 Welcome everybody to Celebrate Learning Week, we do too. This is UBC's Respect Magazine Power Place session with a panel. I'm your moderator today, Barbara Komosh. I'm an Ed consultant in the Center for Teaching and Learning. You're in an Okanagan campus and you will be hearing from many people today, the Respect Magazine team with Anita Chudhury and Richma Chunidas. They're the wonderful faculty mentors for the Respect Magazine and Ximena and Nancy will are here with us today. Elisa is not here, but there are the amazing editorial staff of this magazine. I'd like to welcome you wherever you are. This session is focused on the Power Place and all the different perspectives of the students in the issue as well as the ones that could be here today. You'll hear from them. And so be thinking about where you are, where you're located. I'm joining you from the traditional ancestral and city territory of the Silhokanagan peoples, whether you are an important great campus on the territory of the Musqueam people or elsewhere. Be thinking about the power of your place and acknowledging where you are. Before we continue, I'd like to say that I'm very excited for this day. It has been since November of last year when I met these wonderful students at the Isoto Conference, which is the International Society of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning that was held in November here in Kelowna. And I just happened to go to their session because I know Anita, I know Rishma and I was just blown away about this magazine and the students. And we had already been planning our Celebrate Learning Week theme. Knew it was gonna be the power of place and I proposed to them how about having an issue focused on the power of place. And then you can have a panel and I just went crazy and they humored me and they went with it. And I'm just so excited and so honored. And I can't wait to hear from everybody. So without further ado, let's get started and I'll turn it over to Rishma. That today and moderating this session. My name is Rishma Chedas. I use gender pronouns, she, her and I'm an assistant professor of teaching in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia on the Okanagan campus. In the next 90 minutes, our team is gonna tell you about our interdisciplinary scholarship of teaching and learning projects, how we got started and how much we've grown. Students as partners will share their reflections on the value of this digital venue and its impact on the community. They're gonna share their advice on how to effectively run the magazine as well as share about some of our past and our present issues. We'll end with a panel discussion on power place with some of our very own contributors today. And at the end there'll be a chance where you can ask them questions. Next slide please. At the University of British Columbia, we are working to build a community in which human rights are respected and equity and inclusion are embedded in all areas of academia, working, learning and campus life. UBC has a strategic plan and the purpose is to pursue excellence in research, learning and engagement to foster global citizenship across British Columbia and the world. The plan values academic freedom, as scholars freedom to address ideas through respectful discourse and the pursuit of open discussion without risk of censure. We have many reports and recommendations and resources such as the Indigenous Strategic Plan, the Inclusion Action Plan and the Anti-Racism Inclusive Excellence Report that guides our work. With the desire to enhance the equity work that's happening at UBC, two professors teaching from different faculties were awarded with an equity enhancement fund in 2021 to pilot this project. This fund supports community-based initiatives that enhance equity, diversity and inclusion at UBC. And more recently, we've been successful to secure the Experience UBCO Access Excellence Fund to continue this important work over the next two years. And this fund supports faculty and staff in developing new initiatives aimed at increasing access and participation in post-secondary education for underrepresented and equity-deserving students. It is my pleasure to introduce the Respect Magazine that promotes student engagement on EDI, anti-racism, anti-oppression, anti-abolism and social justice. The team has paid particular attention to all aspects of this initiative. Let's just start off with the acronym Respect. It stands for a representation and equity in systemic practices to effect change today. I'd just like to draw your attention to the Respect logo on the right-hand side of the screen. The word Respect and the logo was designed by Nancy, one of our student coordinators. She created this visual identity of the magazine to convey a deeper meaning of EDI and show people what we wanna achieve with this project. As you can see, the letters in the word Respect are joined, show togetherness. She describes the need to be respectful and be aware of our surroundings. So the letters S and T in the middle, they come together and it makes an image of a heart. She uses the image of holding hands to deliver a message of caring, hope and collaboration. EDI is not an individual issue. We must work together to make change. As digital citizens, students should have the ability to access, use, understand and engage with digital technologies and the internet to participate in society and politics when applying critical thinking. We know students have thoughts and experiences with inequity and oppression, and they need a safe platform to share their knowledge and experiences. Together, this multidisciplinary team created a student-focused and student-run e-magazine for students on both campuses to discuss EDI, share perspectives on inclusiveness of their learning experiences and build community engagement. I'm now gonna pass it on to Anita, who's gonna tell you more about the underpinnings of our project. Thanks, Reshma. So here we are talking about the respect magazine and the planning or the proposed objective behind the magazine. I wanted to start there. So the respect magazine hopes to prepare UBC students to run a publication. It is a venue for applying knowledge of communication and rhetoric, as well as to participate in the institution's strategic commitments such as the inclusive practice that Reshma talked about and share there, and I quote, from the IAP, goal four, share their perspectives on the inclusiveness of their learning experiences and build community engagement. To achieve this objective, we continue to present ourselves in different venues and utilize institutional outreach channels to show why we are interested in this work and how we are doing it. So this screen that you see with the team photograph is an example of such a publication, such an outreach effort. So far, we have had representation from graduate and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines in the published texts and these, from a pedagogical perspective, are examples of learning opportunities in EDI that can inform course learning goals towards, for instance, researching community needs and sharing cross-cultural experiences. In the next slide, I briefly outlined some other ways in which this EDI magazine promotes student engagement. Interdisciplinarity is one of the first outcomes that we recognize that we hoped for with students writing that engages with equity, inclusivity and identity in the current issues conceptualization of the power of place. The next one is, of course, related to the agenda of social justice. So student publications themselves support this agenda of social justice and have, as researchers have noted, this strengthen the concept understanding of diversity by offering their own voice, making it available to the community, sharing their multiple disciplinary knowledge, the learning that's happening in the classroom, as well as their own personal lived experiences, we bring it all together in the publication. And then, of course, we recognize the magazine much like Williams wrote in 2014 as a third space. And the third space is very much a zone of negotiation because it is outside the classroom where the instruction from the professors have happened. And students have worked on assignments, thought red, done a lot of academic work, but when they come out of that classroom, there's a lot more of thinking that happens, a lot more of engagement that happens. And we are trying to capture that piece of the puzzle. How do people engage? What are they thinking about? How do they connect knowledge to real-world issues that they see? And how do these individual identities as a result of this negotiation, shift, change, and lead to transformation and improved practice, even in teaching and learning, of course, in individual spaces. And finally, of course, this magazine is a real example of students as