Locked away in the (Ivory) tower.
ASUW
Year 1: ASUW Senate Membership Coordinator
Within the first twenty days of college, I had joined ASUW Student Senate, ran for an open leadership position, and became a paid employee of ASUW. Though without this job, I wouldn't have been able to afford university costs, I regret jumping into the deep end of a large, bureaucratic organization so early in my college experience. I took on too much, too soon, and my mental health downturn halfway through fall quarter reflected this choice. Year 2: ASUW Senate Speaker
As the leader of the 120-member Student Senate, now held completely over Zoom, it was incredibly challenging to maintain impartiality in the face of overtly political resolutions brought by senators. During my time as Senate Speaker, I restructured the budget to include a live captioner and stipends for Senate committee chairs, and overhauled the parliamentary procedural rules to make them accessible to all members. Year 3: ASUW Director of University Affairs
Upon running for and winning the Board position of Director of University Affairs, I became the sole student in administrative committees and Faculty Senate councils. As this position is designed to overload one student representative to blunt the impact that they can have in any space, I chose a select few committees to throw myself into while assigning the rest out to other students. This proved effective, as I was instrumental in guaranteeing undergraduate student representation on Student Conduct review panels, founding the Undergraduate Transfer Student Advocacy Committee to advise the UW Undergraduate Academic Affairs department, and creating a subcommittee on the Faculty Council on Teaching Learning to explore accessible teaching modalities in classrooms. But this experience also proved that I care little of the approval or validation that often comes from the administration to students in these positions, making it a goal that the university power players would resent my presence in any room (while remaining respectful, of course). |
Experiential Learning Activity Reflection #1:
ASUW Director of University Affairs After a year and a half of online instruction, I was the first ASUW Director of University Affairs in nearly two years to operate in-person. This required a huge emotional and logistical adjustment-- from all students who work in ASUW. My central focuses this quarter were transfer student issues and the Student Conduct process. With the support from my colleagues, I steered the creation of the Undergraduate Transfer Student Advocacy Committee, a permanent student group that will research and recommend changes to university cultural and scholastic barriers facing transfer students. Since I am not a transfer student, it was imperative that I worked with the stakeholders from the transfer student community to ensure I was pursuing the pertinent and appropriate path. Students in ASUW are peddled as the movers and shakers on UW's campus regarding student issues, but this activity only reinforced that I could only access this role with my whiteness and maleness. Therefore, it is my duty to break down the elitist barriers that separate these student "leaders" from the students most affected by institutional marginalization. Transfer students, having experienced these barriers, must be prioritized and credited in the search for solutions, especially in a large institution like UW. In my application, I noted the necessity of coalition-building, and I found that to never be more true while navigating bureaucracy in the quest of systemic change. Regarding my focus on reforming the Student Conduct Process, I was intent on adding students to the university's conduct review process. The student conduct code is steeped in whiteness, penalizing students who "disrupt" classrooms but without consideration of what classifies disruption with white versus Black students. I found it imperative that the review panel that has oversight over all decisions and verdicts from the Student Conduct Office include undergraduate students. While the code allows for students to be part of the review panel, there has not been student representation for over five years. Upon hearing numerous non-white students express discontent with the handling of their conduct cases, I met with staff and administrators in the Office of Student Life and the Office of Student Conduct. Students will now soon sit on the review panel, providing an important perspective for the faculty and conduct officers who review student conduct cases. But this experience has only underscored the limitations of a hierarchical institutional; any carceral system, like the conduct process, will fail the most marginalized, namely Black people. Appointing students to a review panel is not the fix. The entire Student Conduct Code should be overhauled and replaced with an anti-racist restorative justice program-- a program that does not function by doling out sanctions and policing the university's Black students. Now having completed this activity, I have understood more than ever before the limits of institutional change and the investment of value in hierarchical and gate-kept organizations. True systemic change comes from the ground up, and our Western idea of leadership must be abolished. The movers and shakers in any institution are the most system-impacted students, those who will never be applauded in the university's newsletter or awarded from its coffers. The activity of Director of University Affairs will stay with me forever, but I must reorient my time and energy to grassroots causes to push for a more equitable and just University of Washington. |
Assignments, Chronologically
Winter 2021: Honors 231 Policy Brief
This particular Honors course, titled Making All the Difference: Disability, Gender, and Law, involved a final group project, arguably the worst type of assignment. But luckily, I was paired with three terrific disability justice advocates, who all wanted to research the limitations of disability services in universities. The flexibility of this assignment and the vitriol felt by myself and my peers toward the UW for its failures funding the Disability Resources for Students office (DRS) gave way for a marginally radical outcome. Our policy brief was used by the ASUW Student Disability Commission to lobby the Provost and the Office of Planning and Budgeting for increased funding for DRS and greater investment in universal design on our university's campus.
