Madeleine Durbin (AS ’16) was recently profiled in The Syracuse University News. Maddi is an international relations major (IR) with double minors in geography and global political economy. She plans to spend a year in Africa and then to take all of her knowledge and experience to law school and to one day have a career in human rights and social justice. “I want to become a defender of human rights worldwide,” she says.

Maddi’s Capstone, “At Risk: A Study of Uranium Mining in Sub-Saharan Africa,” focuses on three case studies in Madagascar, Gabon, and South Africa where the mining of uranium has been considered a mining industry rather than nuclear activity, and thus the costs and suffering caused by uranium mining have gone undocumented. Maddie will be studying these areas in an attempt to determine the relationship between the impacts of uranium on indigenous populations and and conflict risk that can be extrapolated to predict conflict in other states or areas with a similar set of circumstances. This work could very well inform Maddie’s career as a human rights lawyer. Capstones can travel the world as far as the students who write them!