partners. We have team members who are critically involved in every aspect of the magazine planning. Rishma talked about Nancy's logo there. The name of the magazine itself was something that came from the students. We brainstormed about how the partnership can work, how the partnership needs to operate, the framework we need to build together, and what are the different roles that people are interested in. So when, for instance, Jimena takes up the role as a social media coordinator, which she'll be speaking to later, it is interesting to see how individual interests come up or we become aware of each other's interests, maybe even professional interests. Who knows where our students will end up, but creating this opportunity of varied experiences was crucial for us when imagining this project come together. So with that in mind, I'm gonna pass it on to one of our project coordinators. And we'll talk about the team and the different roles. Go with you, Mena. Well, hello. My name is Simena Gayo. I use gender pronouns to her. I am a psychology major and cultural studies minor in the arts and social sciences faculty at UBC Okanagan. I'm so excited to be here. So to continue on the discussion of students as partners, I wanted to start, and I thought it would be very important to start with the introduction of our team. Our amazing team. First, we have Elise Machalo. She's our project coordinator. Unfortunately, she could not be here today, but she's such a key factor in our team. I always joke about this, and I say this to everyone, but she's kind of the glue that keeps our team organized. We all have very different roles and lots of work to do each week. Elise is the one in charge of just bringing all of them together and make sure they're blending properly and that we can actually see the results. She's in charge of our weekly meetings and just keeping us in line and updated with everything that needs to be done and happening in the upcoming weeks. Then we have Nancy. She's our peer editor, as Richma mentioned. She created our beautiful, beautiful logo. She's also the one in charge of the creation of informative posters about each of our issues, but mainly she's also in charge of the editorial team. She's the one that brings an editorial team onto the table and makes sure that the whole editorial process, that is a key factor of the whole publication process, is going according to plan and it's going smoothly and appropriately. And finally, well, that's me. My name is Simena. I am the marketing and social media manager. My job is to connect with people. Our magazine is one that drives on interconnectivity, both online and offline. We're always trying to make connections and that is what I do every day of every week. I'm in charge of the official email for a magazine. I was in charge of the creation and the constant maintenance of our social media account and just keep our community updated on whatever is happening, upcoming events, upcoming issues, new topics, new deadlines and whatever that needs to be shared. Having that in mind, this is a little timeline, a publication timeline. So you guys can understand what goes behind the scenes in our magazine every time we work on a new issue. This particular timeline starts with the creation of our magazine. Big event, Dr. Shalady and Rishma brought all of us three students together and we needed to decide what we wanted the magazine to be, what we wanted the magazine to show, to represent and to look like formatting wise. Once we had that in mind, we created the name and then C designed our beautiful logo. We made sure to obtain the Creative Commons licensing. So we knew that everyone was in order, according to the rules and that our logo and everything that we really valued was safe from copyright and that we were doing it the appropriate way. After all of this, Nancy and Dr. Shalady with the help of Rishma, Elise and me created the submission guidelines. This was a key part because that is when we needed to decide what type of submissions we wanted to receive from students and what guidelines we would be giving them to follow. These guidelines not necessarily focus on formatting because our main goal is to keep the formatting aspect as general and as free as possible. We just want students to let their imaginations run wild. We want them to create wherever they think needs to be created for our specific topic. Talking about topic, we need to come up with different topics for each of our issues. For example, the first issue topic was what is equity? It is a very detailed topic, but it was also very general. We want to give students a specific thing they should focus on creating their submissions, but we also, again, want to give them as much freedom, creative freedom as possible so they can just create whatever needs to be created. Our second topic was fostering inclusivity and our latest one has been power places. Barbara mentioned with this one, we were trying to incentivize students to reflect on their positionality, where they come from, where they grew up, where they're currently at and how they believe these places have shaped the way that they think about EDI topics about equity, diversity and inclusion and how their ideas have been shaped by these places. Having decided our topic, that is where I jumped into work. We have to create a marketing plan. As an example, for this latest issue, our marketing plan consisted of four separate activities. First of all, I was in charge of the creation of several posts for our social media to announce the topic, announce the deadlines. I shared Nancy's poster, talking about posters. The second thing we did was printing around 50 of those amazing posters and just put them up all over campus for students to see so that we would have as much exposure as possible. Then it was my job to contact faculty members, professors, teaching assistants and just faculty members so that they could also help us promote our magazine within their networks with their students and just giving them the opportunity to be aware that this was happening and maybe partaking in it. This was a big thing. We noticed that there was big, big effects in this and Barbara was also a great, great support in this with the creation of networks with the Vancouver campus, which was a great challenge for us, have any mind that we're all from the Okanagan campus, but that went amazing. And the last one was we held a couple of booths on campus. We just set up a table, we brought some snacks, we brought some posters and we were just seeing them for a couple hours waiting for students to come up and ask us about what we were getting, what was going on and just inform them as much as possible. After this marketing plan is set and put into motion, we start receiving submissions, which is always putting a smile on our faces. Once the deadline has been reached, we especially Nancy, because this is part of her role, come up with an editorial team. Our editorial teams are usually formed by voluntary students. Just students around campus volunteer, they wanna be part of our team for maybe a short amount of time. And yeah, they come together, we share the submissions with them and we go through each and every one of the submissions. We make sure that grammatically everything is okay. There are no controversial or offensive opinions or things being said that the topic has been respected and that everything is just clear. We decided we needed volunteer students so we could have a very unbiased editorial process. We did not want it to be everything standard on our team because we all have very specific concept of what we were expecting for our magazine. We were also trying to bring onto the table different perspectives that would allow us to just be as unbiased as possible when reviewing this works. After we have reviewed all of these works, we have the specific edits and comments that need to be made. We send them back to the contributors because we want to have them as involved as possible. We need their consent and we need their approval for this edits or maybe in most cases, they offer us alternative changes. Things that we maybe did not think of and they realized, hey, this makes more sense. How about we do this instead? So after we received all of this consent and all of this edits are properly done, the comments have been respected. We can finally, finally get to publishing and that is what at least helps us with doing. She's always in charge of just the formatting of the website and it's such a great help. So this is a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes and just to finish this little section, I wanted to share with you a tiny bit of what my job is. This is the Instagram account for the magazine. This is what you would see once you log in. We will share the QR code at the end of the meeting so you can access through the Instagram