Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Giovana is an alumna of the 2015-16 EPIIC '“Future of Europe” colloquium, where I first met her as a classmate. She graduated the following year with a BA in International Relations and a minor in Economics.
Originally from Curitiba, Brazil, she is currently a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she analyzes data-driven policies, interventions, and evidence-based gender research for policy design and delivery with the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP). She works closely with the WAPPP Executive Director informing policymakers and stakeholders in different nations on strategies that close gender gaps in political leadership. Giovana also works with a network of international projects inspired on WAPPP’s political training program, the "From Harvard Square to the Oval Office: A Political Campaign Practicum," to help bring more women to the highest levels of political decision-making and statecraft.
The exchange below was conducted in the Fall of 2019. We discuss her unique and remarkable story, her time in EPIIC and at Tufts, her current aspirations and motivations, and the role she envisions for herself in the future.
As her friend, I value Giovana’s determination, candor, and warmth tremendously. It’s an honor to know her, and to be able to present her here.
- Jerome Krumenacker, 2019
EPIIC was one of the first experiences you opted into upon entering Tufts. What drew you to the course as a recent transfer student? What was most meaningful to you about the experience?
The theme was “The Future of Europe” when I transferred to Tufts in the Fall of 2015. What first drew me into EPIIC was my novice problematization of Europe. Brazilian by nationality, I didn’t know much about studies of Europe. But I knew enough to find issues with that broad categorization – just as Brazil has very little in common with other regions in Latin America (more so internally and across many pockets of Brazilian communities), being insensitive to the minutiae of the European fabric, I thought, would make any student of the world very shortsighted.[1]
Unlike any other class, “The Future of Europe” – and the larger EPIIC colloquium experience – turned out to defy any and all neat assumptions of statehood, unity, conflict, peace, and statecraft. In every session, I felt a level of pressure and chaos that would boil my blood. I never ceased to feel challenged but, strangely, I also felt homeward-bound. Now that I look back, it had indeed been a while since I had last felt the drive that EPIIC re-installed in me.
Perhaps because I was brought up that way, I am someone who gets interested in navigating complex situations, people, and places. I grew up in a somewhat turbulent environment where poverty, angst, and dreams met. As a result, very broadly, I learned to appreciate – and frequently look for – some degree of chaos in life. Complex and convoluted situations and domains – from individuals to ideas and work-place environments – have always taught me how to seek the highest levels of wisdom, to come up with the most creative solutions, and to find the greatest fulfillment in working with others. So, when I quit my decades-old career as a ballerina to continue my undergraduate studies of international relations at Tufts, I was uncomfortably numb.
Gladly I met the IGL, and was accepted into the EPIIC 2015-2016 cohort. The class itself was my own version of Brendan Simms’s Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present – our first assignment, the 720-page book that we read within the first few weeks of the semester. Just like Simms’s book, EPIIC delved deeply into the account of the past half-millennium of European history, but (unlike the book) never forgetting the traditionally-marginalized angles that are often left out of conversations about state formation: multiculturalism (as read in Pallavi Aiyar’s The New Old World); the politics of memory (as we learned from Dan Stone’s Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945); and political disfranchisement (as seen from the many readings on migration referred by Mark Miller, Julia Stewart-David and Kelly Greenhill). Just like the many ideas of Europe, every EPIIIC session that year was illuminating, and revealing. EPIIC brought color again into my every-day.
All in all, I needed the level of difficulty and intensity that EPIIC was about to offer; as soon as I heard the rumors about the class being “too much,” I was sold. I wasn’t wrong – it was indeed very demanding. But it became one of my most enriching life/school experiences. Little did I know that the friendships that I made in EPIIC would also come to stay. Today, they are my dearest and most trusted circle of friends. Liam, Jérôme, Maria, Mile, Paulina, Raasika, Reece (in alphabetical order, or else they’ll lose my number) and everyone else from our year, as well as folks who were also part of the larger EPIIC/IGL ecosystem – Cody Valdes, Heather Barry, Jacob Throwe, Rizwan Ladha, and most uniquely, Sherman – are essential components of one of the strongest pillars of my support system.
To “what was most meaningful to me” about the EPIIC experience community, not only I rediscovered my purpose as a student, but I also found my most loyal friends. Overall, I also regained the best version of myself – one which I thought had gotten lost for good.
You had a very unique background compared to others in that EPIIC class, or at Tufts in general - most of us expected from a much younger age to come to an American liberal arts university for our chosen field of study, and I don’t recall meeting anyone else who was on track to become a professional ballet dancer. How did you come to your interest in global affairs, and what can you say in retrospect about the transition? Did you perceive your relatively circuitous path as an advantage, or as barrier? How do you feel about it now?
I became interested in “international relations” as a field of study from a professor at Miami Dade College (where I studied before transferring to Tufts), an inspiring woman of incredible character who did an even more incredible job helping us understand the impacts of international security on individual people’s lives. Later on, I studied these links again at a class at The Fletcher School on nuclear politics with Francesca Giovannini. But my ever-growing interest in deeper cultural intelligence has been part of me much earlier than that.
It is hard for me to explain in words, but I remember always thinking about how other parts of the world behaved, so as to see how we could learn from one another, in an effort to become better citizens of the same globe. Likely because of the pervasive inequalities that surrounded me, I was never satisfied with the theories from geography, religion, and history alone. I always tried to look for better answers for why politics and modern economic growth have led some places to be so institutionally dysfunctional. Fast forward to now, I like to think of IR as an ideal opportunity to absorb the contributions from every individual social science. Jérôme and I were talking about this the other evening over jazz records and wine.
