A Q&A with the new Kaschak Institute executive director

As she prepared to move from Costa Rica to the United States — something she likened to a circus with five different platforms — Lorena Aguilar spoke to BingUNews about her new position as executive director of the Ellyn Uram Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls.

Aguilar is a former vice-minister of foreign affairs for Costa Rica and a pioneer in the relationship between sustainable development, gender equality and women’s rights.

Q: What made you interested in being the director?

A: The potential that the Institute has. It is a hidden treasure waiting to be shared with the world. The institute is hosted by one of the United States’ universities with solid recognition for its work on social justice. Also, the University has a tremendous capital of human beings to develop their capacities for the future.

Moreover, it is the right fit for me at this point in my lifetime. There is a need to pass the baton to somebody else, and I have been searching a lot. To whom do I want to provide the knowledge and expertise I have acquired through the years? The University’s incredible social justice work and the potential of the students’ work make me think that this is where I want to end my professional career and pass that baton to the new generations.

Q: What is your vision for the institute, and how do hope to realize it?

A: The vision should not be only my vision. I hope to convene faculty, staff and students so that we can collectively build the mission and vision of the institute. If you ask me, I think we need to ensure we invest in the next generation by engaging and providing access to Binghamton undergraduate and graduate students to cutting-edge research and research fellowships, scholarships, carrier opportunities, innovative knowledge generation networks, international and national events, programs, decision-making fora, and interaction with global thought leaders.

I hope the institute can be a center of excellence for career development and show how to do things. The world has agreed to several policies concerning gender equality and women’s empowerment. However, we need implementation, especially on topics like climate change and environmental degradation. This is not anymore a crisis. This is an emergency. We have seen the heat waves and droughts in the past months and what they are doing to the world. So, I think that the institute can become a beacon not only in the U.S. but in the rest of the world to lead and show how we should enhance our ambition and reach the world’s goals on these topics.

Q: How does all of this mesh with social justice issues?

A: It is about social justice. The world has made commitments on really improving gender equality and women empowerment in many different areas: health, the environment, participation and political engagement. So, what I want is for the institute to show the way in two or three topics and then enhance it to other areas of work. The work I have been doing in sustainable development will probably be, as I said, further discussed and agreed upon by a broader group of people.

When you look at the new generations, climate change and environmental degradation is the number one topic. However, we must understand that the negative impacts and damage caused by climate change are also the result of social and political processes and the existing structural nodes of inequality. Climate change encompasses unequally distributed impacts on women, youth, the elderly, people from different ethnic groups, the urban poor and socially excluded groups, exacerbated by unequal distribution and poor access to resources. Structurally disadvantaged people, who are subject to social, economic and political inequalities historically resulting from discrimination, marginalization or disenfranchisement, are disproportionately vulnerable to the negative impacts of hazards associated with climate change.

Hopefully, hand in hand with students, we will be doing some work on the ground so they can have firsthand experience. It is one thing if somebody tells you about what poverty is. The other thing is seeing it. When you talk to women in some countries and ask them to dream, they say, ‘Don’t ask me to dream. I’m too poor to dream.’ You need to understand what that means and what type of actions you can develop to really promote equality among all of us.

Q: Are you hoping this work will have an immediate impact? What is your five-to-10 years down the road picture?

A: I would like to see the institute spearheading a lot of the processes that the world needs when it comes to gender equality and women empowerment. I want the institute to be at the forefront. That is definitely something we can achieve.

When you search universities and try to find which university is really focused on women empowerment and women and girls empowerment in topics like sustainable development, there are very, very few. You can count them on the fingers of your hand, so I want the institute to be that reference.

I’ll give you an example. Global leaders have made a lot of commitments, but there’s no way we can track the impact and how much we have moved toward closing those gender gaps, precisely, that are the causes of these inequalities. One of the ideas I have is that the University can have an observatory and really track what the countries said they were going to do and what they’re doing. That will help us to support countries, parties and decision-makers where the differences are happening and where they need to happen as well.

When I said that the institute should be a beacon, it should be a leader when it comes to knowledge generation. It should be a major player in following these global mandates and what the world has said it is going to do, and also in the development of capacities of the new generations to really know how to engage. In this new transition that we have, we talk about green transition and new economies in transition, but are our students prepared to engage in that new context, in that new world? I hope the institute can support this.

Q: What do you see in terms of progress over past generations? Are our children better off than us, and are we better off than our parents?

A: With the recent events in the U.S., I’m really fearful that this new generation will not have the same rights that I had. That worries me a lot because we thought they were carved in stone and now we are realizing something that many other countries in the world have realized, that the struggle for social justice and human rights is a continuous process and not just one event.

