Lani Both is an Indonesian scholar who completed her master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in 2024. She currently serves as a Research Fellow in community-engaged, trauma-informed research at UT to meet ongoing and urgent needs in Uvalde following the tragedy on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary. Previously, she worked at an NGO focusing on human trafficking, where she was involved in program development, monitoring, welfare visits, and victim repatriations. This professional experience inspired her to look critically at the complexity of human trafficking, power, gendered violence, and exploitation that is context-specific. Following her professional experience, her research investigates the entanglement of gendered violence in the context of human trafficking in the present day, looking closely at how systemic inequalities contribute to the prevalence of trafficking among domestic workers in her home province, East Nusa Tenggara.
Her undergraduate degree in education from Universitas Nusa Cendana (Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia) has enabled her to gain hands-on experience with children and youth in her hometown in Indonesia. She envisions a world where every kid and youth in her province has the same access to good quality education. She is convinced that removing the barriers and promoting access to good quality education can help reduce the condition of risk to issues such as human trafficking. Her recent writing is featured in the anthology Mosaico Feminista (Feminist Mosaic), contributing to ongoing conversations about gender, power, and human rights. Lani’s work aims to bridge academic research and real-world advocacy, creating meaningful change on both local and global levels.