Meet the IRC-Zolberg Fellows for Fall 2022
The IRC and the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School are excited to announce the fall 2022 cohort of fellows. Supported by the Arnhold Foundation, master’s and doctoral students at The New School have the opportunity to contribute or lead design and research projects at the IRC.
Since 2017, fellows have worked at the IRC on a range of teams including policy, innovation, research, health, governance, and emergency response. Fellows have a wide range of experience, and come from the Parsons School of Design, the School of Social Research, the School of Nonprofit and Public Management, the School of Global Affairs, and other New School departments. Learn more about the fellowship.
Khadijah Ally, International Affairs, Julien J. Studley School of Global Affairs, MA, 2023
Khadijah holds a BA in Media Studies from Hunter College, CUNY, with minors in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science, and a focus in Arabic Studies. She previously served as the Communications Specialist with the Institute of Transformative Mentoring, where she managed the organization’s social media accounts and facilitated communication with graduates. She also served as graphic design intern for Bottom Line, where she worked with a team to create branded curriculum workbooks for the organization; as a social media intern for Women Make Movies, where she drafted social media posts pertaining to upcoming programming and regularly undertook administrative and research duties for the organization; and as the social media manager for the start-up Bruk Out Media, where she highlighted the work of individuals from the Caribbean through various forms of media. Her primary research interest is in the intersection of Syrian refugee migration and media advocacy, particularly in social media.
As the Design for Visibility Fellow, Khadijah will support Ahlan Simsim, an early childhood development project, implemented in partnership with Sesame Workshop, that focuses on young children in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria and combines the depth of critical in-person services (reaching over 1.5 million children) with the breadth of mass media through an all-new Arabic-language version of Sesame Street. Khadijah will provide design support to the Ahlan Simsim team, majority of whom are based in the Middle East regional offices. She will focus on design supporting project visibility, aiming to increase strategic representation and learning dissemination to best position the project for successful influence and growth. Work on this will include development of high quality externally facing materials (combination of reports, infographics, presentations, etc.) as well as internally facing project status presentations for IRC and Sesame Workshop leadership. In support of this workstream, Khadijah’s focus will sit at the nexus of communications, advocacy, scaling, growth and project management, with connections to monitoring, evaluation and research.
Simone Calbi, Psychology, New School for Social Research, MA, 2023
Simone has a BS in film and history from Boston University and has a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certificate from Teachers College. She has served as a literacy consultant for the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), where she supported teachers in NYC public schools, elementary English as a new language (ENL) learners, and middle school struggling readers. She has ten years of experience as an English as a foreign language teacher in Argentina and Spanish-English translator. At the New School, Simone is a Teaching Assistant for the Applied Psychology and Design course taught with Michael Schober, she’s also the Cultural Psychology lab manager. Simones research interests include education technology, as well as inclusive design thinking.
As the Education Innovation and Scaling Fellow, Simone will work with the Airbel Impact Lab’s Education Global Research & Innovation Priority to strengthen our strategy to scale the Audio Class System globally. The Audio Class System is an AI-powered chatbot and messaging solution to bring bite-sized educational content to support last mile learners in Colombia. The education content is text, audio, and visual-based and can be accessed with high, low, or medium-tech devices with messaging capabilities. The platform is uniquely set up to cater to the needs of the most vulnerable students, teachers and caregivers in the hardest-to-reach settings to ensure they can continue learning along with peers. After initial piloting in Colombia we intend to scale the solution in broader contexts within IRC and in other global contexts, Simone will support this endeavor by scoping opportunities globally to leverage the Audio Class System.
Alesha Cid Vega, Psychology, New School for Social Research, MA, 2024
Originally from Spain, Alesha has a BA in Cultural Postcolonial Studies, Psychology, and Performing Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. At The New School, she currently works at the Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab, where she is part of the research team of a project testing the effectiveness of training community workers in Problem Management Plus (PM+), a brief, evidenced-based, Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) intervention developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). In this project, she co-leads actor training and coordination for competency-based role-play assessments for PM+ trainees, supports Research Assistant training, and supervises Spanish translations. In addition, she is currently training to become a PM+ helper. Previously, Alesha worked in direct services with refugees and asylum seekers with HIAS New York and as a Senior Admissions Ambassador and Interviewer at Sarah Lawrence College. Alesha’s primary research interests include cultural adaptation and implementation science of MHPSS interventions through community models and task-sharing for trauma-exposed populations, with a particular focus in children and mothers, and in the expansion of these tools into the performing arts community– in addition to the inclusion of meaning making and existential healing in MHPSS.
As the MHPSS Fellow, Alesha will work with the Health Technical Unit to document best practices and innovative solutions related to MHPSS services that sit within the health system. Alesha will collaborate with the Mental Health Primary Health Care team, Health MHPSS staff within country programs, and technical advisors from other technical units to assist on the development of key program guidance documents and reports, and support various ongoing initiatives of the Mental Health Primary Health Care team.