account. We will also share the link to the blog so you can go ahead and read it. But yeah, we have introductory posts. We have Nancy's amazing posters with all the details necessary to know what to submit. We have some support posts. We noticed we received a lot of students that didn't know what to write about but they really wanted to submit something. They maybe didn't have, they didn't have many ideas. So we wanted to support them as much as possible and just some promotional contents such as the feature that we had in the Phoenix News, the official UBCO newspaper. So this is our Instagram account. Now I will pass it on to Nancy so she can talk about publications and our issues. Hello, everyone. I'm Nancy, I'm a third year student majoring in psychology and minor in biology. So my journey with Respect Maxing started with this logo that I designed like what Rishma just said, the symbol of respect reflects the power of collaboration when it comes to EDI related issues. And Respect Maxing is an easy access, open resources for everyone to talk about or even provide solutions to EDI related issues. So we have created a wide range of submission styles for students from different disciplines. So far we have received articles, videos, fictions, poems, artworks and interviews from various student population. So here is like a screenshot of our website. Next slide please. So we start our first issue with the question what does ACT-T mean to you? So there are many concepts related to ACT-T like equality, fairness, justice but everyone has their own understanding of what ACT-T means to them. So we invite our students to express their unique perspectives on the topic of ACT-T. And here are some submission examples from our contributors. The first one we have an author who wrote her life story and put her understanding of EDI into fictions. And here's one of her quotes. ACT-T is definitely one of those slippery questions for me that I feel I will be chasing for a long time. As a brown queer woman and daughter of immigrants I learned pretty quick that my position at the starting line was never going to be the same as my peers. And we also have a graduate student who use her research to focus on the ethical concerns of hospitality studies and migration ethics with the perspective of ACT-T. And we also have an author who is completing a master degree in interdisciplinary studies and is seeking to use her research to contribute to the uncovered part of digital humanities. She used her research to highlight inequalities of representation, for example, under representation of women and power negotiation between humans and natural world. And last, we have an international student who came across the concept of EDI, ACT-T for the first time in their economy class. And as he quoted like to him, ACT-T on campus means giving equal opportunities to students to explore their academic and non-academic interests. Next slide, please. So we decided to continue our topic of ACT-T and we moved to our second issue about how we can promote ACT-T by fostering inclusivity. So as an international student, I know how hard the life transition could be. So I conduct an interview with a student club with psychology, which focused on mental health, especially for international students. And they have this club for both campuses, Vancouver and Okanagan. So we invited, we also invited DCR, DRC to talk about how their center and program can help students when they need some extra support. And here we have an undergraduate student whose research focuses on feminism, indigenous matters and disability studies. In her submission, she hopes to bring awareness of indigenous women's reproductive rights and justice. And after met with Barbara and Isado, we decided to use, we decided to collaborate with Celebrity Learning Week and use the theme power place as our topic issue. So to learn about individuals' understanding of power place in respect to ACT-T diversity and inclusion in different perspectives. And we're so glad to have our amazing contributors to join us today. And I will pass to them to talk about their understanding of power place. So we're gonna have our first panelist, Martin. Martin, would you like to introduce yourself and your submissions to us? Sure, thank you Nancy. Hi everyone, my name is Martin and I'm an MA student in Human Development, Learning and Culture Program at the Faculty of Education at UBC Vancouver. My pronouns are he, him and before I continue, I just want to let you know that I'm under, I'm not feeling great today so please bear with me if I need like a sip of water or a quick pause, but I'm here. So as part of this process, actually my text was part of a final assignment in one of my grad courses in the Faculty of Education. And as part of this final assignment, we had to come up with an op-ed discussing and exploring a theme that was interesting and attractive to us throughout the term. And one of the topics that I decided to focus on was on weird samples and I would get a little bit more detail about that soon and trying to explore some of the implications, the assumptions and the effects of sampling in research, especially for us to understand human development, human cognition and emotions. So as part of this assignment, we also had to submit our final op-ed to a magazine, a newspaper or like a blog that made sense for the target audience and for the chosen topic. So I started exploring some possibilities and found about Respect Magazine and I think that it was like the perfect match and I decided to submit it there and share some ideas about this text. So basically my op-ed focuses on graduate schools, how these are weird, powerful places for inclusive research practices and the idea behind this first of all to explore how in Henryx and colleagues, 2010 article was keen to understand more about these weird samples or those of you that haven't heard about weird samples, it basically stands for societies that are Western educated industrialized, rich and democratic, which is of course the majority of samples and societies that we end up using psychology, education and social sciences, which of course is great to a certain extent because at the end of the day, we have not a super precise or rigorous understanding of humanity and of diversity, but we are just focusing on the outlier, right? If we think about it in terms of like the entire humanity and the characteristics of these different groups of participants. So after thinking about this, I decided to discuss in these op-ed how findings were not really representative of humanity and how 13 years later after the publication of this seminal article, graduate schools still continue to design, conduct and publish research focusing mainly on weird samples and societies and how despite the growing awareness and diversification of these samples, still most publications focus just on weird samples. So of course, after reflecting on these, I also decided to discuss a little bit about the use of these binary dichotomies when categorizing some populations and to what extent these acronyms such as weird, non-weird or global north and global south at the end of the day are useful and relevant for us to understand who we are, our behaviors, our emotions and our cognitions, but also to understand implications in terms of practice, in terms of policy, in terms of research and understanding of human behavior. And at the end of the day, I also decided to explore how these not only impacts research, but also graded students' future orientation in academia, their academic identity and their future practice when trying to promote inclusive and transparent research. So of course, as you can see, I was focusing on my experience in graduate school, but at the same time, on the experience of other future graded students and how graduate school, especially at UBC, for instance, can be these weird powerful places for inclusive research practices. And of course, I do acknowledge that this is not an easy task. Even the text that I submitted, I recognize and acknowledge how I continuously try, but often fail to conduct research beyond these traditional samples. And even though we all sometimes have this desire at the end of the day, there are issues in terms of logistics, in terms of funding, in terms of accessibility samples that sometimes create these barriers and challenges in this diversification of participants. I also wanted to highlight how at the end of the day, this is not only a matter of the researchers or the graded students, but at the same time, how like structural and system changes in grad schools are still needed throughout. And of course, this implies that it is not only students' responsibilities or faculty's responsibilities, but it is more complex and bigger picture that we should all try to put more effort in. And at the end of the article, I decided