Katherine Coetzer

Katherine Coetzer is a senior at Davidson College majoring in history. During her time at Davidson, she has traveled extensively. Her past travels include a summer in Rwanda and Uganda spent studying peace and conflict studies and an immersive semester exploration of Himalayan border politics in India and Nepal. Through these experiences, Katherine has cultivated an interest in populations deemed “peripheral” in multiple senses of the term— from those residing in physical borderlands to groups that are politically and socioeconomically marginalized according to narrow definitions of national identity. In November 2022, she conducted a month-long investigation into the legacy of Nepal’s Maoist conflict in the mid-western Hills of Rukum and Rolpa that formed the cradle of the revolution— regions disregarded as harboring backwards and bellicose peoples. She describes her interest in journalism as stemming from a desire to “write against assumptions that flow uncritically from places of privilege.”