CAPAZ Profiles: Lina Franco and Erika Ortiz
Lina Franco/Personal archive
Lina Franco worked with us at CAPAZ during the first semester of 2021. Below, are her reflection on her professional training and her time at CAPAZ:
“My name is Lina, and I am a final semester student of International Relations at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. I have always been interested in how international society evolves and changes, and how the actors within it relate to each other in political, economic, and legal matters. I am especially interested in the relationship between these actors on issues of peace, conflict resolution and international cooperation. Thanks to CAPAZ and its work as a cooperation project between Colombia and Germany, I have been able to strengthen my interest in these issues, especially in relation to social work with victims, migrants, refugees and in human rights. At CAPAZ I learned about the work being undertaken on peace and post-conflict issues and how they can be worked on daily. The work I was involved in with Markus Ciesielski allowed me to acquire new research skills, which will help me a lot in the future. Also, the CAPAZ Institute has allowed me to strengthen my teamwork skills, to meet people who have given me valuable knowledge and have encouraged me to see the next steps for my professional training in a different way. Everyone in the CAPAZ team has been a constant support and learning something from each of them has been an unparalleled experience”.
Erika Ortiz/Personal archive
We also talked to Erika Ortiz Díaz, who began collaborating in 2021 with the networking activities of the NETCAPAZ platform:
“With a BA in sociology from Universidad del Rosario and a BA in Visual Arts from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She has experience in teaching, research, project coordination and community strengthening that articulate creative processes and languages to the construction and co-construction of social fabric. Erika says that NETCAPAZ’ research network is growing day by day. It uses academic channels to generate valuable information that supports the exercise of peace research. It also disseminates scientific information and is in search of new forms of knowledge production that can be shared, both in the academia and in and with the communities, in order to broaden the country’s forms of peacebuilding and stabilisation”.
(NW: Lina Franco, Erika Ortiz, Claudia Maya. English: Tiziana Laudato)