Official Blog | UCGPC

In this captivating podcast episode, the dynamic trio of hosts—Tori Porter, Evelyn Vazquez, and Kai Huang—takes center stage, skillfully guided by the insightful production of Dr. Ann Cheney and Dr. Manasi Rajadhyaksha. With a focus on inclusivity and social impact, the hosts engage in a thought-provoking discussion exploring innovative research ideas that directly address the nuanced health outcomes crucial to graduate students hailing from historically marginalized communities. Through their expertise and compelling narratives, the podcasters shed light on the imperative need for tailored research initiatives that not only recognize but actively prioritize the unique health concerns of individuals within historically underserved backgrounds. This episode serves as a beacon of inspiration, urging researchers and listeners alike to champion diversity and equity in the pursuit of meaningful and impactful healthcare solutions for graduate students in historically marginalized communities.

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About the hosts:

• ⁠Tori Porter (They/them) journey of exploration has been deeply personal, shaped by their identities as a Black/BlaQ Latinx individual, a transgender trailblazer, a first-generation low-income academic, and an unceasing learner. Their scholarly pursuits revolve around unraveling the intricacies of diversity and inclusion, particularly for Black queer and transgender individuals, low-income and undocumented communities, disabled populations, and people of color. Tori’s thought-provoking workshops, thought-provoking essays, evocative poems, and compelling performances have resonated across universities, colleges, and national organizations from Riverside to San Francisco to Austin. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration and Policy at the University of California, Riverside, Tori’s focus is on transforming campus environments and cultures to nurture the thriving of Black transgender students. At the heart of their research lies a powerful challenge to the university establishment, demanding accountability for perpetuating injustices against marginalized student communities.
• ⁠Evelyn Vazquez⁠, a community psychologist. She has conducted research on different topics, including mental health and well-being in higher education settings, social determinants of health, and health inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her methodological expertise is in qualitative research, action research, mixed-methods designs, and community-based participatory (CBPR) approaches. She is the 2023 recipient of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Award from the Association of Recovery in Higher Education. Most recently, she was a selected scholar in the 2023 UCLA LIFT-UP (Levering Institutional Support for Talent, Underrepresented Physicians and/or Scientists) program funded by NIH/NIDDK. She serves as the Assistant Director of the ⁠HABLAMoS (Hispanic And Bilingual Ambulatory Medical Studies)⁠ program. HABLAMoS is a designated Emphasis (DE) in Medical Spanish.
• Kai Huang- Kai (they/them, he/him, ze/zir, 他) is a queer, trans, nonbinary, and disabled Chinese American second-year medical student at UCSF School of Medicine in the Program in Medical Education – Urban Underserved (PRIME-US) cohort. Their research focuses on Chinese transgender and nonbinary people’s healthcare experience, as well as SOGI terminology in Mandarin Chinese. At UCSF, Kai serves as Advocacy Chair for Pride in Medicine (PrideMed) and a member of the Anti-Oppressive Curriculum Initiative where he advocates for an inclusive and anti-oppressive curriculum and learning environment for students.

Tori 0:08
Hello everyone, my name is Tori Porter, my pronouns are they, them, theirs, and I am a Doctoral Candidate at the University of California, Riverside, and the higher Ed Administration and Policy Program.

Evelyn Vazquez 0:20
Hello everyone. My name is Evelyn Vazquez and I’m assistant researcher at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside.

Kai Huang 0:31
Hello, my name is Kai Huang. I use they/them/he/and zir pronouns. I’m a second year medical student at UCSF School of Medicine in the program in medical education, urban underserved or prime US. This podcast was recorded on August 21st by Dr. Evelyn Vazquez she/her, Tori Porter he/him, and Kai Huang they/them/him/zir. The podcast was produced by Dr. Ann Cheney (she/her) and Dr. Manasi Rajadhyaksha she/her and was edited by Dia Anantharaman they/them. A special thanks to Dr. Evelyn Vazquez for her continued commitment to improving the mental health and emotional well being of historically marginalized graduate and professional students in the academy. This episode is part of the podcast series created for the engaging the academy project, a capacity building project led by Dr. Evelyn Vasquez of the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside.

Tori 1:30
We at UCR would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of this land, water, and air, the Cahuilla Tonga, Louiseño and Serrano peoples and all of their ancestors and descendants past, present, and future. Today, this meeting place is home to many indigenous peoples from all over the world, including UCR faculty, students, and staff. And we are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on these homelands. So how can institutions create healthy environment for graduate and professional students in the academy? And what will researchers do to resolve the issue? These are the topics we’re going to discuss today. So let’s get into it.

