Bartos Fellows
The Bartos Institute for the Constructive Engagement of Conflict brings thought leaders from around the world and a variety of fields to the UWC-USA campus in Montezuma, New Mexico every year.
Bartos Fellows share from their areas of expertise both formally and informally, and work with students in small groups and one-on-one.
In addition, UWC-USA’s beautiful and remote campus acts as the perfect environment for respite, innovation, writing and retreat – ample time will be allotted to these endeavors and to exploring the rich history and cultures of Northern New Mexico.
This program is underwritten by the generous support of the Bartos family.
Bartos Fellows play an integral and unique role, connecting our campus to people and projects beyond our northern New Mexico borders, exemplifying the UWC-USA ethos of inter- cultural dialogue, constructive engagement of conflict, and ecological sustainability. We are honored to host such an elite group of passionate and dedicated individuals!
Arjun Singh Sethi
Arjun Singh Sethi
Arjun Singh Sethi is a human rights lawyer, community activist, author, and law professor based in Washington, DC. He works closely with Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Sikh communities and advocates for racial justice, equity, and social change at the local and international levels. He has represented asylum seekers and national security detainees, and has served as a legal observer across the world, including military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. He holds faculty appointments at Georgetown University Law Center and Vanderbilt University Law School, and presently co-chairs the American Bar Association’s National Committee on Homeland Security, Terrorism, and Treatment of Enemy Combatants. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Arjun traveled the country and met with a diversity of people and documented the hate they experienced during the campaign and after inauguration. American Hate: Survivors Speak Out was released in August 2018 and named an NPR Best Book of the Year.
Auma Obama
Auma Obama
Dr Auma Obama is the founder and chairwoman of the Sauti Kuu Foundation. Sauti Kuu – “powerful voices” in Kiswahili – aims to give disadvantaged children and youths a voice and awaken and strengthen their potential. Based on the principle of helping people help themselves, the foundation provides economically sustainable, practically oriented education and training to youths, thus supporting and encouraging them to become the architects of their own destiny.
She is a member of the governing council of the Kilimanjaro Initiative, which promotes non-violence and positive change in disadvantaged families and supports sustainable development within their communities. One of the initiative’s key activities is the annual ascent of Africa’s highest peak Mount Kilimanjaro.
Dr. Obama is also a writer who delivers worldwide lectures and keynote speeches on the topic of environmental, economic and social sustainability, with a special interest in Kenya. She is the author of the bestseller And Then Life Happens.
Charlie Clements
Charlie Clements
Charlie Clements is a public health physician and human rights activist. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, who served as a C-130 transport pilot in Vietnam until he reached the point where he felt like what he was being asked to do was immoral. Charlie wrote Witness to War, which describes his journey of conscience from Vietnam to the civil war in El Salvador, where he worked as a physician caring for civilians bombed, rocketed, or strafed daily by U.S-supplied aircraft. Currently acting as clinical coordinator and associate professor at Touro University in California, Charlie served for five years as the Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and is one of the founding board members of Physicians for Human Rights. He has been widely recognized for his humanitarian and human rights work.
Chinwe Onuegbu
Chinwe Onuegbu
Chinwe Onuegbu is a trained sociologist with keen interest in science communication,
health information literacy, and healthcare in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
She participated in a Bartos fellowship in 2017, where she did academic and community
engagement on information literacy and conflict resolution. Chinwe is currently undertaking
her PhD at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, UK. Her thesis focuses on
activation and communication with social networks for illness management in slums of
LMICs. Through her PhD project, she hopes to generate empirical evidence to aid the design
of intervention to help improve the access to accurate and complete health information in
low resource slums of LMICs. Chinwe also co-facilitates a course on science communication
for undergraduates at the School of Life Sciences, University at Warwick.
Courtney E. Martin
Courtney E. Martin
Courtney E. Martin is an author, entrepreneur, and facilitator. She has written/edited five books, including The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream and Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists. She writes frequently for The New York Times, BRIGHT Magazine, and The On Being Project, among other publications. She has appeared on the TODAY Show, MSNBC, and The O’Reilly Factor, and speaks widely at conferences and colleges. Her TED talks have been watched over 3.5M times.
Courtney has interviewed luminaries as wide ranging as filmmaker Ava DuVernay, writer Zadie Smith, choreographer Alonzo King, organizer Ai-Jen Poo, rapper Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest, and designer Tim Brown.
Courtney is also the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and FRESH Speakers Bureau, and has consulted with a wide variety of organizations—like TED, the Aspen Institute, The Obama Foundation, and The Sundance Institute—on how to make impactful, story-rich social change. She has an honorary doctorate from Art Center College of Design and received the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics.
She lives with her partner, John Cary, and two daughters, in a co-housing community in Oakland.
Emiel Stegeman
Emiel Stegeman
Emiel is an international educator born in The Netherlands. He currently lives the mission at UWC Costa Rica, where he teaches English Literature and Theory of Knowledge, and facilitates groups in Healthy Masculinities. An alumnus of the World Teachers Program, he first joined the UWC mission during a short internship at UWC-USA. During the academic year 2019/20 he was a Bartos Fellow focusing on restorative justice and gender-transformative approaches to masculinity with both students and staff; two social missions he still dedicates considerable time to.