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Thursday November 21, 2024
Rosebell Kagumire is a trained journalist, rights advocate, digital strategist, public speaker and award-winning blogger, with expertise in gender, peace and conflict issues.
In episode 27 of Her Media Diary Podcast, Rosebell recounts her journey in the media industry, from being an intern at Daily Monitor in Uganda to covering the peace talks in South Sudan. Her experiences exposed her to the harsh realities of war and the unique struggles faced by women in conflict situations which ignited her passion for advocating for women’s rights and African feminism.
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I do not know if you have listened to previous episodes, but we always like to start by trying to get to know the guest first and their history. So where did you grow up, Rosebell?
I grew up in a village in Southwestern Uganda. A place called Bushenyi. I stayed there for 18 years and studied in the southwest of Uganda for those years before going to Kampala for my university.
Okay, so you grew up for quite a while in the village in Uganda. What was that like for you?
It was a lovely experience. I still go there. I still have my family there. I spend a lot of time there when I am not travelling. It was a lovely childhood. When I think of where my spirit wants to be, that’s what I imagine. Because as a child, you were free to roam around, dance, play, you know, living, in a community where you are not afraid of going to a neighbour’s place. So, for me, it has always been that kind of experience that grounds me in the understanding of community and what community is about. That is what I love and that is the kind of place I grew up. Peaceful, green, rolling hills, beautiful still to this day, amazing.
Yeah, it sounds wonderful. What is your fondest memory of those early years?
Well, my fondest memory is really sitting before or after dinner with my grandparents. And they loved me a lot. For me, when I think of love, the earliest memories of people who loved me were my grandparents. They were fond of me. I have always been a very interesting, curious child. I was always surrounded by adults asking for me to do this, teaching me this and that. And those are the memories, and they are good memories.
Now we have a lot in common in terms of that because I was very close to my maternal grandparents. I miss them dearly. One of the things I always wish I did was to ask them more questions, like knowing more about their own childhood, and their own growing up. So, tell me more about the influence that they had on you and what it was like for you in that village environment.
Both my maternal grandparents came from the same village. My parents are neighbours, literally. I grew up with both families and they all loved education. And when at a time when people were saying a girl cannot go to school, they were changing these narratives. And, on my maternal side, my grandfather was a teacher. He was well educated, and he had five daughters, all of them he took to school. For me, those are very good foundations. My grandmothers, both, even if they are not actually educated, supported their children in getting an education. I think one of the most hilarious stories was when they attempted adult education. It was very difficult, and they were annoyed with the whole situation. They still attended classes, even when they could not, they really supported their children in getting educated. They were hardworking and everyone was supportive. For me, from my mother’s time, my mother went to school, and her sisters went to school. On my dad’s side, people went to school. And especially I say this because not everybody in the village was like that. So, I was very privileged that even though I lived in the village, I had generations of people who had gone to school. And I never doubted what education should mean to me.
What was your experience like then, what was your schooling experience like?
For the first six years of my education, I went to a village school. We would run to school, and within ten minutes, you are in class, literally. We wake up, do home chores, fetch water from the well, wash dishes from the previous night, and then we just run to school. And for me, school was great because most of my teachers were from the nearby communities. We knew where they were from, and it was always nice to see it was someone familiar also. There was no abstract idea of a teacher. A teacher was still part of the community, and that instilled a bit of different grounding, you respected your teacher but still had boundaries. I studied there for six years for my primary education before I got transferred to a school in the district where my mom worked at the time.
Where did your interest in women’s rights, African feminism, journalism, and all of that, where did that first begin?
It is very difficult to really pinpoint a place. I think that as you grow, you gravitate towards where you think you can be most useful as a person. But as a child, I used to perform for my family members. I am the kid who would be dancing, singing, acting, doing a play. I have always been an expressive person. I am not afraid of seeking an audience. And the environment I grew up in allowed me to be that. I think that that is the biggest foundation for you to speak. For me, my voice has always been an integral part of my childhood. There was no point in my life where I felt I could not have a voice. So, for me, this is everything and every work, whether it is women’s rights, whether it is media that I have worked in, it goes back to my voice. As a child, did you have a voice? If your parents are educated, you are more likely to be aware of so many things. And if your extended family is educated, you already have a bit of an idea of what you want. And as I grew up, I was very much interested in women’s rights because I went to university on a government scholarship. My parents were very relieved because they had a few other kids in school and they could not afford a top university, like Makerere University in Uganda.
