Yasmin Almeida Lobato Morais studied the MA Power, Participation & Social Change in 2022/23. In this blog post Yasmin reflects on the diversity, new connections, deep conversations, and complex thinking that have shaped her experience at IDS.
Before I came to IDS, I was living with my family in my home country of Brazil, and I was working as a Programme Manager for Global Changemakers – an international non-profit organisation that provides capacity-building, funding and networking for young social entrepreneurs and activists in over 180 countries. It was a great experience – I coordinated the capacity building programmes, and I got to learn the practical side of NGO management and because I was working at an international level, I got to learn from cultures from all over the world.
But I started to feel I wanted to support more local initiatives with a more long-term and political impact. It was also very dispersed, as we were supporting youth all over the world. At that time, Brazil was going through a lot of backlash and was taking big steps back in human rights, participation, and sustainability. I wanted to find a way to apply all of the things that I learned in my work to my home country, and to understand how to have a deeper impact through my work. This is when I started thinking about opportunities to study.
Making the decision to study at IDS
For me, having a deeper impact means being able to change power structures and to change who holds power and how they exercise power in a political sense. But I have many questions on how that works and how to change those. I also wanted to focus my career on Brazil and Latin America. I started researching study opportunities around these areas and I came across the IDS MA Power, Participation & Social Change and thought ‘this is perfect’.
From there, I came up with a list of criteria that were important to me in a MA programme:
- Funding: I needed funding, so I looked for scholarships. I applied for and was awarded the Chevening Scholarship.
- Course approach, structure and faculty: It was really important to me that the course had a decolonial approach and did not perpetuate the current power structure we have. If I am there to learn about how to change it, I can’t study somewhere that perpetuates it! I looked into the approach, the theories used and the main authors that make up the reading lists. I looked at the faculty at IDS and saw that many were quite engaged in the issue of decoloniality. For me, the work of Jo Howard and Tessa Lewin really stood out, and I decided that I wanted to learn with them. It turns out that Jo Howard is my supervisor, so that worked out really well!
- Location: Despite the weather, Brighton is a really nice place! I wanted to stay near the coast, and I wanted to stay somewhere where I felt welcome, and I learned that Brighton is the queer capital of the UK. There are so many events and different things that go on in the city and I felt it would be a good place to learn about these topics as well.
- Diversity: I looked at diversity percentages and rankings. For example, I looked up people who had graduated from IDS to see where they were from. I looked at the diversity of the classes and found that it was a pretty diverse campus.
IDS pretty much checked all the boxes, and so that is why I chose to study here!
The importance of diversity
When I did part of my undergraduate degree in International Relations (IR) in the US, what I remember most are the things I learned from interactions with my classmates from different countries, not just in class but also over lunch and through socialising with them. Hearing their different perspectives is what brought me new insights and showed me in practice how IR works.
As I was studying again in the global north, it was important to me that the majority of my classmates were from the global south, so that I could get a more complete view of the things that we are studying. I wanted to make sure that I heard different views that could complement my own.
The small class size is very beneficial as we get a lot of time to connect and discuss things – we clicked right away! We respect and admire each other, and this makes the class flow really well, even when we are debating complex and contested topics.
Studying in this kind of diverse environment makes our thinking more complex and nuanced. It gives us new questions to ask, new variables to think about when analysing something or thinking about an intervention or a project. It opens new possibilities to know what has been done in other countries, what has worked and what has not, to complement my own experience.
Diversity in practice
In class, whatever we are learning about, the same question can be answered in so many different ways by different people who come from different backgrounds and contexts – it really enriches the conversation.
For example, I joined the Latin American Society at University of Sussex, and the society hosted an event at IDS to discuss the very polarised second round of Brazilian elections and its wider impact on other countries in Latin America. Myself and my friend Dari Santos, who is studying a MSc Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Sussex, spoke about the context and what was at stake in the election, and we got questions from other participants that I personally hadn’t thought about. We also got to hear from them how other countries were viewing the elections, which was really interesting.
Another example is in our small MA Power, Participation & Social Change class, we got into a discussion on religion verses secularism in government. To my surprise the class was very divided around that topic, and it made me realise that I had many assumptions around that subject that weren’t necessarily true for everyone. So I really got to see different points of view that I had never really conversed with before.
Being in a diverse learning environment has taught me to listen more, to ask questions, to connect the dots, and not to have a single response for everything. In a good way, it made it much more complex. It showed me different ways to see things. It has also helped me to value lived experiences even more, both my own and those of others, beyond the academic knowledge. This is something that IDS does really well, to encourage us to value our lived experience.
Building skills for career enhancement
I hope the course gives me the ability to identify those power structures and different strategies to shift them towards making it more inclusive and diverse. I already feel that the course will equip me with reflective and intentional practice in whatever I am doing. As we discuss things in class and I look back at my own work, there are already things that I would have done differently, and I think that’s a really good thing.
I am still mapping out what opportunities are out there, but I hope to work somewhere I can facilitate dialogue with the people that are most affected by whatever solution I am working on. I would love to work closer to the political space in Brazil, perhaps something around participatory public policy design or participatory spaces from government or social movements.