Evelyn Vazquez 2:22
Thank you for sharing these two wonderful questions. I also would like to mention that today podcast episodes, we will try to respond to the question, what do we need for a healthy Academy? And just as you mentioned, Tori, these are the two questions that will drive the discussion today. So I would like to hear from your perspective as graduate students. What do you think institutions can do to create healthy environments for graduate and professional students?

Tori 2:55
So just a little bit of my background, I’ve been working in higher education for a little over 10 years, specifically, in the University of California system at different campuses, Berkeley, Davis, Riverside now. And just through my own research, I see that a lot of research is promoted in a way that focuses on marginalized communities in a deficit way. We show how worthy marginalized people are by using deficit research. Like for example, LGBT folks may experience high harassment in and violation in school, right, instead of centering their resilience and resistance practices, and how they build community. And I think that when we approach research in those ways, we thought the human eyes at the same times marginalized communities, and I think how we can resolve and create more healthy campus environment if we promote, like, these wealth of knowledge that marginalized communities bring to our campus communities, and promote research that doesn’t center on that deficit thinking of marginalized community.

Kai Huang 4:33
Yeah, I really agree. Tori, I think a lot of the times people talk about the disparities that we face as marginalized people, especially in academia, and it’s not often as discussed, like what are their protective factors or what are the strengths that we bring to the academy we have such unique perspectives and lived experiences that are often dismissed. or not valued. And I think it’s really important when doing this kind of research to include the people, that you include people who are from the community that is being researched, so that a lot of care is taken to try not to further marginalize or re traumatize or misrepresent what is important to people in those communities.

Evelyn Vazquez 5:25
Thank you. I think that also something that institutions of higher education can do is to recognize the dominant perspectives that are driving the behaviors and the values that are promoting within those institutions. So we must recognize, for instance, the role of white privilege, always at White Privilege is everywhere we go. It doesn’t matter the institution, even our Hispanic serving institutions, the majority of our faculty representation are white. So what does that mean, in terms of what are the spaces that we are creating? Also, higher education institutions must recognize that those dominance perspectives are not at all. Those dominant perspectives are there because of the history of higher education system that was built for middle income or high income male, this male people? So what does that mean for us? What does that mean, when you are a first generation? College students? What does that mean? When you are coming from single mother the ground, just like my case, what does it mean when you’re, you know, mother tongue is not English. So it means that you have to overcome different layers of oppression. And if there is depression, we cannot talk about liberation, we cannot talk about mental health, we cannot talk about emotional well being. So I think that also from my perspective, as a researcher, and also my lived experiences as a grad student, developing depression and anxiety during my PhD program, there are many things that higher education must do. And one of the best thing is also they must take responsibility. And they must recognize that many of our students are suffering in silence, not because they are not capable to be successful, but because these dominant perspectives are there to prevent them to grow, are there to prevent them to develop their trueselves, or even to embrace their true identities. So I think that there are several things that higher education can do. And it is not just a matter of budget, because that’s also one of the narratives, right? So it’s like, well, we don’t have budget, we don’t have money. It is not a matter of money, it is a matter of embracing our humanity, it’s a matter of recognizing that we are part of a collective.

Kai Huang 8:03
I think when institutions are thinking about how to support graduate and professional students, a lot of the times things seem to be sort of like a band aid solution, where the, you know, people might name that, you know, a lot of people are experiencing adverse mental health events, or having a difficult time with, you know, many issues with the programs. And instead of addressing the root causes of those issues, sometimes institutions might say something like, Oh, and here’s some access to online therapy, right. And that’s not going to fix what is really causing these problems in the first place. And that’s not going to necessarily improve the experience for students, especially those who are most affected by these issues. So it’s really important to look at what is the root of the issue? And how can we address that rather than how can we just kind of address some of the negative experiences by providing a kind of alternative that isn’t helpful or as helpful as removing the barrier in the first place?

