Naomi Hansen, a University of Notre Dame senior from Barrington, Ill., has been named a 2007 Humanity in Action (HIA) summer fellow. One of 57 undergraduate students chosen from the United States, she will complete a summer training session in New York before pursuing an internship in Berlin this fall.
Hansen will spend July participating in intensive seminars, site visits and focus group activities depicting the challenges of resistance to legal and institutional abuse of minority populations. The summer program will culminate with a period of research and writing in which Hansen and an international partner will complete a scholarly paper. The internship in Germany, which will be supplemented by a weekly lecture series on local social justice issues, will allow her to put knowledge from the training program into practice.
A political science and Arabic major, Hansen’s senior research project compares land allocation in historic apartheid South Africa and current Israel-Palestine. She has completed intern and volunteer work with the Human Rights Commission of South Bend, Refugee and Immigration Services of South Bend and the South Bend Center for the Homeless. Off campus, Hansen has participated in Experiential Learning Seminars sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns in China and four domestic sites.
HIA fellows are selected on the basis of academic achievement, leadership ability and commitment to human rights issues. Founded in 1997, HIA works to guide student leaders in the study and work of human rights causes with educational programs in the United States and Europe.
Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on April 30, 2007.