Jessica (Ika) Trijsburg

Jessica (Ika) Trijsburg is Research Fellow in City Diplomacy at the Melbourne Centre for
Cities, working on the Shared Pathways to CoP28 project which focuses on capacity building
for city diplomacy in the global governance of climate and sustainability. Jessica is currently
completing her PhD at Monash Sustainable Development Institute, investigating the role of
diversity of decision-makers in local climate change resilience.
Previously, Ika was awarded a Rotary Peace Fellowship to undertake graduate study at
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University in 2011-13 and worked
alongside her studies assisting research of Muslim organisations in Indonesia (UNC,
Anthropology); and on the A World in Motion: Migration and Development Research Project
at Maastricht Graduate School of Governance. She is passionate about participatory and
authentically inclusive research and praxis – moving diverse voices from the margins to the
centre in decision-making.
Outside of academia, Ika has over a decade of experience in local government, refugee and
migrant health and intercultural education. She worked for a number of years with vast
networks of organisations advancing Muslim-Christian dialogue in Indonesia and Australia,
and convened the Uniting through Faith project and Schoolies with a Cause program. She
has partnered with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through reconciliation
and self-determination programs. During her Rotary Peace Fellowship she developed the
first iteration of the Brining Peace Home program, learning from the experiences of Fellows
from conflict and post-conflict contexts. All of these experiences and many more have
informed Ika’s contribution to public policy and programming, and led to her selection for
two international working groups of the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities Program:
Social Impact Evaluation (Lublin, Poland 2019); and Anti-Muslim Hatred (Barcelona, 2018).
She is currently on the executive of the Victorian Refugee Health Network, and an
ambassador for Get a Grip of the Grind and the Institute for Economics and Peace.