Evelyn Vazquez 9:24
Yes, thank you so much, Kai, for sharing this important aspect. Because just as you mentioned, most of the interventions that have been normalized in higher education are at the individual level. So we are really ignoring the structural factors that exist. So what are the new and older students are coming from low income backgrounds? We know that the cycle of poverty doesn’t disappear. It might take three or four generations to overcome the trauma and not even sometimes a trauma, because sometimes the trauma might not disappear, right. But it is important for us to see what are the institutions doing, for instance, to address basic needs. Right? It’s like access to food access to quality of life, but also to have a home. Like many students, for instance, we talk about homelessness among underrepresented undergraduate students. But we don’t talk about that among graduate and professional students as just because you graduate from college that doesn’t exist. So we have students who are facing homelessness, and institutions are not recognizing that also a matter of asleep. Hey, Kate, Hey, Jen, sorry if I’m mispronouncing that, but our students are not sleeping correctly, because we are normalizing. Academia is so toxic that you lost work all the time, even during the weekends. So that pattern of toxic behaviors is damaging our students. And when we are talking about these communities, that coming from different layers of marginalization, we must recognize all these different structural factors that are preventing them to succeed, that are preventing them, for instance, to attend to conferences, to attend to conferences is super expensive. Yet, in academia, if someone is looking at your CV, and you don’t, you have not attend to conferences. The first though, just as you both mentioned earlier, the first thing that comes into their mind is a deficit perspective, the student is not interested in here, it’s never the factor of is this institute and have it enormous and no resources or enough information to be able to attend those conferences. So it is also important for us to reframe the ways we are seeing our students, and name the things as they are not used BandAids, just as you mentioned, and also to start thinking, for instance, mental health from a collective perspective. What can we do? Like for instance, we in you know, engaging in the academy, we are creating this infrastructure of different stakeholders, we are recognizing that our students are experts, they are patient experts, there is no one else who will know what are the true needs of our students like them. So this is why we are censoring the voices. And this is why we want others to hear what are their real struggles. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of participation or engagement of faculty members. And they are the ones who in many cases are also reproducing toxic and unhealthy behaviors to our students. So what can we do to increase the motivation of faculty to be part of this discussion? So I would like to hear from your perspective, what can we do to make sure that all the voices are there? And so no one can keep justifying the lack of care and the lack of respect to our to our students? Because they don’t know, what are your needs?

Tori 13:28
Yeah, and then it goes back to like what you were saying like these are like structural issues that we are seeing, and that are perpetuated throughout higher education, not just the UC system. So it’s really hard to come up with a solution for these issues, right? We have to think about how the institution of or specifically, since we’re all in the UC system, how to use the target resources. A lot of our resources are provided to undergraduate students. When we know that graduate and professional students struggle a lot financially with basic needs, such as housing, know that we just were on strike for housing, we are on strike to have a living wage. And there however, the institution still promotes that we’re doing better but the resources that are being provided and targeted to you know, to get at food insecurity, basic needs are targeted for undergraduate students. So that’s a larger system wide issue. When they promote their data, and they say, Oh, we’re opening 1500 new beds across the UC system there for undergraduate students. And then we are stressing our need. We need this as graduate and professional students who need it. So as graduate and professional students, however, the institution doesn’t see us first as a student. And that is, that is the biggest issue that we run into. We’re first employees. And then we are students. Because we maintain the function of the campus environment. We’re teaching lectures, we’re grading papers, and we’re ensuring that every department across all campuses have support for their faculty, right. And then we have faculty who were also socialized in a very toxic and environment. And it becomes very normalized with amongst them like, and this is our only, most of the time only sort to communities, our faculty advisors are our faculty mentors, these are our only source of community as graduate and professional students, because our communities are so small, and when they are normalized into a system that is very toxic and very violent, they just, they have normalized it so much that we have to fall into that. And it becomes very detrimental not only for us, as graduate professional students, but for our faculty as well, you know, they’re they uphold standards that not everybody could obtain, especially for one get into the intersections of like race and gender, marginalized gender, folks, women, transgender folks, we just can’t meet those needs, those standards, we just can’t meet them. Because this is like a cyclical, why abuse that happening in our institution. So it’s very hard to come up with an idea on how we would resolve it. Other than what I think as like an abolitionist feature, I believe in abolition, that there has to become bleed dismantle of what we currently have, in order to imagine something new, that we have to be very futuristic in our possibilities. And we might not have the language to create what our future might look like, because we haven’t dismantle that we currently have to create something new. So that’s where my stance is on it. Higher Ed, is really hard to, it’s really hard to care, higher education, because what I believe is iron is functioning the way that it’s supposed to, it’s not broken, it’s functioning the way that it’s supposed to. So it’s really hard to fix something, quote, unquote, fix something that isn’t broken, right, hired function holistically how it’s supposed to. And so my, my thought is, we need to dismantle it, all of it, to create something new.