Letting go of my ballet career wasn’t easy. I was dancing since I was 2 and had my last performance was when I was 21. Like I mentioned, I lacked a bit of purpose as the years went by after I stopped dancing. But experiences like EPIIC reaffirmed my passion for that deep curiosity and solicitous worldview to addressing the world’s most gruesome problems. I got to act on that childhood tenacity, because the constant turmoil and instability of regions that I was learning about put me on an unending road of learning from people.
On adapting from being a ballerina to an aspiring diplomat – it felt to me nearly the same as when I took my first solo flight to Miami, when I was 16, when I left home. When I watched the plane contour the immense curve from the south of Brazil to the south of Florida, I realized that there were more than two Americas, and a bigger world to be understood; other “theaters” to be studied.
On the roads that stretch behind us, this hasn’t always been possible, but I learned to embrace my background as a ballerina. Today I think that my understanding of people and of the world to be much more unconventional – in terms of being nuanced and apt to integrate factors that traditional IR theories have forgotten about. To me, this essentially means studying gender, racial and cognitive diversity, heterogenous preferences within a state demographic, faith, food, dialects, and all of the intersectional variations of the social, intellectual, economic, political, cultural, geographic, linguistic, analytical, human gamut that compose international affairs.
You found unanticipated new passions and sources of inspiration during your senior year at Tufts, not least the course on nuclear security you took at Fletcher. How did your experience in EPIIC draw you to these opportunities, and prepare you for them? How do they continue to influence you?
What I learned in EPIIC became a valuable tool that I will always take with me – to be always analytical and humble, however the segment within international affairs. I like to think that we will always be students of world politics, independent of the level of field experience acquired. World/international politics are complex by virtue and in “kaleidoscopic” levels; as such, EPIIC showed me that by being humble in garnering and seeking all facets of knowledge, studying politics can be a very efficient approach to potentially solving problems of global scale.
This encouraged me to venture into the politics of nuclear energy, which turned out to be a very meaningful way that I found to understand international security. Nuclear, both as a technological and foreign policy tool, is source of geopolitical instability. I saw it recently happen with Brazil at the turn of administrations, with the rapid expansion of our nuclear-fueled submarine that had been somewhat dormant – to the worries of the IAEA.
That aside, I will always strive to be most humble and analytical in my pursuits within the IR field. Currently, I work on the intersection of politics and economics, assessing evidence-based policy across countries that focus on the merits of gender equality in political leadership. More simply put, I analyze political, economic, and social landscapes, in an effort to disseminate data-driven solutions to governments about what works to create gender equality in parliaments around the world.
The collection of these experiences showed me that I am very “data-heavy.” By data I mean everything from the intangible qualities that are very hard to code in a dataset, such as preferences or patterns of behavior, to the coordinates of geospatial data. Although I am fierce about working within the domains of international security within international relations, EPIIC has broaden my horizons by teaching me to be, again, analytical and humble.
How did the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School become your destination after graduation? How have you grown in your roles there, and what you learned from them?
I think that the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) is one of the very few evidence-based think-tanks within a larger policy environment that is the Harvard Kennedy School. In my senior year at Tufts, I was looking to get more proficient in applying that deep level of analysis into the practical world of politics. My objective after graduating was to learn how to be an effective political analyst regardless of area of focus within world politics. Not having had any prior formal teaching on the role of gender, the focus of WAPPP on global gender equity really challenged me, and gave me the opportunity to enrich the range and depth of my knowledge of international affairs more than I expected.
I started at WAPPP first as an undergraduate intern working part-time during my senior year. I was then hired into working very closely with the Executive Director after graduation in 2017. A year after, I became a fellow managing research projects on gender and politics, traveling internationally at short notice, and always analyzing data-driven tools that help governments effectively capacitate gender diversity, parity, and inclusion into political leadership. It has been the mission of creating intersectional diversity in politics and how important that is for peace and security that motivated my long hours and unexpected travels.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have learned how to apply a gender lens in international relations from WAPPP. Unfortunately, this has been severely under-appreciated by IR scholars left and right. I very much hope this can change and would expect that, going forward, it becomes its own required module in IR curricula, and that it also further becomes more actively sought by students and teachers, academics and practitioners alike.
What’s next for you? Longterm?
I have always thought of myself as becoming a diplomat within defense and security later on. The job of a diplomat working with disarmament affairs or ethical AI governance, for example, would fall in that category.
Because I think the road into diplomacy is a long one, I would love to gradually grow into that direction. With that, I see myself working next with geopolitics and intelligence. I know that this may sound like a diversion, but to be successful in these roles, I would love to purse an advanced degree in economics. As a researcher working with political data, I have developed great respect and value for evidence-based, data-driven strategies, which is enabled by quantitative research. This is confidential for now, but I am going to apply (and hopefully get accepted into) the Tufts MS in Economics.
In essence, I see myself being able to work very well across the spectrum: (1) mastering data collection and analysis (which my current role at WAPPP has allowed me to do, and which a master’s degree in economics would take me to a higher level); (2) distilling and disseminating information to stakeholders (which the role of a geopolitical or intelligence analysts entails); and (3) enacting a policy decision in the realm of defense and security. The core problem that I see with diplomacy is that diplomats don’t have much of a role in informing political decisions. But right now, I am only 25, and have plenty of time to reflect on, and to learn.
[1] One of the class readings, The Idea of Europe: An Essay by George Steiner, made me settle on a just notion what Europe is. The Idea of Europe is now my favorite prose.