Unseen - Podcast Episode with Rebekah O'Rourke

Experience: Our Ally at Work

One of the common challenges of working on issues of human rights, particularly when looking at ensuring supply chains are free of violations, is to understand the systems and contexts of human and social dynamics. Too often, ‘solutions’ and ‘responses’ to supply chain human rights risks are made with assumptions about how things are in other countries, cultures, and socio-political contexts. 

Taking systemic and socio-analytical approaches to the work of human rights and social protection is what brought Aarti Kapoor, our Executive Director, to setting up Embode in the first place. Her desire to continue to make an impact led her to explore how to work with the unseen or more systemic aspects of how humans function together. 

In this podcast, Aarti is in conversation with Rebekah O'Rourke in her Podcast series, Experience: Our Ally at Work. The whole series is teeming full of insightful and reflective conversations with people who have truly learnt from their experiences, providing key insights, challenges and most vulnerable moments on their journey. 

In this conversation, Aarti talks about unseen forces and factors in human rights work, giving the example of child labour projects she has worked on. Whilst it was recorded in the midst of global lockdowns, Aarti talks about the needs to be attended to before the work can be genuinely impactful. The capacity to name the unseen and unknown forces comes from Aarti’s years of experience in the field giving her the ability to speak with confidence on Embode’s unique edge in transforming issues of labour and human rights in supply chains.  

Throughout the episode, Aarti shares how her unique experience has shaped how she leads and approaches the very difficult aspects of human rights in our society now.

Listen to the full dialogue here.