About me

I am passionate about the power of storytelling to expose and challenge injustices – and help us understand how to live with humanity in an unjust world.

For more than fifteen years, I’ve been working as a journalist covering international human rights issues – and investigating threats to them. I started at The Guardian in London, before moving to the Centre for Investigative Journalism at Birkbeck, University of London, and later becoming Head of Global Investigations at an independent media outlet, openDemocracy, where I built a transnational team of feminist investigative journalists. My work has also appeared in Al Jazeera, CNN, Foreign Policy, The Independent, The New York Review of Books, Mother Jones, and Ms. Magazine, among many other outlets. 

I am currently co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, a non-profit which is bringing together journalists, activists, and researchers, across borders, for innovative and impactful collaborations. One of our flagship projects is a new MA in Global Data Journalism, accredited by and in partnership with SOAS, University of London, for which I am leading core modules. I am also a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, and I serve on the advisory board of the global feminist ‘think and do’ tank Noor. I’ve additionally worked as a consultant for various human rights and feminist organisations, including Harm Reduction International and the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.

In 2023, I published my first book – Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy (published by Bloomsbury, with co-author Matt Kennard). The Feminist Investigative Journalism Handbook, which I edited, was released in 2025 with contributions from six continents – including Mona Eltahawy, whose foreword calls it a “lifeline” for feminist journalists.

I grew up in Canada, in northern Ontario – near the site of one of the world’s largest nickel mines – as NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Act) and neoliberal economic globalisation were being imposed, and fiercely resisted. Social movements luckily infected my adolescence with the belief and demand that “another world is possible”. A series of other coincidences and accidents led me to university (at Harvard), graduate school (at Columbia), and then into an international journalism career.

On the way, I’ve travelled to and reported from more than 25 countries across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe – and even when I’ve been covering human rights abuses and threats to democracy, I’ve found reasons for hope.