User:Angelina Souren
Angelina Souren is an independent critical thinker, researcher, author, (bio)ethics explorer and wildlife advocate with a background in earth & life science.
Among other things, Souren is a former board member of the Environmental Chemistry (and Toxicology) Section of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society and a former associate editor of the US-based Geochemical Society's international newsletter.
She has written for (popular) science publishers, was on the editorial team of the Arcadis publication "Elements" and was a board and committee member for the NIMF foundation for women in science and technology in the Netherlands. NIMF stands for "Netwerk voor Informaticae, Mathematicae en Fysicae".
She has worked at and with the University of South Florida, the University of Southampton, the University of Plymouth, the University of Twente, VU University Amsterdam and several others.
She is one of Portsmouth's eleven graduates of "Taking the Lead", a national pilot for a "community leadership and effective democracy" initiative that was cut short by austerity. Earlier, Souren had briefly been on Portsmouth City Council's Environmental Forum until this this forum was discontinued. Other members included Lib Dem City Councillors Lynne Stagg and Darren Sanders.
Souren is also a former member of the South Hampshire Enterprise Agency business club (until it folded) and of the Amsterdam-American Business Club as well as of Toastmasters of the Hague.
She released the third edition of her book "We need to talk about this" in 2020, which addresses the new eugenics (a bioethics topics), as well as the first edition of "Is cruelty cool?", which explores how hate and cruelty come about through otherisation, usually as a result of inequality. She's also penned some flash fiction and two booklets about the topic of stalking.
Souren spent most of her adult life in Amsterdam, but has also lived in the US. Souren used to work in tourism and hospitality in Amsterdam, but quit her job in her twenties and enrolled as a full-time earth sciences student. She graduated with distinction from VU University Amsterdam, with an additional diploma for chemical oceanography research (REEs in the Southern Ocean), in conjunction with NIOZ, and two certificates from the Netherlands School for Journalism.
In 2004, Souren moved from Amsterdam to Southampton and later to Portsmouth in southern England. She became self-employed in 1997. She's also a company director.
Not considering herself an IT expert by any stretch of the imagination, she does still remember a little bit of programming (Unix, TurboPascal, Basic), which she learned in the 1980s. She has built computers from scratch as well as (large) websites, which she wrote in NotePad.
Souren was a member of the Green Party from May 2021 to May 2022. At the end of 2021, she briefly was a volunteer for the NHS in the Covid vaccination effort.
Souren is extremely eager to get out of Portsmouth and would love to move back to her beloved Florida.
The island town of Portsmouth has been documented as highly insular and is known for its hostility throughout the UK; it is also highly misogynistic. Portsmouth has an oppressive culture that resembles that of the ndrangheta; particularly older self-employed women who run businesses are not well tolerated in Portsmouth and seen as an insult to traditional masculinity. What may also play a role is that there is a great deal of deep poverty in Portsmouth and many people in Portsmouth not only have too much time on their hands, but also seem to feel disgruntlement when they see someone who is happy and able to support themselves, certainly if that person is a foreigner or a stranger.
In 2018, a Scottish business owner was driven out of Portsmouth too; he and his young family were subjected to their own version of Pizzagate. The Sunday Times wrote about it and called it a xenophobic campaign.