Myriam is an Education Inequalities Specialist and a VR Producer. She is currently experimenting with immersive storytelling and is looking for critical and empathetic ways to harness AR/VR technology, to elevate conversations on how we can individually and collectively build social justice in our everyday lives. For the past three years she has also been a youth advisor for CIVICUS Monitor, a research and advocacy tool powered by frontline activists reporting on the current state of citizen participation across the globe.
Over the past eight years, Myriam has worked for local and international non-governmental organisations focusing on dismantling economic and social barriers to young people’s development. As an education policy advisor for the United Nations Development Program, she promoted the inclusion of a soft-skills curriculum in the Mexican public high school system, a policy which would become the largest of its kind in Latin America. After this experience, Myriam decided to focus on the right to quality education for indigenous youth in southern Mexico. As Development and Policy Director at Escalera, an NGO based in Chiapas, she co-designed and fundraised for educational programmes for youth in remote rural and indigenous territories.
She became a human rights activist as a university student in Monterrey, northern Mexico, where she led the creation of a pop-up museum displaying the threats, resistance and art expressions that were blooming in the midst of structural violence. Since then, Myriam has been involved in social movements in the Latin American region, and campaigning for women’s rights and citizens’ political participation in particular.
She holds an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Tecnológico de Monterrey and an MSc in Social Policy and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science, for which she was awarded the Titmuss Prize for outstanding performance. During her AFSEE Fellowship, Myriam co-created a VR film with the Rarámuri indigenous community in Mexico. The film celebrates the community's indigenous ecological wisdom on taking care of Mother Earth. The outcomes of the project can be found on her website.
Hope comes when a person experiencing oppression finds a community where she is safe and valued, and when political and civic rights are backed up by international solidarity alliances. I feel hope when talented young people are challenging the way we live, produce and grow; and I am even more hopeful when social justice is accompanied by a personal process of care and sorority.Myriam Hernandez