to share some specific recommendations that could be useful for all graduate students conducting research. So to summarize, first of all, I share how it is important to recruit samples which are best suited for research, for the research goal and the research purpose regardless of whether these are weird or not. At the same time, I do encourage students to openly share detailed information about participants' characteristics, even when it is not formally requested by the publication or the journal or the actual place or the outputs. And I also encourage all students to regularly examine their own assumptions and expectations in terms of who they are as researchers, where they're coming from, whether it's a matter of place or a matter of background. And finally, I also encourage students and graduate schools to fund research collaborations and partnerships between grad students, between non-weird colleagues and participants who are usually not welcomed or fully embraced in academia. And hopefully, although this journey will be long and tedious, my hope is that at the end of the day, grad schools have the power to evolve into powerful places for inclusive research practices and allow us to get a better understanding of who we are as humans in terms of behavior, expectations, and emotions, especially in the fields of education. Thanks. Thank you, Martin. Next, we have Adashi Gupta. Hi, thank you. I'm very happy to be here and thank you for the introduction of the magazine. I knew about it a little bit, but getting to know it even more closely has been amazing and thank you. And I'm very honored to be published in it and to be on this panel. So thank you so much. Okay, so I am Adishi. I am a graduate student in the Faculty of Education at UBC Vancouver. I am also doing my MA in Human Development Learning and Culture. I'm currently in the process of working on my thesis, which deals with social emotional learning from a critical race theory perspective. This, the story, I will just go a little bit into how I came to this article or how I came to write this and how I came to send it to Respect. It's actually a little bit of a funny story, but then I saw the call that Respect magazine had. I saw it a day before their first original deadline, and I thought, hmm, okay, so I don't think I can do it in the day, but I think about it because I was very intrigued by the topic, which was Power of Place. And it just stuck with me. I saw it for the first time, and then I kept coming back to it, and I was like, there is something there, but I don't know what it is that's speaking to me. And interestingly enough, very coincidentally, Martin, who was also a dear friend, texted me and we were talking about it, and he was like, I'm thinking of submitting my article, and I was like, oh, I was also just thinking about that, so that's great. And he was like, yeah, just do it, just do it. And before this whole issue, or before this prompt that I saw, I had been going through a little bit of a writer's block, but this topic, again, kept gnawing at me, and I was like, I need to get something out. And I had written briefly about my housing struggles as an international student coming to Vancouver. It's going to be about two years in a few months that I came here. I had not lived anywhere apart from my parents' house in New Delhi before coming here. And as a graduate student with no family around or no support network here, I was very confused about how to navigate renting, not just in terms of cost, but also in terms of just taking up space, which is what I realized was attracting me to this topic, that like what, how do we think of spaces and places? Why is this topic about power of place and not about space? And that's how I started like joining the dots in just the narrative that was forming in my head about housing, about my housing struggles, about finding housing, but also not finding, not being able to take up space in a house that you call your own or that you pay rent for, that you'll co-occupy with others. And that just got me to reflect on my position as a woman, as a racialized woman now in Canada, and just how it has been very difficult for me to take up space and how that has been a constant conversation I've had with my female friends over the years, just how constantly we feel like we need to apologize for things that we didn't even do wrong, how we just sitch in a certain way so we are not taking up too much space and how all of that translates into spaces that we occupy, including housing, but also the teaching and learning spaces and universities. So that's a little bit about my submission and I hope that you will be intrigued to read it. I think you'll have a good time. Thank you. Thank you, Adishi. Yeah, we are absolutely in love with every single one of the submissions that we've received. Please, harness. Hi, everyone. My name is Nazca Gerwell and my pronouns are she, her. And I'm coming to you from the beautiful and traditional and unceded lands of the silk Okanagan people. Before I start talking about my project, I do want to just express my gratitude to be able to work and play on these lands. I'm a graduate student in my first year of the foundational clinical social work program here at UBCO. I actually completed my undergrads in sciences with a hope to go off to medical school, but very quickly realized that my passions lie elsewhere and also did not want to do 10 plus years of schooling. So I very quickly shifted fields into another area. So after graduating, I worked at the Canadian Mental Health Association here in Vernon where I had various different roles such as youth programs coordinator. And that's when I really discovered the field of social work and fell in love with it. So during my first year, there was a lot of emphasis put on the need for evidence-based practice and how that is the golden standard that we should adhere our practices to. But I started to question the applicability of it. I started to question the demographics being used to measure these evidence-based practices. And I love your acronym, Martine, weird. I love that. I'm stealing that just so you know. But evidence-based practice to me is applicable for sure in certain fields and areas of practice, but I found it to be more Eurocentric. And the voices and knowledge of indigenous and other marginalized populations was missing. The voices of the participants was missing. The stories that they had, the knowledge that they held was never really shared in the research that we were being taught about. So when an opportunity rose in social work 514 with Dr. Rochelle Hall to conduct a creative project which was talking about diversity and social justice and inclusivity, I knew I needed to jump on that right away. And that's actually how my project Jada Cup with her NASCARGAR well came to be. So Jada Cup translates into a cup of tea in Punjabi. And many have asked me why this cup of tea, why is tea so important and central to the project? And really it's because for some cultures, tea is a form of healing. It's a form of medicine. And for other cultures, it's a form of socialization. So it also provides that kind of warmth and comfort that we seek. And I knew that the conversations that I was going into were tough ones. They were not lighthearted by any means. And so I thought, why not have a cup of tea with the participants to create that sense of safety, to create that sense of comfort for them to be able to speak on whatever topic that they wanted to speak on. And the project is actually a dedication to my mom, which you will see the beautiful young lady in the slideshow over there. That's her graduation photo. And it was just a dedication for all the times that her and I have had a cup of tea together where she shared her stories about being a South Asian woman in Canada. So this project was initially intended to provide a platform for South Asian women, a population that is often silenced within their own community, but also by larger society. And to provide a place for them to be able to speak their truth. I conducted interviews with different generations of South Asian women ranging from 18 to 80 years old, who came from all different parts of Canada to talk about their experiences immigrating to Canada or being born in Canada. The conversations focused on experiences with racism, discrimination, the integration of their South Asian culture with the kind of larger, dominate Canadian ideologies. And then we ended off with a positive note talking about the importance of allyship, how one can be an ally for the South Asian community, how we can start addressing racism in Canada and also messages of hope for the future generation. So from that, I created a list of recommendations for mental health care providers and other health providers on how to support South Asian individuals as well. I actually chose to submit