This year's edition of the Scholar magazine is the first to be entirely digital - and contains four photo essays
Every submission mirrors the community’s thoughtful leadership and exemplary commitment to build a just future for all.
Reetika Subramanian
The 2020 edition of The Scholar magazine is out with articles on everything from the need to reframe climate change action to early cancer detection and confronting everyday racism.
The Scholar is written and edited by Gates Cambridge Scholars and Alumni. This year’s editing team are Editor in Chief Reetika Subramanian [2019], Assistant Editor Grant Simpson [2017] and Deputy Editor Shawn Zamani [2019]. It aims to showcase some of the diverse and meaningful work that Gates Cambridge Scholars and Alumni have pursued during and after their time at the University of Cambridge.
This year’s edition is the first to be entirely digital and includes a set of four photo essays, including Alexandre L’Heureux on the inclusive innovation ecosystem of Bahir Dar in Ethiopia; Rodrigo Córdova Rosado on the archaeoastronomical structures left in America’s Southwest by the Chacoans from the 9th to the 12th centuries; Oliver Antczak on the resistance to colonial erasure of indigenous communities living on Bonaire island in the Southern Caribbean; and Jessica Fernandez De Lara Harada on the buried histories of Japanese migrants and their descendants in Mexico.
The Scholar also has interviews with Scholars and Alumni, including Sandile Mtetwa who shares her journey of setting up and building Simuka-Arise Initiative, an NGO that advocates for young women’s empowerment in Zimbabwe. Theo di Castri traces his experiences of co-founding Catalyst, a cross-border educational initiative that addresses the War on Drugs in the Americas. Collin Edouard shares his experiences of confronting everyday racism in Cambridge, which pushed him to set up #SpeakOut, a public campaign and solidarity group.
The issue also contains articles by Scholars and Alumni negotiating challenging global problems such as climate change, fragile nation states and resource inequality. Stephen Lezak proposes a third way for climate policy in the Arctic Circle; Kim Van Daalen advocates the need to reframe climate action to move from an abstract, future problem to a people-centred, personal issue; and Jacqueline Siu writes about the ways in which non-experts’ understanding of immunology is hampered by the jargon of the field.
There are also articles on early cancer detection by Aisha Yusuf, Safwan Aziz Khan on reinforcing social safety nets in Iraq, Nicholas Posegay on the Cairo Genizah and its implications for understanding early Egyptian Jewish life, Carol Nkechi Ibe on gospel music, Ayan Mandal on early understandings of maladies of the brain, Andre Holzer and Maximilian Stammnitz on water quality monitoring through their citizen science project PuntSeq, Daniel Hanigan on the dynamic and changing world of cartography, Shobana Sivanendran on the revival of the timber industry, Jascha Achterberg on advances in the development of intelligent systems.
Updates from the Gates Cambridge Scholars Council and the Alumni Association, a report of the 2020 Weekend of Research, short Alumni profiles of Robert Rivers, Dan Greenfield, Kayla Barron and Ananth Kumar and professional updates complete the magazine’s thought-provoking content.
Reetika Subramanian says: “Within the pages of the magazine, we have showcased merely a subset of the diverse and meaningful work that Gates Cambridge Scholars, past as well as present, have pursued during and after their time at Cambridge. Every submission mirrors the community’s thoughtful leadership and exemplary commitment to build a just future for all.”
*Picture credit: Rodrigo Córdova Rosado
