture and design at both the Lebanese American University and the American University of Beirut. He studied MA in public art at Chelsea College of Art and Design London - 2004 - and has a bachelor in interior architecture from the Fine Arts Institute at the Lebanese University - 2001. Currently he is doing a practice based PhD in Architectural Design at the Bartlett, UCL, investigating the informal design processes in areas of conflict-Beirut.
Adi Keinan
Adi is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Her dissertation is about the role of archaeological inventories in cultural heritage management in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She has a BA and MA (both with distinction) in Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures from Tel Aviv University, Israel, and had been working as a field archaeologist in excavations mainly in Israel between 2000 and 2009.
She participated in the Israeli-Palestinian Archaeology Working Group (2005-2009), a joint bilateral group dealing with different aspects of archaeology in the occupied Palestinian territories. Her contribution was the creation of a database of all Israeli archaeological activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967. This work was the impetus for her PhD research, realising how culture, history and archaeology can promote understanding and mutual respect between Israelis and Palestinians, and not just the other way around. Cooperating with Palestinian archaeologists, she hopes to promote the idea of shared heritage, help reducing prejudice and bridge gaps between Israelis and Palestinians.
Fatima Kola
Fatima is a PhD candidate in law and teaching fellow at University College London, where as a Bonnart-Braunthal Scholar she is writing her thesis on the effectiveness of the international prohibition of torture in the context of counter-terrorism. She is a teaching fellow in the Faculty of Laws at UCL, lecturing on Islamic Law, and teaching on the World Legal Orders and the LL.M. Human Rights courses, as well as teaching legal writing. She also served as the Postgraduate Editor of the UCL Jurisprudence Review.
Prior to beginning her doctoral work, Fatima obtained an LL.B., and LL.M. in Human Rights from UCL. She interned at the International Rescue Committee in New York and worked on the British Institute of Comparative and International Law's project on democracy in Iran.
Fatima was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 2007 and is beginning a pupillage in 2010 at Garden Court Chambers, London
Dr Karen Levy
Karen is the Kenya Country Director of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a nonprofit development research organization associated with MIT’s Poverty Action Lab. Karen established the IPA office in Kenya in 2005. Since then, she has managed the growth of in-country operations to their current level, with over 85 full-time personnel working on more than a dozen projects funded by international foundations and multilaterals. Ongoing IPA research includes cutting-edge impact evaluations in the health, education, water and sanitation, and microfinance sectors.
Since January of 2009, Karen has also served as the Regional Director for Africa of Deworm the World, an initiative of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. In this role, she has worked closely with senior officials in the Kenyan government, providing technical and logistical support for the design, implementation, and monitoring of a national school-based deworming program. The first phase of the program successfully reached over 3 million children in Kenya.
In 1995, Karen co-founded the Tawasal Institute, a community-based development organization located on Kenya’s coast, and continues to serve asna Trustee of the Tawasal Foundation Trust Fund. She received a BA with Honors from Brown University in 1994, an MSc with Distinction in Social Policy and Planning from the London School of Economics in 2000, and a PhD in Development Planning from the University of London in 2008. Karen was awarded the Bonnart-Braunthal Scholarship for her doctoral research, and three consecutive Public Service Fellowships from the Echoing Green Foundation for her leadership as a social entrepreneur. She has lived in Kenya for 13 of the last 17 years and speaks fluent Swahili.
Henry Newman
Henry is a PhD candidate in the Government department at the LSE researching the early twentieth century history of Shii ecumenical thought. Ecumenical ideologues sought to bring about a rapprochement with Sunni Islam and to build a framework for inter-sectarian tolerance in Islam. Henry read Persian at Christ Church, Oxford and then studied for a Masters in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard as a Frank Knox Fellow. He has lived in Tehran and writes occasionally for The Guardian's Comment is Free or Slate Magazine.
Victoria Redclift
Having worked for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in London and at UNHCR in Spain, she started an MSc in Population and Development at LSE in 2005. She went on to spend 6 months working in Bangladesh as a research assistant with Sussex University (Migration Studies Institute) and returned in 2007 to begin her PhD in Sociology. She is at the end of her second year and has just returned from a further 7 months fieldwork in Bangladesh. Her PhD is entitled - 'States of exception' and the creation of political space: integration, citizenship and discrimination in Bangladesh.
Beata Świtek
Beata received the Frederick Bonnart-Braunthal Scholarship to pursue her PhD studies into the processes of the formation and nature of prejudice against foreign workers in Japan with a particular focus on Indonesian workers. In her research she concentrates on the interactions within a workplace but also pursues an analysis of a wider socio-political context of the employment of foreign workforce in Japan.
In 2003 she received an MA in Japanese Studies from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Her thesis explored manifestations of subculture in Japanese youth language. After graduation she shortly worked for a Japanese company in Poland, only to return to academia in 2005 as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Bradford, UK. The same year she conducted her first individual project on the Japanese community in London.
Prior to taking up the PhD course in the Department of Social Anthropology at University College London in 2007, she received an MSc in Social Anthropology from the same department for her thesis on the Polish migrant community in London after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004.
Yael Weisz-Rind
Yael is a Research Student in Sociology and the Centre for Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her study is examining the phenomenon of dissident soldiers in the Israeli Army and their impact on Israel’s militaristic culture.
Yael has an MSc in Human Rights from LSE. Her dissertation (with distinction): ‘Israeli, Zionist, Combatant, Refusnik’: Representations of Conscientious Objection (CO) in Israel’ uncovered a process of transformation of COs’ representations in the Israeli printed media. Yael has an MA in Sociology and BA (Hon.) in Sociology and Political Science from the Tel Aviv University in Israel.
For more than two decades Yael has combined academic and professional work in the human rights’ field, including as the Director of Amnesty International Israel Section (1993-2003), and as the Director and Campaigns Manager of Free Tibet (2005-2007). She is currently involved with several human rights organizations.