[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/peace_students.jpg” caption=”Kaya-Marissa Meadows, left, and Ashley White will travel to India with a $11,000 fellowship.”]Due to the combined efforts of McMaster's Centre for Peace Studies and the Office of International Affairs, Ashley White and Kaya-Marissa Meadows have won prestigious fellowships provided under the Canada Corps University Internship Program and will soon be heading to India to conduct research with the Mahila Shanti Sena (Women's Peace Corps) peace organization in northeastern India. The value of each Fellowship is $11,000, which will cover the cost of travel, meals and accommodation and all other related expenses while in India.

White, a third-year arts and science and economics student, has been on the Dean's Honors List for the past two years. Last year she traveled to northwest India, as one of 14 Ontario students, to learn about the health care, educational and municipal government systems of the Garhwal, an extremely isolated Himalayan region.

Meadows, a political science graduate, grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, and has traveled extensively around the world, including Europe, China, India, Thailand and Japan. She is interested in human rights issues, and particularly the effects of development policies on women's rights.

The two will be working with the Mahila Shanti Sena (MSS), which was founded in 2002 at a Peace and Democracy Conference co-organized by the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, and Shrambharati – a prominent Gandhian organization based in Patna, in the state of Bihar. Several members of the Centre for Peace Studies are involved in the MSS work and they will provide academic as well as logistical support to these students. During their internship, White and Meadows will spend two to three months in India studying the functioning of the MSS, to see if this movement can be exported out of India and applied in other countries, such as Afghanistan, which also is experimenting with women's empowerment, and more generally the decentralization of political power.

They also will explore the possibility of Mahila Shanti Sena being used as a field site for McMaster Peace Studies students who are interested in doing their thesis research in India.