45
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left to apply
Giovanna Martin Vial’s work starts with a refusal — a refusal of journalism that extracts stories without accountability. She refuses knowledge production that sidelines the people living the realities being reported. And she refuses narratives shaped far from the communities they claim to describe.
As a Brazilian journalist working across conflict zones and humanitarian contexts, Giovanna has seen how power determines whose voices are amplified and whose are erased. In mainstream international reporting, those closest to crisis are often treated as support staff rather than thinkers, analysts, or authors of their own stories. Giovanna has built her work in direct opposition to that model.
Through her reporting and as co-founder of Youmanitarian, she practices what she calls human journalism. Her approach centers Global South voices as co-authors and intellectual partners, grounded in proximity, historical responsibility, and narrative justice. This work is especially urgent in contexts shaped by armed conflict, political repression, and humanitarian crisis.
As a 2025 Global Fellow in Courage, Giovanna is strengthening her leadership within a transnational community that understands courage as a collective practice rooted in care, accountability, and ethical clarity.
Her courage shows up in consistency. In continuing to tell difficult truths. And in choosing ethical commitment even when silence would be easier.
Being part of Global Fellows in Courage has given me something that is often missing in human rights work: a collective space where political clarity, ethical commitment, and emotional sustainability exist together. The Fellowship has connected me to a transnational community of practitioners who understand courage not as individual heroism, but as a shared responsibility.
Through this network, I have been able to refine my work as a communicator and human rights professional, test ideas in a space that is both supportive and critical, and draw strength from peers navigating similarly complex and high-risk contexts.
To me, courage is not about the absence of fear. It is about moving toward what you believe in, one step at a time, despite fear. Courage means telling uncomfortable truths and pursuing what feels ethically right, even when emotional or material conditions are far from ideal.
I do consider myself a courageous person, not because I seek risk, but because my work consistently requires me to confront power, misinformation, and dominant narratives, especially in contexts of armed conflict and political repression. Often, courage looks like continuing to report, teach, and speak publicly when staying quiet would be safer or more socially acceptable.
I am working to confront extractive and colonial models of journalism and knowledge production that marginalize Global South voices while profiting from their realities. In much international reporting, local actors are reduced to translators or logistical support, while narrative authority remains elsewhere. I have consistently rejected this model.
Instead, I work through horizontal South–South partnerships that prioritize co-authorship and shared decision-making. This work is urgent in Brazil, where public understanding of international crises is increasingly shaped by polarized and imported narratives that lack historical context. These simplified narratives weaken democratic debate and reinforce harmful stereotypes.
I work closely with communities in the Global South who are directly affected by conflict, displacement, and political violence, particularly in the Middle East and Latin America. These partnerships are built on trust, shared decision-making, and long-term relationships.
Through Youmanitarian, we collaborate with local journalists, researchers, educators, artists, and human rights defenders to produce educational content rooted in lived experience and local knowledge. Contributors are not asked to translate their realities into externally imposed frameworks. Partnership, for me, is a political commitment, not a methodology.
Since 2022, our courses have reached more than 370 students, most of them from the Global South. Many participants have gone on to enter international academic programs, work in journalism or human rights, or reshape conversations within their own communities.
What matters most to me is the shift I have seen in participants. Students move from consuming dominant narratives to questioning them. From feeling invisible to recognizing their authority to speak. That shift from extraction to agency is the core impact of my work.
Yes. While reporting from Beirut and later crossing into Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, I saw how local professionals carried the risks of reporting while remaining largely invisible in the stories published about their own country.
That experience made something clear to me. Syria was not an exception. Across the Global South, those closest to crisis are often excluded from shaping how their realities are understood. When I returned home, my co-founder and I created Youmanitarian with a clear mission: to decolonize knowledge and reclaim narrative power for the Global South.
Giovanna’s leadership reflects the heart of Global Fellows in Courage. Her work challenges who gets to produce knowledge about the world, under what conditions, and with what consequences. Through journalism and decolonial education, she is helping reshape how stories are told, who tells them, and whose lives are treated as credible and worthy of attention.