When I see the world and how it’s going against the recognition of human rights, against diversity and moving to very patriarchal principles that we thought we had overcome, I’m extremely concerned. We saw a change from our grandmothers. My grandmother was a suffragist in Costa Rica. I remember one day when my daughters were talking about what they wanted — I have two daughters and a boy, ages 42, 32 and 31. And when my daughters were talking about what they wanted to do, one was talking about being a physician, the other an astronomer, and my grandmother looked at them and said, ‘You are so lucky. I wanted to be a physician, a doctor, and I was never allowed to be. I wasn’t allowed to have a vote.’ So I think that, between her generation and our generation, we saw a lot of progress in that sense.

But right now, we’re seeing that people are terrified of diverse people having rights. I really thought that we had already won that fight. And there are many countries in the world in which being from the LGBTQ+ community means that you can be killed or imprisoned, but those were the few and not the majority, so I really hope that the institute can play a role, especially in the U.S., when it comes to fighting because right now it’s not even about protecting, it’s about going back to the fight where we came from in the ’50s and the ’60s. And we can do it.

And sometimes, with these new generations —and I have discussed this a lot with them — they walked through paved roads that we built, and they thought that those paved roads were a given; not anymore. It’s time for them to know to what it is to fight for their rights, it’s important to know what one’s vote can mean and it’s time to go back to those causes that we had 40 years ago. It’s a pity that we have to go back to that. I really have a lot of hope in the new generations. They grew up with those rights as a given, and now they’re losing them. It feels worse.

I never thought I would say it. I already cried as much as I could, and I can still not believe that my daughter and granddaughters would not have the same rights as I did. Nevertheless, this is where we are.

There was a woman I worked with in Liberia once. She was the mother of a child soldier who committed some terrible crimes. She was banned from the community, and the child committed suicide when he was 12 years old. I had a project, and when I came to talk to her, she was this very positive person, and I was shocked. Moreover, I said, ‘How can you be so positive? Teach me. Where does your positivity come from?’ She said that in everything good, there is something bad, and in everything bad, there is something good. You would not be offering me this project if I had not suffered what I suffered.

So in everything bad, there is something good, and we have to — we have to — build our courage precisely in these more difficult times. Establish new types of alliances and rebuild alliances we thought we didn’t need anymore. This is the time for us to go literally to the streets and fight and vote and claim and demand; more than claim — demand what is ours.

Q: How do people, as individuals, leave a place better than they found it in the context of today’s society?

A: We have to live our lives based on certain principles of respect for human beings, respect for nature and respect for one another. We have to live by those principles, and some of them are not easy to live by. For example, it is every day in the way you consume. If you call yourself a feminist and consume to unimaginable levels, your decisions affect the women in my country. Your decisions are creating such a significant carbon footprint that you are putting me at risk as a woman, child or girl. So how can you call yourself a feminist when you do not take into account how your decisions are going to have an impact on other women and other girls around the world?

For example, I am not going to buy all these clothes. Can I buy second-hand clothes? What will people say? I have heard this in the U.S. I don’t tell people I go to thrift shops. Why? I do it because it is an ecological decision. I am doing it based on my principles. I do not buy anything that I cannot recycle or reuse.

Q: How do differing cultures play into the work of the institute?

A: I think the institute will be a platform where diverse voices can come in and have dialogues and better understanding and sharing of experiences. There are different cultures and diverse ways of addressing things, but when it comes to the patriarchal system, believe me, the cultures share many of the same principles of discrimination. They may come in various forms, flavors and sizes, but the patriarchal system is pretty much the same worldwide. Even in the U.S., when you look at the coasts and the center of the country, they have unique principles and traditions. You do not have to go abroad to see those differences and traditions. The institute needs to recognize and not undermine diversity, and we must understand in which areas we can bring change and in which areas it is possible to move the social justice and the human rights agenda.

Diversity, as in biodiversity, is healthy. The more diverse ecosystems are, the stronger they are, and the more diverse society is, in respect of that diversity, makes communities and countries so rich and so unique. As long as they know how to respect each other and with human rights as my banner, I will not respect culture, tradition or custom that will endanger the human rights that the United Nations have agreed to since the ’40s.

It’s the weight that society has put on certain people that we cannot allow to continue happening. It doesn’t matter who you are, I will respect you. Respect has a bottom line, and that respect is a human right. If your positions are against human rights, I will not respect them. I will fight with every inch of my body and voice to overcome that. That’s the limit. I will not respect any tradition or custom or policy that is against human rights.

Q: What would you like the campus to know?

A: I would like the Binghamton University community to see the institute as its own. It’s not my institute or what do I bring as its director; it’s going to be a collective effort. It’s the place to come, grow together, think together and fight together. I hope the Binghamton University community can see this as a ‘we’ place, a place in which we can move forward in this so well-embedded social justice essence of the University. This is one little leg in decades of work at this University and I really hope we can all come together to agree and disagree, because that is the right way of doing it — to move forward together in our differences and in our goals.