So for me, I had to work extra hard to get into a government scholarship. But the course I wanted to take was journalism. And if there was no intervention, I was missing it by 0.5 per cent or, thereabout. But because women’s rights groups had pushed to have this, it was 1.5 per cent if I remember well, to really increase girls’ intake in universities because it was still low. Higher education was still male-dominated. So I got admitted to a university because I earned that point for women’s rights groups and saying that to get the kind of course I wanted and had dreamed of doing. I became more and more aware as I got to university, like, why this is very important. It is very significant. So, I think to have a voice to speak on issues, comes from deep reflection of your own experience and why you think your experience connects you to others and where it matters. For me, it comes from all these experiences.
And it is not to say my entire childhood was a blissful experience. Of course, you stay in the same country where there are wars going on, there are coups happening. As a child, we lived through that. You are aware there is a war going on in a different part of the country. You consume this information, and as you become an adult, you try to understand why. For me, the interest came from really seeking to understand, that I am part of this country, and I come from this place, but the world is bigger than that. From your small village to now a city, you are getting into a university. You learn, you get different experiences,s and you learn your own privilege, but also your own disadvantages. And then you learn to speak up for yourself, and how do you speak up for others? I think it is something you acquire along the way, but you always have a foundation.
What was the transition from the village to the university in the city like for you?
It was quite a shocker because nobody prepared you for that. I think prior to moving to school, I had been to Kampala only once for a holiday when my uncle invited me. And of course, even during the holiday as a teenager, you were just in an enclosed place, so I did not have a good idea of what it was worth. And it is scary. In Uganda, most of us go to boarding school because we get a good education in boarding school as a teenager, this really cuts us off a lot from reality. While you are little, you are free and suddenly you are out in the world and you are like 17. Then you have become an adult, and things are expected of you. It was very difficult because even if, for example, you are on a government scholarship, it was hard to get upkeep.
And suddenly you are struggling. You are becoming an adult. You are also struggling with basic things like nutrition and getting food. It was quite an experience because my entire life I never had to struggle or think of food. Because if you live in a village, food is there, there are plantations. Food is abundant, especially in Uganda. But suddenly you are in a city where you have to get everything with money. And your parents do not really have that kind of money, and it is a struggle. In terms of finances, it was a rude awakening to adulthood. It was an extremely fragile time and many things can go wrong.
And so did you end up studying journalism?
I did study Mass Communication at Makerere University which includes journalism, public relations, international relations, and economics. It was a lot at the undergraduate level. So before I finished university, in my second year precisely, I went to do an internship at the Daily Monitor, which is one of the leading newspapers in the country. And I never looked back. In fact, I did less studies and more work. My parents were not sure I was going to graduate from the university. And again, it came from a bit of discontent. I was now in a newsroom and I could see daily the realities of what journalism is about. Sometimes you go back to school and you see the kind of education being offered, there is a disconnect between the education and the practice.
But at the same time, I was already in a newsroom at the age of 19 and I am taking on small assignments and understanding different perspectives, and the country. It was very incredible for me to open my eyes because I had an uncle in the same newsroom and I was privileged to get the placement and work there after my university
Having that opportunity to be in an active newsroom while in school, what would you say it did for you in terms of when you finished your education and began to flourish?
I think it quickly introduced me to the dynamics of society. Not just in a newsroom, but what is what in society. As a journalist, you are a very privileged person, actually because on a daily basis, you interact with so many layers of society. You could be sent to a market to talk to traders, or you could be sent to a presidential briefing. So you are able to transit through society and see it for what it is. And for me, I think that is a very privileged access, that very few people, I think very few professions managed to teach anybody like that in real life. The opportunity to look at what everybody in different aspects of the society is doing, whether they are in harmony or not and how they affect each other. It gives you a good foundation for questioning and learning. And I always wanted to learn. It was like school all over again. The newsroom was the school. In Uganda we still had the war going on in the northern part of the Country. The war only ended in 2009 or thereabout, but during my whole childhood, that part of the country was mostly in war. I come from a county where there has never been war. So it is confusing when people ask the question of what it is like to grow up in a country where a part is under conflict and massive displacement, and the part where you live is actually peaceful.
