Elsa Cornejo's Profile
Elsa is from El Salvador but has lived in Australia for over 20 years. Her own experience of being persecuted at war and entering Australia as a refugee child have given her a deep understanding and a passion for Social justice and pursuit of human rights. For the last 8 years the central focus of her work has been in the areas of theology, social justice, social change education, global development, and empowerment, education for critical consciousness and spiritual direction for marginalised communities.
Elsa has lived and worked in Guatemala, India and Italy and has been involved with missionary work for the last seven years. In 2001 to 2004 she worked in Guatemala City as a Youth Ministry Leader and developed training courses in faith and social justice for youth groups leaders in parishes, arranged major events like concerts, fund raising, artistic expression, outings and annual retreats. In the meantime she was also working as a teacher’s assistant at a Kindergarten ran by the sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition. Elsa worked directly with children from low socio-economic backgrounds and living in urban slums. Apart from working with the children, she was responsible for visiting the homes and families of the children so as to gain an understanding of each child. In 2003 she also managed an outreach food program in San Geronimo, a distant rural community in Guatemala. She was responsible for overseeing the proper distribution of food to be cooked daily, ensured clean standards in the kitchen and sanitary conditions for the children, worked directly with the mothers (a group of indigenous Maya women) in the areas of empowerment, family relationships, child development and basic education.
Elsa worked in India in 2007 as a Personal Development Coordinator, developing workshops, retreats, providing spiritual direction and teaching English to young women in rural, marginalised communities. Given that she speaks English, Spanish, Italian and French, she has worked in Italy as a translator although admits that her Italian and French are rapidly becoming extinct from lack of practice.
In December 2007, Elsa graduated from the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle with a BA, with First Class Honours in Theology and Social Justice. Her Honours thesis and project work involved analysing empowerment models from cross-disciplinary perspectives. This included examining how the term - and its root concept, power - has been understood by young people in Guatemala City. She adopted a multi-method, qualitative research approach, using photography and voice. This ‘photovoice’ approach allowed the narratives and lived experiences of the young people to be explored and analysed. This generated an understanding of how models of empowerment may be understood in the social, political and cultural context of young people in Guatemala City. Elsa then organised a public photo exhibition at the University of Notre Dame Australia as a means of raising people’s awareness of the situation in Guatemala.
In 2008, Elsa commenced a PhD in human rights at the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University. Her PhD seeks to gain a deeper understanding of contextualised models of empowerment, and how these may be understood from the perspective of returned trafficked women in the Philippines. Elsa hopes to travel and live in the Philippines in 2009, and develop a visual ethnography of women who live with social stigma and ailments such as HIV/AIDS.
For fun, Elsa enjoys meeting new people, of different backgrounds and cultures. A couple of years ago she decided it was important to take a photo of that which inspired her the most each day, and she spends her free time doing creative journaling and photography. She loves travelling, understanding new cultures and trying new and exotic foods. She enjoys reading a good book, although she admits that her own study does not allow her to read anything other than academic books and journals. On the weekends she loves to go out walking or going for a long jog by a lake.
