 Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever you're listening. This is Davisville on KDRT LP 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Bill Buchanan. I'm the host. Thank you for tuning in. Each year, you see Davis chooses one graduating senior to receive its university medal. The prize recognizes excellence in undergraduate studies, outstanding community service, and the promise of future scholarship and contributions to society. This year's medalist, effectively, the top student from a graduating class that includes many thousands of accomplished students is Jumana Isso. She is an English major who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and country of Jordan. And among other things, she wants to study fiction involving climate change. Like all of our recent shows, we're doing this by Zoom, so the sound quality isn't what you get in the studio, but the gist of the show should be intact. Jumana, thank you for appearing on Davisville today. Thank you for having me. First, congratulations. You know, tell us about the moment when you learned you had received really this extraordinary prize. What did you do when you heard the news? Thank you. I was interviewed pretty late on in the quarter to the point where I didn't really know if I was still up for the university medal because I didn't know in normal quarters if you figure out this later on that you are the recipient of it. So after interviewing, I thought that it went really well. And two days later, I received a call from the university that said, Do you know the news yet? And I was like, No, but if it was bad news, it would be really sad that I received the call first, but then I got an email that said, You're the university medalist effectively. I called my parents in there in Jordan. So the time zone was a bit off, but they were really excited for me. Did you end up waking him up in the middle of the night? I think yeah, it was it was nighttime for them. I don't think I woke them up, but receiving a call from me that late, they knew that it must be like news of some sort, but they were really excited for me. Yeah, I can imagine. That's quite a phone call to get from the campus. You know, have you heard the news yet? Yeah. Like, maybe. They were like, Did you receive any emails today? And I was like, No. And they're like, So you don't know the news yet. I was like, This would be really depressing if I didn't get it. You know, I guess we should explain a little bit the process for winning the medal. It isn't simply that you have the highest grade point average or anything like that, right? I mean, you have to be nominated and you get evaluated. I mean, the academic senate gets involved as I understand. It's just an automatic thing like you got more A pluses than anyone else. No, we had, I think each college has its own set of awards and you can win the award but still have to be nominated by the college. So I'm not sure who else was being interviewed for the university medal but I'm assuming that it would be the top student in engineering, ag science, bioscience, etc. All of whom I'm sure are very accomplished students to get to that level. So your parents are in Jordan. Were they able, and you just graduated from UC Davis, you know, there wasn't a physical ceremony this year because of the pandemic. You know, were your parents able to participate in your online graduation? So, I was a bit confused by the format of our online graduation and I sent links but the way that it worked was we had kind of short clips by the chancellor and the deans of the colleges and you can just click on the slide. So it wasn't so much as they participated but I mean I sent links to people that wanted to be involved in it but yeah it was a bit different this year obviously and I'm glad that they didn't buy tickets to come to the US way early on. So how did you, you grew up in California and in Jordan. So how did you come to grow up in both countries? Yeah, my dad went to college in the US, he went to Chico State and so I was born in the US and they had kind of work and connections in the San Francisco Bay area. And then when we were, when I was six, we moved back to Jordan for work and then spent five years there, moved back here, spent three years here, moved back there again, moved back here. I spent part of high school here, hence why I went to a UC and kind of was able to stay in California but it was, I grew up in both places because it was a lot of back and forth. You know, I would think that would be interesting to different countries and back and forth so that you can almost compare you know high school in Jordan, high school in California. Yeah, very different, well hardly different countries and education systems. It's, it was a bit weird to jump back and forth between them because I spent ninth grade in Jordan and I was taking like biology, physics and chemistry all at the same time and then I would come back to the US and each science was like a year of your high school experience like you took biology as a freshman and then you ended your high school experience with physics and so I was like why isn't everyone just taking all of them at once. This is the IB kind of protocol for foreign country. So you majored in English at UC Davis. Why did you choose English? I've always loved reading and literature and especially in high school I started to realize that this was the subject that I was drawn to the most. But when I was applying to college, a lot of people were kind of scaring me out of choosing my passion as a major because they're like what about financial security or how are you going to get a job or what do you plan on being like you need to look into what an English major can lead you to. And so I applied to all the UCs and CSUs as an undeclared major. And then once I got to Davis and I took my first English class, I declared English because I realized that I yeah I do love it and I'm not going to be scared away by what people say about it. That's a very common debate discussion I say this, I have two daughters they're out of college now, but certainly among their friends that very question you know do you study something that draws you, or do you have strictly a financial consideration. And, you know these days a lot of the language or a lot of the discussion seems to favor things like STEM, you know being very practical, but you know it was English and you