Autumn Herndon, International Affairs, Julien J. Studley School of Global Affairs, MA, 2022
Autumn is a Thomas R. Pickering Fellow and received her BA in International Studies from Manhattan College, with a specialization in Latin America and the Caribbean. She has served as an English teacher to Guna students on the island village of Nalunega in Panama, as an intern at the Office of Brazil and Southern Cone Affairs in the U.S. Department of State where she reported on key U.S. policy interests and priority issues, and most recently as an intern for the Economic Office in the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok where she researched a variety of humanitarian issues in the Lower Mekong, such as transnational crime, gender inequality, human rights violations, and China’s oppression of Taiwan. Her primary research interests include development, sustainability, migrants, and gender studies. Autumn’s capstone thesis will focus on the parallels between caste and race.
As a Humanitarian Access Fellow, Autumn will be a core member of the Humanitarian Access Technical Team, contributing to the development and refinement of training content and preparation, measuring outcomes, and supporting the facilitation of online technical support, including the community of practice for humanitarian negotiators. Autumn will also support the development of learning products, including data collection, and drafting case studies and lessons learned.
Eduardo Mora Zuniga, Politics, New School for Social Research, MA, 2023
Eduardo has a BA in Collective Communication Sciences (with an emphasis on audiovisual and multimedia communication) from the University of Costa Rica, San José. Previously, he served as the leading researcher and writer for Suave un Toque, a web series that exposed millions of young people to critical content about politics in Central America; as Head of Research of a Latin American tech startup focused on financial inclusion for immigrants in the U.S., where he managed a team that produced data and developed reports to inform executive decision-making; as a communication strategy consultant for political and institutional campaigns in Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico; and as a freelance content creator for humanitarian organizations including Human Rights Funders Network, Feeling Foundation, and Pawanka Fund. Eduardo’s research interests include critical border studies, populism and social movements, particularly in Central America, and he’s currently researching the relationship between the gig economy and plantation work as forms of accumulation by dispossession.
As Education Measurement and Metrics Fellow, Eduardo will lead the creation of a repository that consolidates the measurement tools, training materials, and best practices used across education research projects to capture education outcomes and the processes that support them. Eduardo will engage with education technical advisors from the Education Technical Unit, researchers from the Airbel Impact Lab, and project leads from IRC’s country teams working on projects across the education portfolio in Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, and more. The purpose of these interactions will be to gather tools, best practices, and contextualized versions of tools and training materials.
Jennie Spector, International Affairs, Julien J. Studley School of Global Affairs, MA, 2023
Jennie received her BA in International Affairs from Northeastern University, with a minor in Political Science. During her time at Northeastern, she worked and studied in the Balkans, Paris, and Istanbul. She currently serves as the Research Assistant to Professor Nina Khrushcheva, for whom she supports research related to Soviet and Russian history, media, and propaganda. Previously, Jennie served as a Student Fellow at Foreign Policy Interrupted, an organization that aims to amplify women’s voices in foreign policy media. She was also the Marla Bennett Memorial Scholar in Jewish Studies at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, and prior to beginning her time at the New School, worked as a theater artist in Portland, Oregon. Jennie is interested in how the media operates in times of conflict, and her research focuses on disinformation and propaganda.
As Communications and Knowledge Management Fellow, Jennie will work with the Airbel Impact Lab’s Evidence to Action team to capture and share stories of how our teams on the ground have used evidence to make changes or improvements to their programs. She will help to identify the best ways to structure and communicate the stories for maximum impact and will work with program colleagues to draft, pilot, edit and document the stories in audiovisual and written formats that can be adapted and translated into IRC’s working languages. These stories will then be leveraged to establish a common understanding across the organization about the types of research evidence that we are focusing on at the IRC and how they can be used and to generate excitement about using research evidence to improve our impact. In addition, Jennie will support the ongoing development of the Interactive Outcomes and Evidence Framework (iOEF), an electronic platform through which IRC staff accesses relevant research evidence, by identifying and linking relevant resources to specific IRC interventions.
Sarah Wilson, Media Studies, New School for Social Research, MA, 2023
For the past decade, Sarah has run her own book marketing & public relations studio while raising a family in Upstate New York, with clients ranging from fiction authors to business bestsellers. She is periodically sub-contracted by New York City agencies to run social media campaigns for their clients as well. Sarah also previously served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she worked as the Acting Deputy Director of Empretec Zimbabwe, an integrated capacity-building programme promoting the creation of sustainable small and medium sized enterprises across Africa and South America. Empretec was a program of the United Nations Council on Technology and Development (UNCTAD). Sarah’s thesis paper, research, and accompanying media project will explore interactive documentary (a participatory and interactive method of documentary co-creation) as a possible research methodology.
As the Communications and Design Fellow, Behavioral Insights, Sarah will will work with the Behavioral Insights team at the Airbel Impact Lab to develop a set of graphic design and/or communications products with the goal of building the external presence and reputation of the team and the internal use of behavioral science. Sarah will design and draft communications, evidence, and knowledge management products, as ways of communicating both internally within the IRC and externally with partners.
Felippe Ramos and Anwesha Sengupta will be continuing their Summer 2022 fellowships into Fall 2022. Max Helfand and Tzlil Rubinstein will be continuing their Spring 2022 fellowships into Fall 2022.
