Jennifer’s story is one of coming full circle. Originally from Detroit and having recently moved back there, Jennifer explains how her serendipitous path and global living experiences built on each other: From Detroit to Colorado to study anthropology; to Senegal and Ghana in order to see this work on the ground; to New York and living through 9/11, creating a need to focus on understanding terrorism and crisis, which took her to California for further studies; to Switzerland in order to go deeper in this field at the ETH Zurich Center for Security Studies; and back to the US.

Back to Detroit in fact, to be a part of a new community that looks to create spaces and rebuild the city in a new light, based to a large extent on the theoretical background and principles from her work at ETH. “ETH gave me a canvas, and they gave me the best paints in the world. And they said: “paint what you want.” And as a creative, in terms of thinking, writing, seeing, interpreting, analyzing, it gave me this license to dance across a couple of different domains that were all about our environment, and our interplay with our environment.”

In our second episode, Susan talks to Jennifer Giroux dialing in from Detroit, USA, about connecting the dots that led her back to her hometown, via ETH Zurich and beyond. Jennifer is a social research and strategy consultant focusing on the social impact space. She spent seven years at the ETH Zurich Center for Security Studies. She is an active member of the ETH Circle.

Please find more information on the ETH Circle network here.

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