As I have explained my childhood, was a very happy one, and I had normal problems like my family struggling with money to take me to school. While the kids in another part of the country were running for their lives, losing their lives, being kidnapped and so on. Journalism then exposed me to the fact that I was no longer just a reader, I was actually on the inside seeing people covering this war and understanding what it meant. And I think as time went on, I was able to go to the north of the country. Some of the most moving experiences were the fact that there were girls younger than me going through the war. I had just finished university, but these kids were like, 14 years old, carrying babies from rape. It was my first time witnessing that. It was just heartbreaking. I remember literally being a 20-year-old, being in my hotel room and crying in the night. Nothing prepared me for this kind of mass suffering and violence on such a scale. These kinds of assignments earlier on showed me that even if the war was going on, girls were experiencing the war differently than anyone else These assignments opened my eyes in terms of power and who was at the bottom of power, who was at the top geographically, and gender-wise, all the questions that we still contend with today. It was my early exposure in covering these kinds of stories, that opened my eyes.
I want to go back to that 20-year-old Rosabell in the hotel room after witnessing that. I was just thinking, what should the newsroom have done to prepare you for that? How did you go through that mentally and resolve that with yourself?
I do not think anybody was being prepared because I think that even the journalists that had come before me, this was towards the end of the war, had actually been on the front lines and had seen more gruesome atrocities. And there was this whole idea that you are a journalist, you are covering this, and there was really no debriefing for you. You really had to find your own way of channelling these kinds of conflicting feelings of comparing your life to the lives of those in conflict situations But the job has to be done. Then what do you do about it? And I continued not only when I left Daily Monitor,
I worked briefly for several other outlets. And I still continued to cover the post-conflict recovery in northern Uganda and still saw the persistent issues. I became more interested in what women’s war experiences were like, and projecting them. Remember that the majority of people covering this war are men. Yes, they can say this is what women go through, but there is a certain layer of access l and reflection that it takes a certain level for you to say, we need to learn this more, to understand this more, to keep this on the forefront. For me, those were really life-changing. I was not covering this constantly, so that helped a lot. But I would take several trips to different parts to write about what was going on.
I know you went on to do a Master’s degree in media peace and conflict studies. So how did your area and your niche come to emerge through all of these experiences?
I think it was from that early experience with the Daily Monitor that going to northern Uganda made me realise that I needed to understand the aspects of war that are affecting women and people that are underreported. There is the marginalized and there are people on the periphery of things. So before I went for my master’s, I was in southern Sudan, which was not a country yet, where the Ugandan government and the rebels were having peace talks. And often, I was the only woman journalist in that room. a room full of government, soldiers and rebel representatives. To be honest, no one prepared me for this. They see you, you are a young woman who is interested in politics. You have the guts for it. This is what they see. And unfortunately, our newsrooms were not well equipped to prepare you.
Like, I was going to the middle of nowhere in this case, Juba was not a city. It was like a village. We were staying in tents literally by the river Nile at that point, and attending the peace talks, often staying for three weeks in the peace talks. And mostly everyone is a man. So you rely on your male journalist friends to really protect you because this was a hostile situation. For example, I wanted an interview with one of the delegations for the peace talks, and he asked me to go to his hotel room. I quickly understood and I said, wow. He was talking to all the men and giving them all the bites and everything, but he wanted me to go to his hotel. I quickly thought about it and asked one of the male journalists to escort me at that time, and he was kind of shocked that I came with another journalist. And you can tell, you know what it means as a woman.
Men do this in any situation where they think they have an upper hand. You can tell that his intention was to put you in a certain situation of compromise that no one would even believe. This kind of violence is very difficult to explain to somebody you know. But being aware of it and finding that your employer is not working with you on this. Sexual violence is not something we even talk about ourselves. Right? You can go as a journalist talking about women’s violence experiences, but if it has not happened to you, you cannot talk about it easily. The employer is not really considering that you are going out and it’s going to be in a very remote place. You are going to stay for three weeks with men. How should you protect yourself? I think back and I am like, that was crazy.
And, at the same time, a very peculiar experience was one evening, as journalists, after work, we were hanging out with friends, debriefing, having a drink to just relax, take a rest, then a man came to talk to me, a Sudanese man. I tried to avoid him, but he would budge. Good enough, my friend saved me. He told me, ‘Oh, you do not say no to Sudanese men’. You must entertain the conversation and let him down gently. Like someone had to whisper that in my ear. I said, so what happens? Like, everybody here is almost armed. It was a very bad situation within a hotel that is guarded, so I did not think about that. And these are social situations where you are still a female journalist in a conflict situation where you remember male dominance. The dangers for you as a female journalist are not that different from the women who are facing the brutalities of war. So it is just like you have more power, you could call a friend. But the way society is designed to debase women, it does not exclude you Even as a journalist. Your class and your position as a journalist do not protect you often from this kind of harassment. You must learn to navigate them.
