Each year in its Commencement edition, the Daily highlights a handful of exceptional graduating seniors: what they studied, how they impacted campus and how they hope to change the world.
Recently, the Daily caught up with two of its interviewees from 2018: one, a Fletcher student studying human security and technology policy, and the other, a political organizer in Arizona who worked for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Amanda Borquaye (LA’18) is a second-year master’s candidate in The Fletcher School’s Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy program. She studies human displacement and how different border surveillance technologies affect migrant communities coming across the border.
Borquaye stumbled into the technology aspect of international relations accidentally. After graduating from Tufts in 2018, she lived in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a paralegal at a civil rights law firm. The firm examined numerous cases having to do with how automated technology — for example, in applications for loans — can harm minority communities. She said she left the law firm “familiar with the harms of technology on vulnerable people” and was excited to apply her knowledge to the world of international relations.
The Daily first interviewed Borquaye alongside fellow alumna Margo Bender (LA’18) in 2018 regarding the pair’s work with the Tufts University Prison Initiative (TUPIT), a program in the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life that allows students to take classes with incarcerated people at a correctional institution in Concord, Mass. Borquaye and Bender both advocated for prison education reform during their time at Tufts. In 2021, Borquaye described how prison advocacy remains an important aspect of her work today.
“Prison advocacy is always going to be something that I am passionate about, especially in terms of thinking of how incarceration is an act of violence against people and against communities,” Borquaye said.
She said her work with TUPIT helped inform her current studies at Fletcher. In fact, she’s even working with some of the same people, now, that she worked with as an undergraduate.
Borquaye also reflected on how the experience within Tisch College shaped her outlook on community work.
“[The emphasis] on meeting a community's needs, rather than imposing what it is that you think a community might need, has been extremely helpful as a praxis point of how to engage in social justice and advocacy," Borquaye said.
Similarly assessing community needs and advocacy, Lorenza Ramírez (LA’18) works for the Arizona Democratic Party, organizing voting campaigns to elect Democrats up and down the ballot in Arizona for elections in 2022.
In the Daily’s profile of Ramírez in 2018, the then-graduating senior described her aspirations to launch a career in political organization and advocacy, leaving her ambitions within the field fairly open-ended. After graduating from Tufts, Ramírez went on to serve numerous roles aiding the Warren campaign. Ramírez started as a student intern and worked her way up to be a regional organizer in Iowa during Warren’s presidential campaign.
“I learned so much ... not just about campaigns and management ... but to be at the epicenter of the presidential primary was just really exciting,” Ramírez said.
After Warren’s campaign, Ramírez pivoted to the general election, with hopes of using her passion for organizing to drive voter turnout in critical states. After deliberating her options, Ramírez focused her sights on Arizona.
“I wanted to go to a state where I felt like I could use more of my skill set,” she said. Ramírez grew up in Mexico and is bilingual. "I just loved working in Arizona, especially after living in Iowa for a year … being in a really diverse state was just really exciting to me."
In Arizona, Ramírez stepped into the role of deputy organizing director, where she ran the largest statewide Latinx and Spanish language organizing and volunteer program in the country.
When asked to reflect on her experiences, Ramírez described how she deeply values empowerment through action.
“The reason why I love organizing and love managing people in organizing … is that I think that it's so actionable," Ramírez said. "It feels so good every day to be able to take any ounce of anxiety or stress and just channel it into talking to voters ... and doing something about it."
She also reflected on her Tufts undergraduate experience and, specifically, how former Associate Professor of Political Science Natalie Masuoka encouraged her to explore political advocacy. With Masuoka’s mentorship, Ramírez wrote her senior thesis on how political campaigns engage with Latinx voters.
The Arizona Democratic Party has a Spanish program and a Spanish program director, Ramírez noted, so she often finds she is able to connect her thesis with her current work.
Ramírez is already committed to serving as organizing director for the coordinated campaign in 2022. She emphasized her appreciation for how much freedom and agency she has had in her role and how she has high hopes for the next campaign.
“We're creating that road map [and] building that from scratch," she said. "I am not super interested in just doing things the way they've always been done before. … I think it's very empowering pretty early in your career to have so much agency and so much ability to be creative and try new things.”