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Spring 2021: JSIS 202 Ethnography Project
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I have come to understand that the ability to explore radical subjects in introductory courses is substantially constrained. Throughout the 200-series JSIS courses, I felt frustrated by the limitations of content discussion. There was little time devoted to discussions of classism and its underlying presence in any proposed solution to an international rights issue. Growing up low-income, I detested NextDoor.com, which masqueraded as a neighborhood message board but quickly evolved into a proudly classist forum, where neighors would post pictures of individuals they profiled as homeless and complain of their existence. For my final project in JSIS 202, a class on ethnography, I chose to analyze the "Safety" section of NextDoor in which I found a citizen-run quasi-surveillance state that fostered vitriolic classism. It turned out to be one of my proudest final projects I completed in college.
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Spring 2022: CHID 485 Final Paper
CHID 485 was completely asynchronous, and as someone who does not do well with solely online learning, I found it difficult to connect with the material, even though I had been looking forward to taking a course called "Comparative Colonialism" since my first year.
The final exam was designed as a traditional essay, and I took the opportunity to explore the means to which the War on Terror decimated domestic labor rights. Rarely is the War on Terror analyzed through U.S. policy (rightly so, as its most violent effects were the West's neoimperial onslaught of the Middle East), but I felt empowered and enraged by what I found, a welcome experience that diverged from the usual numbness that comes from class assignments. |
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Fall 2022: Honors 392 Group Action Project
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One of the most difficult Honors classes to feel genuine engagement in discussions and course content was Honors 392: The Political Ecology of Death in the Anthropocene. It primary dealt with the question of our existential death as a species from climate change. I understand little about science, and my professor lived and breathed science, so her explanations to complex climate change-related questions went far over my head. My confidence in the class and receiving an adequate grade quickly evaporated, and I dreaded having to start on the final project--a quarter-long action project. But I did not realize that this is where I could finally dig my teeth into the course content! My group chose to investigate the UW Board of Regents' ties to corporations that are major global polluters.
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Winter 2023: French 303 Ad-Hoc Honors Project
For my Honors ad-hoc project, I chose to craft a comparative essay that analyzed how the French far-right's use Islamophobia to appeal to white queer supporters was akin to the British TERF movement's positioning of transgender identities as threats to cisgender feminism. This was a bold project, especially as I chose to write it in French, but the most challenging aspect proved to be the self-structured nature of an Honors ad-hoc project. Holding myself accountable to self-made deadlines was near impossible, and I resisted contacting my professor when I fell behind. This was a naïve choice, as my professor was both understanding and flexible with any hiccup that I came across, but I also recognized the nature of self-scheduling does not work for the type of learner that I am.
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Departmental Honors Thesis
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Expectedly, the most challenging piece of my college career was my departmental honors thesis in the Jackson School of International Studies. To measure the degree to which the Brazilian LGBTI rights movement marginalized transgender interests, I had originally conceived of conducting virtual interviews over Zoom with transgender organizers and activists from Brazil. But due to logistic challenges and too grand of expectations, I shifted my entire methodology less than a month before the deadline of the final copy. There were many conversations with my advisor in which I apologized over and over again for my disorganization and failure to recognize the constraints of my research design earlier. I am grateful that she not only reassured me that I should not be sorry but that she herself often gets caught in the crosshairs of underestimating the ambitious nature of research projects.
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This gave me great solace, and I was able to overcome my initial fears of disappointing my professors and advisors from who I so badly wanted respect. With my advisor, Prof. Godoy, I was able to restructure my thesis and collect and analyze new data within a tight timeframe. This, of course, was incredibly stressful, even with comforting advice, but I am proud of my finished product. I was able to dive deep into the theoretical research surrounding LGBTI rights frameworks and their failures to prioritize transgender interests among the other cisgender identities in the LGBTI community.