did very well at it. What do you want to do with it. What do you want to do, not with your degree necessarily but I mean where do you want to go with your life. That is the question that I've been trying to get answering. And only because kind of with everything happening in the world right now, I know that even having set plans doesn't necessarily mean that your life is going to go on a specific course like I know a lot of friends who are in the business who have had internships since their junior year which guaranteed them jobs after graduation, and now they're in the position where they don't know if they have their job, because of everything happening in the world and because of, you know, the kind of crisis that we're going into after graduation. So, I've been wary about designating a career for myself post grad school, but also because I don't really know, I think that choosing to apply to Cambridge was when I talked to Francis Dolan about it, I was saying, and if I don't get financial aid, I won't go and then I'll figure out something else. And then I got the scholarship, and now I have financial aid and I was choosing to go there, and it became that while I'm there I will decide what I'll do after, or if I really enjoy my master's program maybe it'll turn into a PhD, etc. We should explain there that you, among other things, you've earned a full right scholarship at the University of Cambridge which is where you're going this fall in England, you know, assuming things go as intended. Yes, the Gates Cambridge scholarship. We should mention Francis Dolan too who also appeared on the show several years ago. She is a professor at UC Davis, an English professor. So she was someone you took several classes from, I believe, right? She was sort of a mentor to you. Yes, yeah, she has been a great support system and mentor for me, and I just kept wanting to take classes with her whenever I saw her name pop up on a syllabus for a specific quarter, and I turned to her for advice, even for applying for the University Medal, or for the Letters and Sciences nomination that Len led to the University Medal, and for grad school and what I could do after and what I could use the English major for. So she's been very helpful with that. So you've got a couple of interests that have, I'm sure there's more than two, but a couple that have surfaced in the initial campus articles about your awards. That's refugees and also climate fiction, meaning fiction where climate change is part of the story, not that climate change is fiction. Tell us about those. So why, why do those draw you as subjects? I started with issues of refugees and displacement. I'm Palestinian, even though I grew up in Jordan, and that's because of displacement. So my family, both my mom and my dad's side had to go to Jordan because of the war. So my issues regarding refugees have always kind of interested me because it's very close to home. And so when I took my first human rights class through the University Honors Program, I started to volunteer with Article 26 backpack, which focuses on kind of guaranteeing that refugees can still document their past years and education through a cloud based app. And so when I focused on that throughout college, even in English classes, there's always still issues of human rights violations that appear in our literature, whether it be about like World War Two or the Vietnam War. And so everything that you read will have social issues embedded in it. And so when I looked at human rights violations and issues of refugees, I realized that in the next 50 years, ecological refugees are going to be increasing wildly because of floods or islands disappearing or being displaced from their homes along the coast. And that's not really an issue that people see as climate change as a human rights issue. They kind of see it as disparate things like climate change is a storm or fire and human rights violations are wars and floods, but you know storms and fires could lead to those two things or displacing people is just as big a human rights violation as leaving because of meeting asylum. And so when tackling my thesis and turning to climate fiction. I wanted to knit those two issues together. But I also didn't really know what climate fiction was until last year when I took a climate fiction course with Professor Tobias Manili. I, I obviously love literature being an English major but I wasn't aware that there was a genre dedicated to climate change and representing it through these non realist modes. Yeah, in fact, I one of the articles I read on UC Davis talking about your interest, referred to as Clifi. I wasn't familiar with that term either. Climate fiction, I understand, but I wasn't aware that it become so defined as already have acquired that nickname. Oh yeah, sci fi and Clifi. Your honors thesis he wrote was about African futuristic works in climate fiction. Right, so tell us about those. I mean there's a, there's a specificity there that I find interest. Yes, so I kind of discussed how the climate crisis is this crisis of culture and imagination, in terms of you have to transform your literary approach to adapt to these change circumstances in our world and the Anthropocene, because we're trying to translate climate change into this lasting story, but we can't really represent climate change through realism, you can't put yourself in the eye of the hurricane or discuss nature as its own kind of agency of matter without turning to non realist modes and just that I examined do turn to non realist modes and they specifically use the structure of myth in their works and all of them are linked by the fact that they are black women. And when I started looking into their works, a lot of people labeled them as Afro futurist, because they turn to this future world, where they're reimagining a land changed by climate change or the climate crisis, as well as still representing the social issues that black women and black people face in the world, because they don't just go away when you're imagining climate change. And that's what interested me about Octavia Butler she has a lot of interviews in the science fiction world where people tell her to put away the Rick quote unquote race issues, because she's talking about sci fi and how can you have that alongside the technological changes but what I think what's great about the works that I've kind of tackled is that