Evelyn Vazquez 18:06
Yes, I completely agree with you, in the sense of the structures that are upholding the system are made that way, right? Like, if we look at why do people of course they they’re going to find a lot of come forward of how academia works, because you know, what you also have heard about the publish or perish perspective, right? But there is no acknowledgement of community service. Many of us who are marginalized law, love doing community service, because that’s the way that we can find emancipation and liberation, because we want to give back to our communities because we know they deserve better. So, academia is not recognizing that part of ourselves. So, it is neglecting that and also had academia it is normalizing unpaid labor tremendously. If you are a people of color, you have high chances that you will be used as the token for diversity. So it is a lot of capabilities that you will use in all the service committees that they might have to justify their lack of representation and their lack of diversity. So it will be ideal to abolish let it exist. But the truth is that it might take so many years for us to do it. So I think that one of the solutions that we can do is to start calling them out. Many of us leave fearful, we are fearful of rejection, we are fearful of lack of validation. We are fearful of not being able to make it that we must recognize that we are aren’t enough? And that yes, it is true. There are not many safe communities for all us, but they are some. And we must also applaud and celebrate the existence of those communities that are there holding us up. Because many of us, for instance, have informal mentors, yet they are not accounting in our academic lives, right. So like, I’ve never seen, for instance, institutional recognition of all these informal mentors who have not PhD degrees, or MDs, who are giving hopes to our students, what are they? Who cares for them, I know that our students and all us care about them, but the institutions don’t. So whenever we are talking about healing the academy, it is important for us to name things as they are, because otherwise we are going to start behaving like them. Yes,

Tori 20:59
I definitely agree. I, I mean, just from my own experience, being in the UC system for so long, a lot of my unrecognized mentors are my own peers, as black transgender people have sustained sustained me throughout all of my educational career post secondary educational career. The only reason I’m in a Ph. D. program is because of black transgender people, transgender students, and transgender peers, black transgender peers, that have validated my experiences affirmed me and created those little pockets of communities of care that feed me, like food, actual food, and also feed me spiritually, with affirmation with family with intimacy, in ways that the institution, I don’t think knows how to create structurally for everybody, I can even say that I have larger connections with other queer and transgender people across the UC system, whether they’re undergraduates, or they’ve been former students of mine, they have also created little communities of care for me, that, you know, help sustain me, help me help motivate me to move forward and continue to be in the UC system, continue to be a professional and graduate student, you know, making sure that I am safe, safer, happier, and, and taken care of. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.

Kai Huang 22:43
Yeah, I have a very similar experience to where I feel like so much of my support as I navigate, higher education has come from peers in the form of other like queer and trans students, especially other trans students of color, and also from just my other queer and trans community, outside of academia, I feel like, it’s, academia is such a bubble, and we sometimes are very insular, and it’s really nice to go out into the world and kind of not have to think about that and have a nice, you know, Friday night and hang out with my friends or, you know, for example, I go rock climbing, and there’s a monthly meetup that’s put on by a queer organization, and it’s literally just for, like queer and trans people to go rock climbing together, and then have a social after. And it’s so nice to meet other people who are not in academia, and for me to have community outside of the sort of institution, because we spend so much time, you know, doing all of this work and like learning and spend spending a lot of time like on campus, this. And so that’s been very, like, helpful and productive. And I, it was such an important factor when I was deciding what institution to go to. And it was not like, the I mean, there was some factor of like, what level of protections what level of concrete support? What policies right? Does an institution have that supports trans students? But also like, what is the culture like they’re right? For the like, I asked students, I asked so many students at all of the schools that I was interviewing at for medical school, like, what are the faculty like if you correct them, when they’re not using gender inclusive language? What is the like, can people access trans healthcare easily there, right, like not only am I going to be a healthcare provider, but I’m also someone who needs health care myself, right. So that’s, that was Orton, to me and also, like, just, you know, what does the student community look like? This is something that I think institutions don’t do very well as support students and creating community of their own. And that is something that I think is very protective for a lot of students who hold marginalized identities is to find other people who may have similar experiences or identities and to support each other. But it can also be very difficult to kind of have to do that constantly for other people who are also experiencing difficult things. And so, you know, for institutions to create a healthier environment, it’s important to reduce that burden on us, I find that a lot of times people find mentors who maybe also share similar marginalized identities. And while that can be incredibly amazing and important, it can also be very taxing for people when they are like, the one professor, maybe, right, who is supporting so many students, and isn’t getting recognized for that support. Or like when people are, you know, being asked to be on committees, for example, right, like you named earlier, you might be asked to be on like 10 committees, but you’re not getting paid extra for all of that time and effort at work, and your perspective and your very unique perspective that you are bringing. And yet, you’re still expected to be as like, productive as all of the other people who are not doing this additional work. And that’s very draining

