Warwick student accepted to Clinton Scheme

Second-year postgraduate Law student Margaret O’Leary has been invited to participate at the Clinton Global Initiative this year.

The conference, hosted by former President of the USA, William Clinton, will take place in early April, at the University of California, San Diego, and is open to graduate or undergraduate students from the all over the world.

This year more than 3 800 students have applied to take part in this unique project. All of them have created projects hoping that their commitments will result in real changes. However, only a third of them were invited to the conference.

Hannah Clark Steiman, Communications Manager of the CGIU, told the _Boar_: “At this meeting, nearly 1,200 attendees will come together to make a difference in CGI U’s five focus areas: education, environment and climate change, peace and human
rights, poverty alleviation, and public health.

“But CGI U is more than just an event. It is a growing community of young leaders who don’t just discuss the world’s challenges – they take real, concrete steps toward solving them”, claimed Steiman.

O’Leary has decided to apply in order to represent Femin Ijithad (FI), a student research initiative that aims to link academia with Muslim women’s rights activism by making academic scholarship more accessible to activists. She has already participated in the Clinton scheme with her colleague Natscha Latiff, Warwick alumni, who has created this research.

“Femin Ijtihad is committed to facilitating the accessibility of academic information to activists and organisations promoting gender justice in the Islamic world”, explained O’Leary, who claims that continuing access to knowledge and information is essential for effective and informed activism.

In her opinion, women’s participation remains impeded because the great majority of women do not possess enough knowledge and authority in Islamic law and other disciplines to dispute current gender-biased interpretations. Therefore, they want to ensure that “information on women’s rights in Islamic law not traditionally available in the mainstream media is made accessible to NGOs who work on women’s rights issues in Islam”.

“Our goal [is] to increase the physical, linguistic and discursive accessibility of academic and literary scholarship on women’s rights. We will do this by building an online compendium of academic and literary scholarship on gender that will be made directly
accessible to activists”, claimed Margaret.

As one of the main goals of the Clinton Global Initiative is to benefit the local community as well as global, all Warwick students are welcomed to join this research initiative.

“Femin Ijtihad provides Warwick students with an opportunity to get involved with an organisation that heavily invests in capacity building,” Margaret commented. “Also, allowing Warwick students to attend these sorts of events benefits others in that it creates links with outside organisations and means that when I return I can impart my new found knowledge to other students.”

“I cannot wait to go to America to meet the former American President Clinton”, she concluded.