the project for the Respect Magazine for two reasons. One was because of a really big supporter of mine who was RTA in Social Work 514 Robin. And two, to really help amplify the voices of the women in this project. The power of place actually fit perfectly because many of the participants talked about not only the physical space, but also the societal spaces that were created and how that influenced their identity, how that influenced the ways that they engage with people and how the power of place can be seen as both a place of freedom, but also a place of constraint. And I thought this would be a one-off project to be completely honest with you. But after graduating, I really want to expand this platform and have more conversations with other equity seeking populations and also other marginalized populations in the country as well. Thank you. Thank you, Anas. Now we have Jeremy Mandy. Hello, everyone. I hope my microphone works well. My name is Jeremy Mandy. I am an undergraduate student at University of British Columbia, the Okanagan campus. My pronouns are he, him. And I'd just like to take you through my submission for the Respect Magazine. So my submission, essentially the core ethos of it lies between the self-reflection necessary to recognize your place or your positionality. And this coincided pretty well with actually a club that I've met two other students have recently started, the UBC Mindfulness and Meditation Club. In this club, we hope to teach students and hopefully if we can expand on further, just young adults in the general Kelowna area, mindfulness-based techniques and mindfulness-based therapies to act as a supplementary treatment for a lot of things that young students struggle with. And more than just that, to serve more as a perspective change, honestly, as it was for me. So mindfulness is perceiving quite a huge influx of research because of its availability, its utility in treating a variety of chronic issues. So recently, I think in a 2013 meta-analysis of a bunch of different studies, clinical trials using mindfulness-based therapies, they found a decent significant efficacy in using it for stress, depression, and anxiety. And thinking about these and thinking about how impactful this type of therapy could be for students who, as the stats show, are probably the highest, one of the highest-risk groups for a lot of mental illnesses due to the stress we have in the university, being separated from your parents. I came up with the idea that hopefully I'd love to teach people how to maybe alleviate some of the larger symptoms and also direct them towards more professional help. As we go in through and after COVID, professional help has become a lot more harder to access. So I was thinking this could offer maybe some alleviation, temporary medication for asserts and mental illnesses, but I guess my main goal with the club, which actually coincides with the power of place, was to grant people the ability to be introspective. With power in place, these are very intrinsic things to our nature, to recognize your positionality, to recognize the effect that the environment has on you, both social and physical, means having the ability to truly inspect yourself, to be introspective and to analyze how your feelings are and how they affect the interactions you have. And luckily, that is a core tenet of mindfulness practices. So mindfulness is the main thesis behind it is the non-judgmental, conscious overview of your subjective experience. This means looking into everything that makes your experience maybe sensations, maybe smells, maybe thoughts and realizing there's no essential separation between the two and it all lies within the realm of consciousness. I'm being able to accept that, not judgmentally and live with that. And this coincides very well with actual power of place because the skills you need to actually be that introspective to realize your own intrinsic proclivities is something that would greatly benefit looking at your power of place because my angle of this was looking at how power of place can affect certain implicit biases that you have. So it is an avenue essentially to analyze how your prior history, how your friends, how the general environment around you can shape your attitudes and your biases towards a different people. And it coincides well with the EDI principles because these implicit biases are undetected and very hard to realize into a conscious awareness. So being able to recognize these using introspection and using skills that mindfulness actually teaches is a very good way to actually understand yourself to improve on certain biases that you have that you never really realized and hopefully just become a better candidate for equality everywhere and just become a better human in general. And this club was something that I started with because mindfulness actually helped me my own personal journey. And as I said, it was quite a drastic perspective shift because of the prior mindset that I used to have when dealing with stress or when dealing with all issues mental is I looked at them as separate to myself as if there's some object that I can lock into a box and throw it away. And slowly as I grew up, I realized that those just literally lay landlines. And I felt this in my first year in university, I felt like I was going in retrograde and I realized that those landlines were exploding on me and I didn't really realize what I was doing and learning to non-judgmentally observe how I feel and to understand this really, really affected the way I view anything in life giving me more empathy. And I was hoping to teach students that same ability hopefully who've never, who probably have gone through a similar situation to me where they've never actually cognizized how they actually feel. And when I learned about the Respect magazine I actually was present for one of their presentations and I thought this would be an amazing avenue to promote mindfulness and also just to promote just general accepting, just general acceptance of any type of interaction. I really enjoyed how they promoted their club, their thesis. They really, they're very concise which I very much enjoyed. And I just thought this would be an incredible avenue for me to actually promote what I want to do and to just generally promote the club as it is and to promote power of place as it is. And that pretty much summarizes my submission. Thank you so much, Jeremy. Of course. Lastly, we have one of our own Nancy Liu and she alongside with Ryan will be talking about an interview that they made and eventually published. Please go ahead. Hello, I'm Nancy. So when I see the theme power plays I just started to associate myself in the lens that I lived before. So like I have studied in several countries and from growing up, like growing up like I was definitely influenced by the places surrounding nature and cultural that in my community and leaving areas. So I think the power of place is like the place are really powerful to shape who we are today and shape our attitudes. But sometimes I just start to think, okay, we get so much from, we learn so much from our lens. We get so much from our lens. How can we contribute to our lens? So I start thinking about like environment issues and sometimes diversity could be really beneficial to our environment. Like if it's really creative tools that we can't address environmental issues but sometimes diversity could be something that's not really beneficial in terms of environmental issues. So I start thinking about the clubs that are joined on campus. It's a team that aims to improve the sorting of placed items on campus because people from different places will have different sorting systems like waste systems that they use. So how can we reduce the contamination of recyclable and compostable items in terms of power of place? So I interviewed this amazing team who are working on the real life issues on campus. And I also invited one of the club member, Ryan, to join our conversation today. So Ryan, do you want to talk about how like your understanding of diversity and power of place in addressing environmental issues? Yeah, I'm Ryan. I'm an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology student here at UBCO undergraduate. And yeah, I guess I'll get to that point. I'll talk about a little bit of what we did and then how that relates to it. So what we did this year was, as Nancy mentioned, we're trying to reduce the contamination between the different waste streams we have on campus, recycling, returnables, compost and garbage. And we got a lot of complaints about the old like signages that they weren't very useful for anyone, especially like new students from like places where they might not have a recycling all. So we decided to redesign the signs. Nancy did most of the work on that. And yeah, we ended up having them in the commons