How one first-year student found her inner “social justice warrior”

It was in Morocco, at the height of the Arab Spring, that first-year student Elissa James found her calling.

One day, while shopping in the streets of the city of Rabat, she suddenly found herself in the middle of a massive protest.

“Thousands and thousands of students came walking down the street,” says James, who was in Morocco teaching English at a foreign-language school, “They were singing, and had signs, they weren’t hurting anybody.”

The students were demanding constitutional change that would end nepotism, which they said was robbing them of jobs.

It started as a peaceful protest, but suddenly things changed.

“They sat down in front of the parliament buildings and that’s when the police attacked from all sides,” she recalls. “They were hitting the protesters with batons and shields.”

“I thought, ‘This is so wrong. These students just want to work. You’re beating them up because they want to work. My social justice warrior came out. That’s where my love of human rights was born.”

In that moment she decided to pursue her passion and dedicate herself to human rights.

James is taking a step toward that goal by starting her first year at McMaster. She plans on studying Political Science, and hopes to minor in Peace Studies. It’s the beginning of an academic journey 15 years in the making.

James, a Hamilton native, graduated from college in 2001. For almost a decade, she was a corrections worker in a jail for youth, then worked as a youth counsellor in a group home. At the same time, she was managing the affects of dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes muscle spasms, affecting her speech and also making it difficult to control the movements of her hands and feet.

“I was burning out in the group home, and my dystonia was bothering me to the point where I couldn’t be effective. I needed a change,” she says. “I had a friend who had gone to Morocco to learn Arabic for university and she loved it, so I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to give it a try.’”

She initially spent three months in Morocco, studying Arabic and travelling the country. “It was so beautiful,” said James, who went back to Morocco in 2011, this time as an English instructor. She lived and worked there for 11 months but during that time, her dystonia worsened and she returned home to seek treatment.

“My speech had gotten so bad, you couldn’t understand me. My arms were shaking constantly– I couldn’t do anything,” she says.

On her doctor’s recommendation, James decided to undergo deep brain stimulation, a surgery in which electrodes are placed in the brain and connected to a device in the chest. The device sends electric pulses to areas of the brain responsible for body movement.

The results were dramatic. “I had a 90% improvement,” she says. With her dystonia under control, she felt the time was finally right to pursue a career in human rights. For James, that meant applying to McMaster.

“I feel like it’s the school I should have gone to in the first place, although life would be different if I had!” she laughs. “I didn’t even apply to another school. It was Mac or bust, as far as I was concerned.”

Starting her first year at McMaster marks the beginning of a new chapter in James’ life, one she hopes will eventually lead to law school and maybe, one day, to her ultimate goal of working at the United Nations.

But for now, she is taking it one step at a time.

“I’m looking forward to starting classes and seeing what it’s all about because I forget–it’s been so long since I graduated college,” she says. “I’m just excited to get in there, and learn, and soak it all in.”