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2021-2022 marks the 10th year of the AHDA fellowship program. Since 2012, the fellowship has hosted at least 107 fellows who represent over 48 countries and territories. Below please find information regarding the professional interests and accomplishments of fellows and alumni. While at Columbia, fellows design individual projects that address some aspect of a history of gross human rights violations in their society, country, and/or region.
Click here to read more about the fellows' projects.
Click here to read about more about the work of our Fellows.
Bosch Stiftung Fellow
Subha Ghale works as a project coordinator for the National Indigenous Women’s Federation (NIWF) in Kathmandu, Nepal. She has worked with various other organizations such as Heifer International Nepal, and the National Human Rights Commission Nepal/UNDP, and the Asia Foundation, primarily on issues related to gender, indigenous women’s rights, and human rights. She has a Master's in Rural Development from Tribhuvan University, Nepal and a Master's in Human Rights and Democratization from the University of Sydney Australia. Subha's association with NIWF has increasingly sharpened her awareness about the situation of indigenous women in Nepal. Indigenous peoples make up over one-third of the total population of Nepal.
She is keen to deepen her knowledge about the experiences of indigenous women in Nepal and the history of discrimination against them. A question she seeks to address is how to strengthen their voices and move beyond tokenism to ensure their inclusion. As an AHDA Fellow, Subha plans to to develop an oral history project on the personal narratives of indigenous women who were affected by the decade-long armed conflict (1996-2006) in Nepal. How do they understand their experiences, and how do they define truth and justice? How are their wartime experiences intertwined with their social and cultural identity? Subha will use oral history as a tool to uncover an alternative history of the conflict, and hopes this will help bring about policy attuned to the experiences of historically marginalized groups.
Petar Subotin is the Regional Development Officer of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Regional Network, BIRN Hub, and has held this position since 2010. The BIRN Network aims to build and strengthen media capacity in the Balkans, in the belief that better reporting, and the scrutiny and analysis that such reporting entails, contributes to political, social, and economic reforms and transitional justice efforts. Petar’s role is related to the development of the BIRN Network – expanding the Network’s influence within and beyond the Balkan region. He works closely on the Balkan Transitional Justice program that aims to improve the general public’s understanding of transitional justice issues in former Yugoslav countries. Aside from designing the program and securing funds for its continuation, he oversees monitoring and evaluation of the program’s activities that include publishing and broadcasting balanced reports (online, radio and TV) in a variety of different languages (Albanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, Macedonian and English). Petar graduated from media studies as the top student at Philosophy Faculty in Novi Sad, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. After graduation he participated in the Professional Development Year program organized by Voice of America, where he studied journalism for a year at University of El Paso, Texas, US. In 2011, he studied cycle management and European integrations at the College of Europe in Bruge, Belgium.
Petar’s professional involvement in dealing with the past emerged from his experience as a teenager, during the wars and violence that occurred in the Balkans during 1990s. Although history was taught in schools, there was almost no opportunity to understand or contextualize the events being taught due to intense media pressure and the nationalist narratives that defined that period. While media played a crucial role in the wars of the 1990s, TV, radio and print also served as main sources of information (as opposed to textbooks). Taking part in shaping the public’s discourse has inspired Petar’s awareness of the importance of dealing with the past, and the responsibility that lies with younger generations to open the public discussion by exposing the crimes that were committed in the name of a people or a country. As an AHDA fellow, Petar will develop a multi-media project that examines the acts of one of the most notorious military units, the “Serbian Volunteer Guard”.
