Impossible Choices: When Human Rights Work Comes at a Personal Expense

In this upcoming public event, co-hosted by metaLAB (at) Harvard, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, metaLAB Affiliate and TED Fellow Anjan Sundaram will be in conversation with BBC editor and Nieman Fellow Ashish Dikshit about the personal costs that journalists and frontline war correspondents pay, and the common but underexpressed tension between public service work and the toll it takes on one’s personal life. The conversation will touch upon Anjan Sundaram’s new book, Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime, in which he describes how, after ten years of reporting from central Africa for The New York Times and The Associated Press, word arrives of preparations for ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic. He is suddenly torn between his duty as a husband and father, and his moral responsibility to report on a conflict largely unseen by the world. Introduction by metaLAB's Director of Art & Education, Sarah Newman. The event will conclude with a Q&A, followed by a reception.

This event is free and open to the public.

Speakers

Anjan Sundaram is a TED Fellow, a metaLAB Affiliate, and a journalist, academic, and author of three memoirs, Stringer, Bad News and Breakup. His books have been featured by Christiane Amanpour and Fareed Zakaria on CNN, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and MSNBC’s Morning Joe. His war correspondence won a Frontline Club Award in 2015 and a Reuters prize in 2006, and was short-listed for the Prix Bayeux in 2015. Stringer was a Royal African Society Book of the Year in 2014, and Bad News was an Amazon Book of the Year in 2016. Sundaram graduated from Yale University, where he studied mathematics, and holds a PhD in journalism and literature from the University of East Anglia.

Ashish Dikshit is a Nieman Fellow the editor of BBC News Marathi, one of the fastest growing news divisions of the BBC World Service. Based in New Delhi, he leads the BBC’s Diversity & Inclusion chapter in India. He is one of the first editors to come out openly as gay in the traditionally conservative Indian-language press. He has worked in various positions in English-language national newsrooms as well as Marathi-language news channels serving a population of 80 million in western India. He previously worked as a senior correspondent for the digital start-up TheQuint.com and as news editor for IBN Lokmat, a leading Marathi news channel. He has covered several elections, parliamentary sessions, bomb blasts, anti-corruption movements and natural disasters.