Journalist Students Linn Jönsson and Maria Lundström Receive SASNET Travel Grant

Linn Jönsson and Maria Lundström are in their final year of journalism studies at Lund University and plan to travel to Mumbai for their final projects. Jönsson aims to document the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, and Lundström wants to follow climate activists from the organisation Fridays for Future. Both their projects will focus on youth perceptions in India as well as the country's upcoming election:
 
- India’s young generation is often described as a progressive force of educated urbanites with high ambitions and great faith in the future. But how does this work along with the growing right-wing populism with its inherent characteristics of nationalism and Islamophobia, Linn Jönsson asks.
 
To capture this, Jönsson aims to interview young people from different backgrounds, classes, religions, and occupations concerning their political views:
 
- I hope to have interesting and meaningful encounters that can form the basis of a multi-faceted reportage that can tell us about how Hindu nationalism has grown so large in India. Above all, I want to be able to tell readers about the impact this political force has on ordinary people, not least those belonging to the Muslim minority. 
 
Maria Lundström’s project will more specifically document climate activists in Mumbai, where she wants to look at the resistance they face, including those that involve violations of basic human rights. By focusing on the organisation Fridays for Future, Lundström wishes to make the reportage more accessible to Swedish readers:
 
- I plan to follow a couple of young activists and gain insights regarding their everyday life, but above all knowledge about their activism. I also intend to interview representatives of local human rights organisations.
 
They plan to travel to Mumbai for ten days in September - a trip both students look much forward to:
 
- This will be my first visit to India. It is a country I have wanted to visit for a long time, and I am really looking forward to the trip. I anticipate some practical problems that arise while working as a journalist in a foreign country. Beyond that, I think it can be a challenge to talk to people about such sensitive issues as politics and religion, but it is also the sensitivity of the issues that makes this trip so interesting, Jönsson says.