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Changing Our Story 6 Week Project Proposal
Significance of the Issue: While there are many Asian students, international and from the US, we have noticed that there aren’t very many students who identify as Asian American. We want to bring attention to this minority at Bryn Mawr and examine the individual struggles that are associated with being caught in between Asian and American culture.
For my project, I would like to study the contact zones among people who identify as minorities. There are clashes between people of different races, genders, and sexualities; I would like to connect the groups in this contact zone. To do this, I will record the responses of people who face discrimination and struggles for different reasons - race, religion, gender, sexuality - and note how their health is affected by this. In my health psychology class, we looked at the health effects of stress. Excessive stress can damage the immune system over time and make someone more susceptible to infection and viruses; however, this depends on their appraisal of stress.
Bryn Mawr College is a diverse, multinational, historically all women’s institution that is the home to hundreds of dynamic individuals. The school proclaims its liberal ideals and presents students with the tools to form a moral conscience as well as values of respect and sister/brotherhood among its members. During the previous month, these open-minded and compassionate goals have, for the most part, held true, but the divides in race, sexuality, and nationality, unfortunately, have not been completely eradicated.
Morine: I am one of the international students in Bryn Mawr College. I hail from Kenya, in the Eastern part of Africa. For the few weeks I have been here, I have been mesmerised by the diverse international community in the college. What struck me the most was the history of the college from the ‘Black at Bryn Mawr’ digital tour prepared by Emma Kioko and Grace Pusey; about the white supremacy vision during the foundation of the college and admission of students from solely affluent backgrounds.
For my project, I wish to explore the contact zone of multicultural students: specifically, Asian Americans. In this class, we talked a lot about contact zones and contact zones in various different forms and perspectives. As a multicultural or multiracial student, you are constantly put into a contact zone of conflicting and clashing cultures that you have to accept. In this project, I want to explore different experiences of different multicultural Bryn Mawr students. Last weekend, I went to the ASA: work in translation performance, and many Bryn Mawr students shared their different experiences of living through this lens of being Asian American.
We would like to focus on the way the health center treats LGBTQIA+ students at Bryn Mawr College. We want to do further research on the purpose of the health center, and the kind of things that they can and cannot do when it comes to dealing with student health on campus. We specifically want to focus on sexual health and the treatment of students here that may identify with different genders. We also plan on interviewing people from the health center and people of the LGBTQIA+ community, specifically transgender students.
First off, I'm sorry for this post taking so long. I hope my lateness doesn't discredit my appreciation for the trip and presence in the museum.
Today in Anne's class, I talked a little bit about my love project in reference to our discussion on Getting Mother's Body. I apologize for how scattered my thoughts were- it's something I've thought and talked a lot about over the past 4.5 years, but it's been a while since I've introduced it.
After our discussion of drama vs. prose today, I thought yall might find this (very short!) piece interesting. It's called "On Reading Plays" and is in the print version of a play called Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar
For our project, we wish to expand our contact zones by exploring what it means to attend a women's college without identifying as a woman. This includes both transgender and gender nonconforming students at historically women’s colleges. We would like to look at the history of transgender and non conforming students at Bryn Mawr and other women’s colleges, and develop a timeline of milestones such as policy changes and student movements at these institutions to trace the extent of the history regarding this topic.