for a month and we got some positive responses. And in terms of power of place, one thing that I did is I'm not originally from Kelowna in this area. I'm from Portland, Oregon, where there's actually a lot more focus on compost and that kind of stuff than there is here. So I took my knowledge from that and see how we could implement that here in this place. And I know some other students from other parts of the country and other countries did that as well. And yeah, in terms of diversity, as Nancy mentioned, there's a lot of international students here. So they might not be familiar with it. So we tried to use real images and change some of the names to make it as easy for people from all different backgrounds to be able to use a signage. And we tried to reach out to different communities. We had an event with the Disability Resource Center, for example, to see how we can improve waste signage and just the design of waste cans to try and make it more equitable for everyone to use. Yeah, so everything I have for right now. Thank you so much. As you guys can see all of these submissions, we've received are so diverse and different and varied, which is something that we absolutely love to share as many perspectives as possible. We have created some discussion questions for our panelists and I am checking the time because we have 30 minutes left, I would also like to open this to questions from the audience. If you guys have anything you would like to ask our panelists, we have the set questions. I will start asking them and if you have any follow-up questions or any comments, just please hop on. So to begin, we have the first one that is the topic for issue three was Power of Place. So tell us a little bit how you think responded to your topic. What was your intention with your contribution? Could we have someone from our panel to maybe volunteer for this? Anyone's interested? Oh, please go ahead, Nars. I can talk really briefly about it just because of time. I know for myself, one of the things that actually stood out to me was during the interviews, many of the Canadian-born women talked about how they almost have two different identities depending on the place that they're in. So if they're in a community where it's a larger kind of Canadian-dominated community where they don't necessarily see themselves, they felt like they almost had to fit in so they changed their identity accordingly to that place. Whereas if they were with other South Asian individuals, others who acted like them, ate the foods that they did, they felt more comfortable to be themselves and they felt more comfortable to be able to actually share their identity. So I think even just that little example in itself shows how important the power of place is. Thank you. And just to add to that, I completely resonate with what you're sharing, Nars. I mean, in my personal experience, I am South American, I am Peruvian. So I really noticed after the transition from Peru to Canada, especially in Kelowna, we were always speaking people of our own, if you know what I mean. We're always trying to find the people that will understand this and that is such a big help just for international students and not only international students but everyone going into university, that's a big change and it makes sense for us to just try to seek comfort and some people that will make us feel less comfortable. Thank you. Now for the second question, why is a sense of place important to you? Could maybe Martin answer this one? Sure. So indeed, as you were just mentioning, I think place at the end of the day is important for all of us because we are in these different places at the same time, right? We are in marriage in these different systems and not only systems and physical spaces but at the end of the day places, as Alicia was mentioning, that have its own rules, norms, actors and ways of functioning. So I do believe that it is essential for all of us to think about the place in the sense of not only where we're coming from but also where we're at at this precise moment and where we're going. And I guess in my case, in the case of my submission, I was thinking about graduate schools as this place that it's important to me and to some of my peers not only in the sense that it will allow us to keep on learning and exploring different topics in our field but also in the sense that it is about our assumptions, it is about our implications, about being reflexive of who we are and where we want to take our own research or experience or practice. So I think it's definitely important because it will actually influence and guide our practice who we are but also how this specific place, in this case, grad schools will level throughout time and across different contexts. Thanks. Thank you. I will jump on to question number three. I'm just checking the time guys. So how do you think your social location, positionality, shape of use shared in your contribution to the mass, please go ahead. Yeah. Before I want to address the question, I do want to just position myself as an individual because that influenced a lot of what I did with my project. So I am a Punjabi stick woman and six are a collectivist community. So when one person is hurting, that pain is shared throughout the community. And there's another kind of central component value to Sikhism is Seva, which is the selfless acts of compassion for others above oneself. So when I was really starting to see this kind of rise and hate towards Asian populations, I knew I had to kind of spring into action and that was one of the reasons why Jawda Cup was created. In that moment, I felt kind of helpless knowing that I may not necessarily be able to create large systemic changes, but I could at least help amplify the voices of the people that were hurting. And I recall the quote from one of my professors during my first semester where they said, in order to create change, all we can really do is add a drop of water to each person. And for some people that might be the first drop of water that's ever been put into their glass, for others, it might be that overflowing moment that they needed. And so like I mentioned, the project was done with South Asian women. And really mainly that was because I was a South Asian woman myself who was also hurting. And I just wanted to see how others were feeling and to help amplify their voices. And so that's why I created the space through this cup of tea, where women felt empowered to talk about their experiences and above all feel validated. Some of them mentioned that this was actually the first time they've ever been in the space where they could talk about racism, where they could talk about discrimination. And for others, they felt validated and they felt like someone was actually listening to them. And one participant mentioned to me that it was actually helpful with me being South Asian myself because they felt like there could be a better connection between the two of us. So that I could better understand what they were going through, which I think women in itself shows how important diversity is in research and then also the people doing the research as well. So yeah, that's, I think, so my social positionality and location really just influenced everything that I did in this project and how I carry myself on a day to day. Thank you so much. Yeah, that really resonates a lot with and I'm sure with a lot of people here. For question number four, what influences you're thinking about power of place? Could you add a sheet? Please take it away. Thank you. The lawnmower just dropped, so good timing. So yeah, these are lovely questions. Thank you so much to the team for putting these together. So I will take a little bit from my article as I respond to this question and a little bit from question three, actually, because for me, so yeah, okay, I'm still trying to form it. So yes, as I mentioned in my article, the difference between and as I picked up from Oxford bibliographies that like the difference between space and place is one of abstraction and being able to invest meaning. So space is an abstract concept, whereas place is a concept which we develop once we invest meaning into the space. So I see it as a process of like place is more potential, which is why I would go back to question three about positionality. And the question then would be who gets the privilege to invest meanings into spaces and whose meanings are prioritized. And I think that largely influences how I would think about what places mean or the kind of power that places have. And as an example, we, I have worked as a teaching assistant and like in classes, it's common to tell students to remember in times of discussion that like they do not take up space too much because that leans out space for others. Like if you are just talking for a long time, that's not leaving time for anyone else to