Occupation: Graduate
University: Tufts University
Organizations: JVP-DC, DC for Palestine
Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-saviano/
Katie Saviano is an activist dedicated to advocating for gender justice and the rights of all Palestinians, immigrants, and refugees.
Katie is a graduate of Tufts University, where she studied Arabic and International Relations. Her academic work includes a semester studying at the University of Jordan as well as various decolonial research projects on the Historical and Contemporary Repression of Sephardim in Israel, Gentrification Analysis in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and eight months of research on civil society and youth movements in Tunisia.
An active member of the Tufts chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, she was involved in the successful Tufts University senate resolution pushing for the divestment from four multinational corporations that profit off of the occupation.
As a staff writer for the Tufts Observer, Katie cares deeply about investigative journalism, and her published writing includes “Forced Migration in the 21st Century,” “Apolitical Erasure,” and “The True Cost of Off-Campus Housing.”
During her senior year, she was a founding member of Tufts Student Action (TSA), a student group devoted to building student power to fight for racial, economic, and gender justice. TSA was created to fill a void at Tufts — to bring together disparate student activist groups, centralize resources, and create a unified platform for student campaigns, specifically a Halt the Hike Campaign, demanding an end to tuition hikes without justification or explanation, and calling for transparency, accessibility, and accountability from Tufts University.
Katie is currently based in Washington D.C.
“Going forward, there can no longer be spaces at Tufts where students can decide that combating systems of oppression do not apply to them.”