they show the change circumstances due to this extreme weather events and apocalypse, essentially, but still focus on how, you know, racial to bring is still an issue, genocides and wars based on race, as well as climate change or an issue, they bring the two concepts together to show that climate change and human rights violations are one in the same. So what interested me about them I didn't necessarily choose them going into it knowing like these are all black women but when I finally decided on the books that I would be writing about for my thesis. It kind of came to me when I was discussing it with my thesis advisor Professor Manili that all of them are black women all of them use myth why is it that these African American authors are using myth. So are there really US writers that you're talking about here are these writers actually in Africa. Yes, native native core for is Nigerian American I believe, and she has spent summers in Nigeria and lived in the US and so she's kind of like me in that way but Octavia Butler African American. Are you interested in writing fiction yourself climate fiction. I don't know. I haven't really tried to write climate fiction, or any kind of fiction throughout college has mostly been kind of literary criticism. But I mean it's an interesting path and obviously researching the neurological methods and talking about all these authors would allow me to see what works and what doesn't and kind of approach it from a new angle, possibly discussing the Middle East and climate change but I haven't I hadn't as I said I hadn't given much thought to post grad school quite yet. Well, you've got plenty of time obviously if that's something you want to pursue. We are talking with Jumana Eso. She is this year's University Medalist at UC Davis which means she is considered the top under top graduating senior this year. The program is a Davisville and bill Buchanan and this is on Katie RT. Refugees a big subject with you as well and Jordan is a country of 10 million with about 745,000 refugees. I was reading this according to United Nations, and I think that's a big number in a country of that size. These are mostly from the Syrian war, but there's also a climate change angle here too, I believe right. Definitely. I think that Jordan, especially without this strain on its resources doesn't really have much resources to be spreading around because the location with drought and this kind of limited land space where refugees are having to huddle into tents and now with Corona to there's a lot of risk for refugees in all countries but specifically in the Middle East. I think that Jordan is kind of the push for my discussion of refugees in the climate change narrative, specifically, because there are major barriers for refugees in new environments but in places like Jordan where the citizens themselves don't have that much leeway for resources, refugees kind of get placed into this. You can't really find the words for it. Well it's it's it's enormous. Obviously it's not a problem we can solve in a minute or two but what would help. Do you think with refugee crisis. Yeah, I mean what would help, what would help address this. I am not really sure what would help tackle. I mean like in general with refugees or specifically in the Middle East. I know that there's obviously a myriad of issues that leads to people being displaced from their countries and so I know that to stop this issue entirely you'd have to tackle climate change. I mean you have to find the root cause of wars and then see, you know, everything happening in these countries and focus on it bit by bit and so I'm not really sure what would help in this scenario. I know that with the Syrian Revolution a lot of people have started to link it to rising temperatures, displacing millions of people into the city which then led to conflicts in the city. Hence the revolution but it's not entirely climate change and so I can't say once we solve climate change there will no longer be wars and refugees, but yeah. And certainly too I mean it's a it is a big problem. I'm thinking one of the purposes of literature I suppose is to illustrate conditions problems in such a way that they that other people can understand them. Yes, it's just a frame of reference for people. And I think the fact that I'm so drawn a fiction it's also this the sense suspended disbelief in terms of it is a real issue and you know that you can imagine something like this happening in the real world, especially with fiction that's based on climate change or wars you know that it has happened but the story itself is fictional so you have this level of remove where you can not be immobilized by it. And I think that's what's interesting as well about climate change fiction because there are utopias dystopias apocalypse is everything in between but you aren't necessarily in this world that's fully on fire at least not yet. And so it either gives you a future that you can imagine that's hopeful where we adapt and where we've stopped emissions, or possibly one where we go on business as usual and realize now you know the world is underwater and what have we done to it, because I think that this speculative futureity is, it's a part of climate fiction but it's also just a part of the news, like if you read an article that's like the Arctic might fully disappear, and it's already melting right now but this could happen or the probability of this occurring is this much all of it is speculating because we don't really know what's going to happen in the future we're just basing it on what we're doing now, but we could, in a week, completely stop emissions or we could, as soon as this pandemic is over completely go back to how we were before. So I think that the merits of using fiction for climate change is because we are also engaging in fiction making in our news and in everyday life when we're trying to imagine a world in the future, altered by climate change. You know, listening to you right now I think you've just made a pretty good argument for why an English degree is worth pursuing. Thank you. So it's partly to grapple with things, whatever the issue may be it's a chance to grapple with these larger questions and as as a culture as a world, work them out I don't want to get too high fluting here but I think that's, I think that's always been one of the purposes of the humanities is to think and figure it out. I