Working in that area, I saw officials, and the people you interview, sexually harass you as well Plus an ordinary man you just saw in a bar and someone warning you that he could be armed, even if he is not armed
If you reject him and he knows where you are staying, he can come and shoot you. These are the kinds of dynamics. Just imagine that you are a brilliant journalist, you can interview anybody, you are outspoken and brave. That is all you needed to be to fall prey to these men. But then you realize that gender is a question, you can not explain. So I think that I learned so much.
That is interesting. And so how did you go from there? Going into African feminism and all of that area of work on women’s rights?
I think what galvanized me was when I finally decided to do my master’s in media peace and conflict studies. In journalism school, they do not teach you anything about gender. So, for the first time, I was exposed to gender theories, understanding the questions I always had, and the discomforts, even not from journalism but from an early age as a girl, it was the first time I was like, whoa! I am not crazy, and I am not an outlier, someone has written about all this, and it is here. At that time, the Internet was becoming more available, and cheaper for us to access and read. And it was my first time, trust me, to really be in a class and someone gave me the theories of gender as it pertains to conflict, pertains to how women are treated in society, and how women and different people of different genders are classified historically. You know, just to take that class for me was one of the most eye-opening journeys.
And I must say I was very lucky to be taught by Mona Eltahawy, a famous Egyptian feminist. She was teaching a class on Arab women and the media, and it exposed me to the genesis of media in the Arab world, which is very similar to my experiences as an African woman. Being taught by an Egyptian woman at an international level and exploring layers of colonization and patriarchy. And understanding this from a woman who has similar experiences on the same continent as me was very powerful. And seeing that our experiences were similar. I remember after class, chatting about her covering Muammar Gaddafi, being in Libya. Her coming from journalism, teaching us, and introducing us to different lines of thought about feminism was an important grounding for me. I made sense of every question I would have had from my journalism experience and as a person. When I came back after my course, the university allowed me to do a theoretical paper or research. I opted to work with the women’s rights NGO in Uganda, which was doing post-conflict work. So I needed to go back again to what I had worked on and I could not believe the amount of stories I had access to when I was working with the NGO. Literally being there to do my internship so that I can do my master’s thesis from that. I was going with doctors doing open boot camps, and for the first time, seeing upfront the impact of the war on women’s reproductive health.
I think one of the very big stories was when I actually interviewed a woman who had a relapse of the uterus or something like that. It is a condition where the uterus falls out of a woman as a result of rape and violence. And she had lived with this for years. You know, during the war, nobody is concerned about rape victims. And I remember talking to her and seeing her get surgery. And the fact that this was something that had crippled her entire existence. So I was able to see this kind of intervention again from the other side of people who were doing post-conflict interventions, and what was working and what was not working. And I think that is how I figured I really needed to build more on what I already learnt. It was not just for peace and conflict, but really understanding the role of voice and dismantling all these hierarchies and violent structures that enabled this kind of experience to happen. Now it is difficult for me to go back to mainstream journalism. It was no longer easy for me to just interview a person and go. I needed to know what are the mechanisms in place to correct the situation. What do we question? And how do we connect this person’s experience to the experience of many others, not just in that locality, but what is happening in the African continent? As I travelled to different countries, I interviewed refugees from Congo I realized it is not enough to just tell the story one day and move to another one. So it was difficult to really work towards being back in the mainstream media. By then, even as a journalist, I had already started blogging, I was already developing a whole different kind of media. A lot of media houses were still really behind, not really realizing the importance of emerging technologies and what was going to happen. And because of the education and different courses I had taken, I had seen what people were doing in Egypt and I was already belonging to other communities. So it really pointed me to solution-based journalism.