talk. And that is also an example of taking up space. And that's, it's very interesting to see which students from which social locations find it comfortable to take up that kind of space that they talk and they do not realize that they have been talking for a long time. That's just an example. And as similarly as I said in my article, that like some of the things that I think about, it's just odd to me that they never cross someone else's minds just because they feel more like they belong in a space and hence they think it's their place to take up that space. And I'm sorry if this is getting confusing now, but I really think this play between space and place is very, very intriguing to me. And I realized that anthropology as a field has actually been investigating this in very different ways. And I realized that while writing this article. So thank you for that. And one last point that I would say from there is that for racialized students, it's, and for racialized people in general and people from other marginalized populations, then it's very important and can be very transformative to have a place that they can actually occupy and invest meaning within. So just student communities and just groups like Naz was saying just how South Asian women would feel more seen and more comfortable being themselves, their version of being a South Asian woman, which then you are with people who are not South Asian, for example, that is the side that you have to constantly rein it in and like constantly, even the example of code switching, like just being able to speak without having that constant mental labor of, oh, no, like this is no, not Hindi, no English, because even when we speak in India, it's not just Hindi. We speak a lot of Hindi plus English. So it then we are speaking with native English speakers it's just so difficult and that's another example of taking up space, which again becomes a hindrance when you are trying to own or find belongingness in a place. So yeah, I would say that these are some, some things that affect or influence my thinking, your power, your positionality and the privilege that your positionality gives you and how just places can be so transformative because of that, just how even this project where students are working as partners, that's exactly what is happening, like the students have that place which could very well have been another hierarchical position of, oh, we're just workers and this is not our project. So yeah, just some thoughts and I'm sorry for how disdointed they are, but I hope that makes sense. Thank you. Thank you so much. We will move on to question number five. We'll try to get through five and fix a little bit quicker because we're running out of time. So for number five, please, Ryan, go ahead and show your thoughts. Yeah, I got some barriers to connecting from to a place is like kind of like if the environment you're in, which I guess is kind of place, is it like very well suited like in terms of like city design to like build community and connect yourself to the environment? Probably a big barrier to place and also like maybe not interacting with like ideas around place and that kind of thing. Like one thing that really brought me to power place is just kind of getting on question four is like my background in ecology. It's like every little slight changes in the environment can have very different impacts on the creatures that live there and realizing that that can also like affect human societies and how humans live and interact in different environments. And yeah, some people just aren't really, never really run into that kind of thinking. And yeah. Thank you so much. And for the last question, Jeremy will do would you like to take it over? Yeah, sure thing. So I'll try to be brief. The way I see the relationship between power of place and EDI is I see them as intrinsically linked whereby to recognize differences and equality, diversity and inclusion, you have to first recognize your place and your positionality. And this connection is essential because the recognizing your background and the environment and the effects of it is necessary and pivotal in actually promoting equality and diversity because to promote equality, you have to recognize different groups you have to recognize how your impact on a different social setting affects different outcomes to recognize diversity and inclusion go hand in hand with that. So these concepts are directly linked I would say part recognizing your place is I guess primary and to actually follow through with any EDI concepts and to recognize where you come from and the a lot of people tend to think of place as the more environmental the more physical spaces that you inhabit but place is a lot more than that. It is your social identity. It is your personal identity. It's your internal identity and to be able to actually recognize that to interpret that to internalize that grants you the ability to actually recognize any quality or diversity. Yeah, well, I really love all the opinions and ideas that we've heard today. Thank you guys. We really appreciate your presence and your participation in this panel and with this, we can finally move on into the Q&A from our audience. Anything that you guys would like to know about our panelists, about our magazine you too guys, like our panelists if you have any questions about the magazine or would like to share something else we still have some time so please go ahead. Oh yes, and Dr. Chalili shared the link to the respect magazine on the chat so our audience could visit and can just check all of these amazing works as well as past issues and everything that we have published over there and on screen you can see the QR code to the magazine's Instagram account. So yes, please if you have any questions, any ideas, any comments maybe if you something, oh please go ahead. Thanks. I'm Janine and I work at the Center for Teaching and Learning and I just I do have a question but first before my question I just want to say how much I enjoyed this panel. You all are such an amazing but if this is our student population and if this is, you know, the future I the big I have hope have so much hope we've been through so much through COVID and all the things and you are also articulate and thoughtful and took such care the emotional intelligence in this zoom room, the space is so reassuring and I thank you for this hope I could spend a week speaking with each of you easily I'm sure which would be I would be so grateful. So my question that I wanted to ask was and came a little bit of listening to I think it's Naz and I'm not sure how to say but talked about people feeling comfortable when they're with you know people who look like them and behave like them and I think we learn a lot about things not to say and things you know to do and correct ways to try and treat people but I'm just wondering if you can tell us and you can't it would just be for yourself I guess but how can I make people feel more comfortable in the spaces we're in whether it's someone muted me I think I went over time taking too much it was my accident I was trying to mute myself so I'm just my question is what can I do to make you feel more comfortable so if I could start and then give it to you and ask in my personal experience I found it very funny how I was since the moment I got accepted into UDCO and my first year was online I was seeking a Peruvian community I was very specific at first every Peruvian that I would meet I was just going at them let's be best friends I need you in my life right now but then I started noticing that that's not necessarily the case I have some very dear Peruvian friends but I also started noticing that it was not just Peruvians that I resonated with it was Mexicans it was just people from all over in my personal experience mostly Latin people they know because we speak the same language we're we're from places relatively close to each other we have relatively similar experiences and that also gave us a lot of comfort even if sometimes we did not understand each other I have this issue with my best friend there from Mexico we all speak Spanish but I don't understand what they're saying because it's a different Spanish and something that I ended up realizing and it was through also accepting the fact that I'm here to make friends regardless of where they're from I was I had a very strong preference for Latin people but then I realized like there's so many different types of people and so much diversity why should I enclose my opportunities of making friends to just this tiny group and I think the best way that you could make us or help us be more comfortable is just being accepting we as international students are very scared we're very proud of our culture but we're also very scared of feeling people that we're trying to impose them impose them on others so just wanting