Growing up, E. Tendayi Achiume wanted to be a physicist or an engineer, inspired by a high school physics teacher.
“I also considered a career in medicine for a long time,” she says. “But as an undergraduate, I took a college seminar taught by a third-year law student on law and international development, and that seminar completely changed my sense of the work I wanted to do. I decided I was interested in law as a tool for social change and that’s how I ended up on this path,” says Achiume, who is currently an assistant professor at UCLA School of Law.
The law student who taught that seminar, Dr. Bernadette Atuahene, now herself a law professor, undoubtedly had a role in Achiume’s decision to take up law.
While in law school, she developed an interest in refugee issues and human rights abuses against Zimbabwean refugees seeking asylum in South Africa.
“I think my interest in refugees and international migration more generally has only grown since then, in part because my own life has been characterized by voluntary and involuntary international migration,” she says. “In a world that remains firmly statist, and where rights are most strongly administered and protected at the national level, I find refugee and migrant rights issues to be especially pressing and challenging.”
Achiume says that one of the things that she loves about her current job is that, through her scholarship, she can explore the conceptual, theoretical and normative complexity of a world defined by borders. In the advocacy work that she does through the International Human Rights Clinic, her teaching and a United Nations appointment, she can also focus on policy and its impact on real lives.
