I was on the student planning committee for an international conference on Conflict Resolution Education. This conference was a two-week event that focused on youth engagement in conflict resolution for the first-weekend and then focused on both current professionals involved in diplomacy and peacebuilding along with students during the second week. As a member of the planning committee, I spent all summer working with students from different universities across Ohio and the United States to plan this online conference that people would be attending from around the world. Our planning included deciding on speakers who would present at the conference, deciding which type of events we would like to organize, and working on advertising the conference. As the Professional Development Chair in IA, I decided to also suggest including professional development events during the first weekend of the conference and we ended up including a resume workshop event during the first weekend!
One of the presentations for this conference that I attended and was a moderator for was called “Justice in Images: From the Amazon Rainforest to the United States of America.” The panelists for this event were Tyrone Turner, who is a photographer working for National Geographic and the Washington DC NPR Station along with Gabriele Sciortino, and Debora Komukai, who have both also worked with Tyrone and photographed people and events around the world. Tyrone shared his photography from New Orleans, LA where he got to capture the stories of Black communities in New Orleans through photojournalism. Gabriele is from Brazil and his photojournalism experience was centered around photography of the Brazilian rainforest and the indigenous communities there. Debora is also from Brazil and her photojournalism was focused on urban communities, particularly the lower-income marginalized communities, in the cities of Brazil. Through their photojournalism, I got to learn more about how photographers document the stories of various communities and how they aim to learn their stories without serving as a distraction. I thought it was fascinating to learn about the job and responsibilities of a photographer as an individual with the power to share stories from around the world and inspire peace and inclusivity, which is not something you always realize when you are quickly scrolling through the content of photographers on social media.