The Catalyst team met with Barbara Clark to discuss his paper “Water Sanitation Security: The Implementation of Autonomous Desalination in the Gaza Strip” in the upcoming Spring 2021 edition of Chrysalis. Barbara’s article proposes a plan to provide sustainable water supply resources to the Gaza Strip, currently deprived of such resource due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Israeli blockade.
Barbara graduated from McGill in Spring 2020 where she did a double major in History and International Development Studies and minored in Jewish Studies. While at McGill, she was a PennyDrops Mentor and an avid visitor to McLennan floor 3. Barbara was also involved in the Montreal Jewish community, working as a Hebrew School teacher at Temple Emanuel-Beth-Shalom, Westmount’s Reform Temple. She is from Vancouver but is currently a first-year Juris Doctor candidate at the University of Western Ontario, Faculty of Law.
Barbara wrote her paper, “Water Sanitation Security: The Implementation of Autonomous Desalination in the Gaza Strip”, for her final IDS course, INTD 497. Her professor, Professor Peruniak, gave the class an interesting and thought-provoking assignment: to write case study on a current or future migration problem, developing a possible solution and the chief objections that the solution may face. Barbara took this as an opportunity to unite her three academic interests into the final paper she would write as a McGill student.
In addressing water insecurity and desalination in the Gaza Strip, she examined the historical relationship between Israel and Gaza within the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the current threat posed by a lack of clean water a densely populated state with limited migratory opportunities for its citizens, and how these factors may affect what is widely regarded to be the most viable solution to the water crisis: desalination.
Video edited by Sena Lee.
Read the Spring 2021 issue of Chrysalis here.
