Jodie Martinson (‘10) has won an International Development Research Centre (IDRC) fellowship of $20,000 to report on the fate of wives of Ugandan rebels. The fellowship will enable Martinson to produce a series of short documentaries for television and radio about, and in partnership with, a group of women who were wives to top commanders in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the notorious rebel group responsible for over 20 years of war in Northern Uganda.
These documentaries will tell insider accounts of life inside one of the least-understood rebel armies, an army still committing mass atrocities, and highlight the issues that young women face when they escape the LRA and try to reintegrate into society.
Jodie Martinson is a second-year student in the Master of Journalism program. She is the producer and director of a feature-length documentary film, “To The Tar Sands,” which screened at the Calgary International Film Festival and DOXA Documentary Film Festival.
She has interned at CBC Radio One’s “The Current,” the Globe and Mail, and was part of the UBC School of Journalism International Reporting team that produced a half-hour documentary on electronic waste for PBS Frontline World.
She has traveled twice to Northern Uganda with Professor Erin Baines of the Liu Institute for Global Studies to lay the foundations for her project there.
Each year, UBC Graduate School of Journalism is given an award of $20,000 for International Development Journalism, to be awarded to a student enrolled in the final year of the program. The donor is the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
The award enables the recipient to spend four to 10 months in a developing country to enhance his/her knowledge of international development and international reporting issues.
