Alma Begicevic teaches her Society in a Global Age class in Loyola’s Mundelein Center.
rocks by the lake. I often say that I earned my bachelor’s degree with honors literally study- ing by the lake.
Coming full circle After graduation, I continued my academic
journey by earning a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and eventually, almost two decades later, getting my PhD from the University of Melbourne in Australia. But there was never a question in my mind about where the focus of my work should be. My personal experience has served as my drive to work in justice and human rights. I wanted to take the skills I learned in my new home and apply them to the home I’d been forced to leave many years earlier. As part of my post-graduate training, I was
awarded a human rights internship grant to do research with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a junior analyst returning to Bosnia, I reviewed laws to assess the legal
and practical obstacles Bosnian refugees face upon returning home, to help create a policy to allow for displaced persons to return. From there, I launched my career in human
rights. I represented the U.S. government as the seconded expert to the U.N. Mission in Kosovo, where I was the key technical adviser on legal reform in the areas of anti-trafficking, gender-based violence, and human rights and rule of law. My doctoral studies provided an opportu-
nity to dig deeper in the post-socialist trans- formation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As the state goes from war to peace, Bosnians who suffered terrible crimes are being ignored. Yet, recognizing victims’ losses and injuries is essential for democracy building and future social and political stability. Because wartime crimes and injustices are widely denied, Bos- nians are left to independently seek justice for rights violated using courts. This February marked exactly 23 years since my family left Bosnia and Herzegovina, and
a little over six years since my father died in Chicago. But it also marked a new anniversary. Last February, I found myself back on Loyola’s Lake Shore Campus to teach part-time in the sociology department. Being back in the place where I started
out as a new refugee in America—and where some of the professors who helped me so much still teach—feels like coming home. I feel privileged to be able to help guide a new generation of young scholars in using the sociological imagination to look at the world in new, critical ways. They must learn to see beyond what is obvious and to recognize structural injustice. I want to teach them to know their rights, to advocate for themselves and others, and to help shape society into a more just place, one step at a time. I imagine there are many other things
I could be doing in my career. However, there is nothing else I hear calling my name. Human rights and justice work is not a matter of voca- tion for me; it is what my life is all about. L
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