to have a conversation you know I have so many some of my best friends are Canadian and they had the same issue at first they didn't know what to say they didn't know how to say it to make me feel at home and we both had to realize together like hey you don't need to make me feel at home you just need to make me feel accepted because I'm a human being just as you so that was my personal experience if not do you want to say that one? Yeah I can quickly add I think even just moving beyond acceptance to understanding because acceptance is accepting it for what it is whereas understanding is almost putting yourself in that person's shoes or having that conversation with that individual better understanding how you can help foster kind of more positive change and I know for myself just positioning myself like I'm not an international student I am Canadian born but I am a person of color at the end of the day and one of the things that I noticed was things like diversity or things like other people's cultures would only be brought up on token days for example September 30th is the prime example of like Indigenous and then you've got Black History Month that's the only time that certain cultures are being spoken about why aren't we talking about cultures all the time considering how diverse our country is supposed to be and like she said just have conversations some people don't want to and that is completely okay it's not on racialized people to be educating others whereas others like myself always open to conversation always open to sharing about my culture and reciprocating that learning from other people's culture and I think ignorance is a big thing that comes into play unfortunately I know during my undergraduate degree I almost anglified my name so my name is Naz but I would say Naz because professors were like oh that's too hard for me to say I can't say that name so I changed it even though I take so much pride in my name so little examples like that just help people feel more welcomed and included in the conversation I feel go ahead Marie yeah so I'll just echo sorry so I'll just echo what Jeanine said it was an amazing set of presentations so thank you very much I'm wondering I guess I have more kind of a technical question so given the desire of course to engage your readers I'm just wondering how you sort of went about fostering that in terms of the platform so is the magazine is it a blog so do you have places for response from readers is that the way it works or so our magazine right now works as a blog after well if you were to check out the actual website you can see that underneath every submission there's a comment section and people can send comments and we usually get really happy when we get this comments and we send them immediately to whoever wrote that piece so they know that it's happening we are also on the works of creating an actual website because right now our magazine works through the UBC blog site the UBC blog I don't know if it's kind of it's kind of it's not an app how would you call it it's built in a wordpress platform my students they don't find it's actually that user friendly at least they don't find it 100% it is a bit tough even for us to figure out at first which is why we're working towards actually getting a web developer that will help us create an actual website that we can own and share around it may be a bit more easier but yes we're always seeking for comments from readers so we can also share them with the contributors and they can be recognized for their work because I think the thing about Naza's sorry did I get your name right now I'm wondering if I did Naza's presentation so I suggested that there was a lot of engagement I'm a bit confused is there a larger sort of project that the piece that you did for respect links to because you said that there's a lot of hunger for that kind of place where the voices of as you say South Asian women can amplify so we're just wondering so this was actually my final project submission for 514 and then as I kind of started ruminating on it I was like I want to do more with this and there is options to do more with this that being said I'm also in grad school and working and planning a wedding so I don't have time that's so my plan is to expand the platform job the cup itself is becoming an advocacy branch platform social media campaign I don't really know what you want to call it in which I will have conversations with other populations it's just for the time being it was South Asian women and hopefully I can expand that further thank you very much yeah it was fascinating outline thank you so much thank you I have other questions I feel like it opened if somebody else has one the okay has to run I have a question about learning spaces doesn't necessarily have to do with a classroom but where can anybody give an example of the power of place in a learning space whether it's a classroom or outside of a classroom where you're like wow especially around feeling included power and inclusion in spaces and places on campus and your learning do you mind if I add to that all of that please go ahead yeah so one thing about me is I'm dyslexic so when you're mentioning like different powers of places I've been to schools where there's been a lot of resources to that and schools where there have not really been resources for that that can definitely impact like people like me and a lot of people with like opportunities ability to like learn and those kind of resources often go along with like schools with those resources resources for like people of color and women and schools that don't often don't have those as well and often in like four communities so different places can impact learning and where you come from very different outcomes like education and learning and your opportunities in life just because of those like I'm not sure if that's what you mean by places in terms of learning but that's been my experience and there's been a lot of variety with that and those can have a big impact that's wonderful and also oh sorry also to add to that a very nice conversation I had with the chief editor from the Phoenix as well as Dr. David Jeffries he is in the faculty of cultural studies I had a class with him and such an eye-opening discussion we had about our magazine was you know sometimes in this classes especially like indigenous courses in cultural studies classes and gender women's and sexuality studies there are conversations going on in class there are projects that seek to talk about things related to EDI but at the end of the day and it's really hard for students to continue that discussion after the class ends you know you write a paper for a class that you think could change so many people's perspective but it's just for a class and that's what we wanted to do with our magazine just giving them that space once the hour and a half of lecturing finishes so you can continue that discussion and bring it outside of the classroom because it is very important to keep them going not to just like have an hour and a half of mind-blowing theories and changing perspectives and then it's like oh it's done I'm gonna go home and do homework now you know we wanted to do that with our magazine just keep giving that space for students to finish that conversation and then restart a new one or maybe continue that same conversation but within their community I just quickly wanted to add to that and also I wanted to thank you for having me on the panelist section this was an amazing opportunity I do have to leave pretty soon but adding on to these to the learning spaces I think the actual physical parameters of the space have a palpable impact on the actual learning that goes into this like I can use a physical example a bland white room versus a room with certain couches and a board and photos or whatever topic you want to do have two dramatically different outcomes when you want to encourage students to learn to discuss one probably hinders discussion and probably I guess inputs like this power dynamic between the two between the professor and the students and shows that there's a power differential and no one should surpass that whilst one actually encourages communication and diversity and inclusion so the physical parameters of a space have a dramatic impact on the actual learning that goes on to this and I just want to say thank you for everything this was an amazing opportunity I'm going to head out but thank you Thank you Jeremy that was a great example thank you I think people have to rush off to other meetings I don't want to keep you I hope you're continuing to take part instead of learning week we will share out the recording and the links that people shared so thank you to all the panelists to the Respect magazine team and have a wonderful afternoon and rest of Celebrate Week Thank you Have a great week everyone