Before I ventured into African feminism, I was still part of the blogging communities, one of the first people on Twitter as Ugandans. I was responding to global campaigns with my experience in northern Uganda, South Sudan and Congo. I was responding to these kinds of viral campaigns that were distorting the idea of what Africans needed. So I had already begun that kind of resistance, having my own blog. When I did a story, I would go and put my own thoughts on that story. I would give you the story of how technically media wants this, but, I would give my own comment on what could happen and what I think. So as I was still in journalism, part of me was growing a community online, growing a platform, blogging on my platforms, and connecting with different platforms on African continents and worldwide. So that was how I was able to build my voice. I slowly found communities of African feminists. Actually, the bigger question is that you have all these questions, but the traditional media is locked. Even for the women who are there, the space for change is still very difficult to navigate. So that is how I actually ended up in African feminism. Women know their story, they know what is going on, and they can write about it, we can no longer rely on the official status quo to tell our story. Oftentimes when they get it wrong, we can respond, and we can show what the alternative voice looks like. So that was how I really ended up in feminism.
It has been really interesting hearing about your journey and some of those experiences you shared, particularly, in those conflict environments, and that journey of setting up African feminism. And I am interested in knowing what has inspired you along the way. Who are those people who have mentored you along the way, and supported you along the way? What is the structure around you that enables you to kind of do the things you are doing?
I am a very structureless person. I don’t like structures, so I do not have a structure. I just follow my dreams. I just follow what calls me. For me, the dedication to enhancing knowledge among our people, for people to learn from our history, to learn histories of marginalization and histories of triumph is very important for us to sustain us in building on the future. What sustains me is rooted in the need to see us advance and see us have better conditions as women than what has been left for us or what the system has conditioned us to be. Journalism is just a vessel, or storytelling is a vessel. Ultimately that is what it is. And, definitely, there have always been people I have looked up to, activists, people who were fighters, people who did not have a place on the table, but they nevertheless came and fought and left something for us. And of course, we always talked about the fact that you start from home. I have always had good examples of women, even when they did not make it that far. Their resolve for me is what the lesson is. Their resolve, no matter what life has been. But ultimately, making it in life is very personal. It is a personal journey. So you have to look really closely at those who share a similar journey as you. Also looking at women in general and understanding how to represent them and how to beat the long-standing stereotypes and barriers. We do not live in a gender-equal world, it is 100-plus years away from us. So the struggle would always be there. And you have to look to those who are, fighting like you, whether in other fields or in your own.
Talking about gender and media from your perspective and based on your kind of context, If there was one thing that you think was a glaring gap in all of the activism around women’s rights and gender equality in media, what would you say that was?
I think the enduring struggle is always patriarchy. And the fact that leadership no matter where you are on this continent or over the world. It is deeply patriarchal, even when you put women in charge. So people always say we need more women. Yes, we do, because women have a right to be there as much as men. It should not even be a question. But the question is what kind of politics do you practice? It is deeply problematic that always, when you push it, then the system would rather have a woman who would represent women the same way that men have. But just put a woman there and say, oh, but we have women, they are making changes. They say Change is hard, but it is not actually, when you agree that there is a system of marginalization. The change that is hard is the change in your mindset, your own mindset as a man leading in these places, to understand that, it is more than just adding women in newsrooms, but deeply looking at the intersectional struggles of women and other people that have for a very long time, been left out of not only newsrooms, but basically society and public affairs.
For example, in Uganda, only 20% of the news sources are women. Even when you have places that are run by women, the news sources are not women. The voices continue to be men. There are always persistent excuses that women are not available. But if you understand the structure of your society and what needs to be done in order to make women available, you will realise that the problem is to think that the marginalized people will be the only ones to work towards equality. But you can rather look at your position as someone in charge of shaping opinion, shaping the education of a country, shaping the information. Then you realise that you have to go the extra mile in order to bring the person who is not at the table to the table
Unpaid care work is one of the biggest struggles for women. The fact that you have to go and get a child from school, teach them homework, and do all these things that oftentimes men do not do. So it not only affects the women in the newsroom, it affects the women that you are trying to reach as news sources. So if you understand this, how do you work around them to get them to understand that their voice is important? It is not that they do not work, it is just that they are burdened with so much care work already that affects their availability. The easy availability of men cannot be the same as women. It boils down to the lack of understanding of entrenched systemic discrimination and oppression of women. Also, you do not put long-term strategies into addressing those issues, you continue to blame that on the society l and we know that it is not enough to just mirror the society. We have a great responsibility as storytellers, as people in places of influence, to explain why things are the way they are. I think, for me, that remains a problem.
