A successful first masterclass of the year!

On 16 February we had a group of 50 future anthropologists from study association Djembé in our Amnesty house for a masterclass. Besides our human rights work and campaigning, we specifically focused on lobbying. Our senior political affairs officer Youssef Rahman discussed his advocacy work for human rights violations in Yemen and we finished with a case study on the situation in Egypt. Below you can read the experience of one of the attendees, Lonneke Lindhout.

I’m a third year anthropology student, but the group I came to Amnesty with was a mixture of first up untill third year students. I wanted to come to the Amnesty masterclass for multiple reasons. I was first and foremost very interested in getting a more in depth introduction to the work Amnesty is doing as well as visiting the office, which made the whole experience more tangible. I really enjoyed the masterclass, and I think my peers did as well. It was great to be able to hear from an anthropologist working for Amnesty, it provided some insight into what I can be doing later in life. However, I was still left with some questions for him. His work seemed very interesting and I would’ve loved to know more about it and the field of lobbying as well as what this means for an organisation such as Amnesty. I did learn a lot about Amnesty’s work, though. For example, we got some insight in the campaign about ‘shrinking space’ and the importance of the letter-writing actions Amnesty organises. Obviously, we also learned why exactly all of this action is needed: for the protection of human rights around the globe. My favourite part of the masterclass was the case study. We worked in groups in tackling the issue of finding support for a human rights issue and we were given lobbying techniques to use. We all had to pitch our proposals and learned a lot from the feedback as well as each other. Overall a long, but great day. I would definitely consider going to another Amnesty Masterclass. 

Want to see what masterclasses are coming up? Check it out!

Via the links below you can read more about the human rights situation in Yemen and Egypt

https://hrij.amnesty.nl/un-mandates-investigation-human-rights-abuses-yemen/

https://www.amnesty.nl/media/jemen-vergeten-oorlog

https://www.amnesty.nl/actueel/egypt-civil-society-faces-existential-threat

https://www.amnesty.nl/kom-in-actie/acties/vrouwendag