2008 Trudeau Scholar

christopher.tenove@trudeaufoundation.net

Profile

Chris Tenove's career direction was set, to a great degree, at the Thai-Burma border in 1999. There, he taught Burmese refugees and he met farmers who had stepped on landmines, displaced families who suffered from disease and malnutrition, and Burmese women exploited by Thai employers. None was able to give public voice to the wrongs they endured. Again and again, Chris has seen a clear relationship between the injustices people suffer and their forced silence. He has also found that it is no simple matter to promote justice through speech-this is the problem he intends to address both as an academic and as a writer for general audiences.

Since 2002, he has worked as a freelance journalist. His writing regularly appears in Canada's national magazines and newspapers (such as Maclean's, The Walrus, Reader's Digest, and The Globe and Mail), and his radio documentaries run on the CBC and the Radio Netherlands World Service. His print and radio work has won awards, and he is a five-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards.

Two themes have dominated Chris' work in recent years. The first is global citizenship. He is interested in the moral obligations that we - as wealthy individuals and as Canadians - have to the distant poor. He has tried to understand what institutional and legal developments could help us fulfill these obligations. He has paid particular attention to how stories, from literary novels to news broadcasts about celebrity philanthropists, address this issue.

The second theme, related to the first, is international criminal law. His reporting has taken him to courtrooms in Nuremberg and The Hague, and into the homes of shattered families in Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

As a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia, Chris is studying the impact of international criminal trials in post-conflict countries, paying particular attention to how journalists and writers use the trials to address questions of history, law and justice.