And I guess much of what you are saying underlines the reason why we need to have equity. When we are talking about equality, It is not just about equality and inclusion, it is also about equity. And what you said really underlines the importance of that.
We spoke earlier on about those who have inspired you towards where you are. So for those young African women looking up to you, coming up behind you, following your footsteps, what is your advice to them?
Well, I would say that people are human and journeys are quite unique, so do not be consumed by someone else’s journey. I always have a very uncomfortable idea of a role model. I just see people, who inspire me towards something, and another one inspires me towards another thing. You can not find a person as a whole, as an inspiration. Sometimes there are those parts of the person that will inspire you, and other parts require you to question. So find what inspires you about anybody’s journey. Seek out people who have come before you to understand their struggles, their triumphs, and learn from them. But know that your journey is quite unique, as much as it is still very connected to other people. So when you understand that, then you will know how to use the influence you have been given or where you found yourself, you be able to connect the dots between yourself and the past, and then be able to paint your own path and bring about changes that we have not been able to bring so far. And that is what we need. We need to see new people, new voices, for us to be able to shake the foundations of oppression, to be able to advance our societies. I think ultimately, that is what the call is about.
I really love the way you frame that. Which therefore means that there are aspects of them that you are going to absolutely love, and that is what is inspiring you. And then there are going to be aspects that actually are not so great. And I think not expecting everybody to be perfect. This ideal role model is really important, and this really resonated with me because a few years ago, I met with somebody that I have always observed from afar in the news and was just really inspired by all of the work she did. And I remember the very first time I met her and somebody introduced us. She pretty much blanked me, and I was so distraught. This was somebody I was looking forward to meeting, somebody I had looked up to, spoken about in spaces where she probably never even knew she had somebody like me there. But actually, it took me a few days later, I just thought to myself, well, it was late in the evening. There were lots of people around there saying hello. She probably just had a very long, very hard day and was tired of all of the hellos. And she is only human. And we run the risk of letting those kinds of moments overpower us and actually lose our dream or our inspiration because of that one tiny moment. But it is really important to understand that they are just human.
Yes. Usually, because media is about image also, people carry a certain image, but sometimes the image does not match the politics of the person, or sometimes the person is simply tired. So if you finally meet them, and then maybe they do not add up to this image you have conjured in your head because of the space they occupy in the media industry or in society, then it is easier for you to walk back. We tend to think that, oh, my God, I want to be like that person. No, but you just be yourself. Maybe there are aspects of that person that inspire you, but do not aspire to be like somebody, aspire to be yourself because that person aspires to be themselves. And that is why you find them to be inspiring.
Absolutely. So what next for you, Rosebell?
Wow, it’s been a struggle post-COVID and the media environment, and online environment are being totally unraveled. We have seen social media platforms, and we have seen monopolies congregating around social media platforms where most of us are informing people, where we are making communities, and where we are sharing our stories. We found that especially for women and maybe queer people, and minority people, the social terrain is becoming extremely violent, and extremely exclusionary, because, the kind of ownership that we are seeing in these platforms has zero care. They are interested in money and making a profit of rage. There is no time, to question if the rage is indeed good? There is good rage which is changing things, but there is rage that is deployed to actually attack a certain section of society, and take away certain rights of a certain section of society. And unfortunately, we see a lot of that kind of racketeering for journalists. We see hate speech, disinformation, gender discrimination. I am working a lot on the nexus of that, looking at gender discrimination. Despite all the barriers, we have seen women becoming storytellers, and journalists, successfully able to tell these stories. But also the challenges are ever emerging and building on those existing challenges. So, I am very much interested because having been online and most of my work is known mostly online.
Although I worked in TV in Uganda, my work is mostly known online. So I am interested in, how we understand and study the emerging threats on women journalists, queer journalists. people who are marginalized doubly in society so we are able to respond. But at the heart of it is the capitalist kind of ownership of technologies and platforms that do not care about the lives of those on the margin. So I am interested more in research sharing and making sure that we can continue to push. I see myself at that nexus of pushing and understanding these experiences. And then how do you push for change to have platforms or public spaces, I see social media as a public space that we do not go backwards. So it is very important that we protect or we challenge those spaces and continue to support emerging and alternative spaces that can give us an idea of a healthy public discourse. That is always going to be my dedication.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Rosebell. It has been such a pleasure hearing your story and your journey. You are an amazing person so thank you so much for your time. It has been an absolute pleasure.