was discussing this with my thesis advisor recently because I was in a human rights and climate justice class, and for my final project I chose to talk to everyone about climate fiction, although the class is kind of a policy, I are themed human rights class where we discussed law policy, universal declaration of human rights and so a lot of people were like why fiction. And so I gave them my own response but I turned to my thesis advisor way after and I was like, I didn't know what to say to all these policy majors about why fiction and he said, Well, our world is organized around narrative. And as policy majors, they should know that if a president wins an election it's because he has the most appealing story. And we all are crafting stories for people, and kind of also selling our stories to others. And so, when someone turns you says why fiction, well this is just another kind of story. I think that that's important to articulate social issues, climate change, issues of refugees, displacement. I mean, my, some of my favorite narratives helped me figure out the scale of the issue like exit West by my son Hamid. He talks about kind of refugees and displacement but he uses magical realism, where there are doors in a world and you open them and you can get into a different country through it, which it's very cool and it kind of relates to my thesis in terms of using non realist modes but it's also a way of thinking about borders and how they're imagined and how we divide countries arbitrarily. It's, it's very interesting to think about how fiction has oriented the way I think about social issues. We have a few minutes left, I wanted to ask some questions that are sort of more prosaic but, but given that you've accomplished at this level I think people might be curious in your answers and one of them is simply, how did you manage to achieve everything that you needed to do to achieve at this level. Several years ago I talked to one of your predecessors as a metalist and I'd have to actually go back and listen to it but part of it was I think she avoided social media or at least Facebook. And I think her brother cooked meals for from time to time. Point was, those are small details perhaps but that they sort of gave some insight into how she organized and you know that's one of the questions is how do we all get everything done. That was something really quite remarkable and I'm curious if you have any advice or how you manage to achieve at this level. I think that it has to do with the fact that I actually love my major. And so when it came to choosing my majors classes every quarter, I would look at the description and see what most interested me. If I saw in a British novel to 1900 I immediately chose it and it was also helpful that the professors were amazing and the TAs and the resources that I had at Davis helped me achieve what I did but also with GE classes I did the same thing I wasn't going on Davis websites and seeing you know easy a or what's the best class to take if you don't want to try I would just see what interested me and the interest helped me try harder. And I also, I know it's weird to say but I like to sit down and kind of read for class and do my writing and a lot of people in college were like, I'm just going to skim this book or sparks notes it and just try to do as well as I can on this pop quiz but I would read to read and then it would help with the quiz when I remember the things that I do. In terms of community service and the other factors that led to the university medal that's it's also the same you know with human rights issues and refugees. The professors about their programs after taking their classes and decided to volunteer for them it wasn't necessarily like I need this many hours of community service for the university honors program requirements or doing something as a means to an end it was because I wanted to do the things and it became this thread woven throughout my research and it helped me and other factors and I really like to connect issues like if I'm taking an environmental science class I would connect it to the essay that I was writing in an English class even if it was British novels in the in the 18th century somehow there is an ecological lens that you can take with this so I'm big on connecting my classes together so it helps that I choose things that interested me during college. So you were interested in I believe I could summarize what you said that you saw real purpose to it I mean it engaged you personally but you also saw value in it and then that really propelled you. Exactly. You chose you see Davis because why you could have gotten a lot of schools I mentioned. I think as a California resident it was really important to me to also choose pragmatically because you have in state tuition with a lot of schools. I know that's not a glamorous answer. It doesn't need to be glamorous just a little bit the time left I did want to ask besides the education. What else will you take with you from Davis. I think that the relationships that I fostered with my professors. I'll continue to develop after leaving UC Davis because even during this really hectic quarter I've had professors that aren't even teaching classes reach out and say would you like to zoom in just talk about life or let's you know meet up for a socially just walk and and just talk and chat and it doesn't have to be about school or about grad school or about the future and I think that I was surprised choosing UC Davis that I managed to talk to my professors in this way because it's a school of over 35,000 kids and a lot of classes are big lectures even English classes I've taken you know shakes here where there's 90 other students in the class and you don't assume that the professor will even know your name. Let alone like recognize your face and yet here I am kind of leaving the school emailing all these professors saying this is when I'll be leaving Davis I really love to see you or. And it's been, I think this is one of the big things I'm going to take away from Davis and also one of the most surprising. Well, jimana thank you very much for talking with us today we've been talking with jimana he so who just graduated from UC Davis with a degree in English she's the university medalist this year jimana thank you for being on the show. Thank you so much. This is bill Buchanan on Davis Phil on kdrt. Thank you for listening.