Uncovering Security Programme grantees publish articles on wide range of topics

by Rose Skelton
Monday, 25 September 2017 15:23 GMT

Participants in discussion at the Uncovering Security Story Lab. Wiston House, West Sussex. Devon Terrill / October 2016.

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Following its 2016 Story Lab, four collaborative teams of journalists and researchers were awarded travel grants by the Uncovering Security Programme to help with the cost of field research for media articles and academic papers. The journalists and academic researchers in some cases did field research together and wrote their pieces separately, while in other case they wrote the article together. In all cases, the ideas were created and mapped out by the collaborative team.

While many of the academic papers are still under peer review, a wide range of articles were published on subjects from land struggles for Bangladesh's indigenous population, to conflicts between farmers and herders in Nigeria.

Freelance journalist Sohara Mehroze Shachi and Eva Gerharz, a junior professor in sociology of development at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, used an Uncovering Security research grant to work together in Bangladesh's remote Chittagong Hill Tracts area.They collaborated on this story together, which was published on the Reuters news site.

Sohara, with input from Professor Gerharz, also wrote these stories about the food crisis in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts. One was published in the Daily Star, Bangladesh's leading English-language newspaper, and the second in the Dkaha Tribune.

Professor Gerharz's paper on the Chittagong Hill Tracts will shortly be published in the academic journal “Südasien” and the pair are now working on a further collaborative article analysing the impact of Rohinggya refugee movements on the CHT.

 Abigail Higgins, a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, used her grant to write two stories about the refugee situation in Kenya and Uganda. She worked with Neil James Wilson, a Visiting Lecturer at City University of London and a Research Associate at the British Institute in Eastern Africa, Kenya. You can read Abigail's stories here and here.

Journalist Abby Seif and researcher Areeya Tivasuradej worked together on a story about climate change and hydro-electric dams in Cambodia. You can read Abby's story here and Areeya's report here.

Bayo Akinloye, a journalist at the Nigerian newspaper The Punch, worked with Kaderi Noagah Bukari, a researcher in Development Studies and Anthropology from the University of Gottingen and the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn, on the issue of farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria and Ghana. While Kaderi's paper is forthcoming, you can read Bayo's story here.

Find out more about the Thomson Reuters Foundation's Media Development programme. 


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