Evelyn Vazquez 26:46
for us. Thank you. Yes. And that is definitely also something that prevents us to create or to achieve these healthy Academy, right, this lack of sense of belonging, but also a lack of a sense of community. Like, if you don’t have this notion of you’re part of a community, it’s pretty easy that you get isolated, and that you also develop, or even, that your mental health conditions get even worse, because we know the power of the collective, we know the power of the community. And this is definitely something that higher education must be do better, right? Like they, they can start identifying mech mechanism to start connecting students with others with similar identities or similar interest. So they know that they are not alone, because now we know that we are not alone. But how many years of how many months, takes four holes to assault student to find a community, like I remember, as a grad student, I spent my first two years in isolation, because all the time, I was fearful that I was not going to make it. So of course, that was when I was suffering the most. And that was also the moment when I had suicidal ideation, almost one time a week. And yet no one talks about that. I

Kai Huang 28:19
I think it’s important that research focuses on, like, the ways in which we can be supportive of folks who are navigating these things, and also doesn’t place the emphasis on solutions on the people who don’t have capacity to do a lot of that work, right. Like, I think it’s important that marginalized people are included in the research process, and very much centered throughout it. But the implementation work should not only follow up on the people who are most effective. And so it’s important to identify not just like individual actions that people can take, but also like what are the structural changes that need to occur? And how can people who have more power make that happen?

Tori 28:46
Yes, I definitely. I definitely challenge researchers to move one step beyond just like findings into moving towards solutions. I think there needs to be a lot of what like black scholars call like freedom dreaming. Like we need to start dreaming about ways that we can create a world that like visualizes the future that we want. Instead of like what we currently have, like we need to start moving from, like we know all these isms, racism, whiteness, gender ism, trans antagonism, all of these isms are in play. acting students graduate and professional students, faculty. Doctor, yeah, yeah. So they’re all these isms are impacting graduate and professional students, right. But we have to start moving towards a solution. We can’t spend so much time discussing our marginalization. I think we spend a lot of energy, calling out whiteness calling out white privilege, calling out white people and inadvertently center white, white structures in in trying to build our futures, right. But we need to take it a step further start thinking about our future, we need to start thinking about our endless possibilities that can be generated from something that we know our communities of care are essentially, those possibilities that we generated, right? Those are things that we, in spite of all of these isms that are impacting our mental health, our abilities to engage in our communities, we created those bases. So there’s possibilities that we can create not just on our in our micro loveable communities that we create, but on a broader scale within higher education. So I think the we researchers, I challenge all researchers, even myself to do start centralizing those solutions, start centralizing those possibilities, because if we continue to use a majority of our our dissertations or papers or articles talking about the marginalization that we experience, we sort of give power to those those isms that are impacting our communities.

Evelyn Vazquez 31:52
Yes, thank you. I also would like just to add the importance of be intentional, whenever you are conducting research, be intentional, what are the questions you are asking what are the theoretical frameworks that you are using to conduct your research or also to, you know, the analytical frameworks where you’re you’re using to analyze your data, because what is happening even in research, we are using the same approaches. And those approaches are not going to respond to the question we are asking because we are moving beyond what we know already. So I would say that one recommendation is to keep promoting primary data collection within your own campuses. Because also, the other thing is that we cannot make generalizations based on one campus like for instance, UC Berkeley or UCLA, when we know that students at UC Merced or even at UC Riverside are completely different, different in their backgrounds different in their interests. And so we must hear their voices. So when we are also conducting research, I invite all researchers to start, including in their approaches, transformative approaches, transformative approaches are grounded, or center the voices of the communities that we are working with. So we are not doing research of we are doing research, we’re making sure that we include their voices in that we recognize aware students are experts, they are the experts in their living conditions. I also would like to recommend to start decolonizing our practice as researchers to make sure that the approaches we take are not re-traumatizing the system. If you mentioned earlier, our participants, what are the right questions, if we are, for instance, going to ask questions about suicidality, okay, make sure that the words we are using are the words that are not harming our students. Right. So they are different approaches that we can use as a researchers to make sure that we are decreasing harm, but also to make sure that we are they’re using the tools to of research to a style addressing social justice issues, right. He’s like to make sure that we are there not just to publish, but also to start working with communities so they find the solutions of the problems that are important or relevant for them. So stop this helicopter research, stop going into those marginalized communities, and then extract the information and then go away. If you go and work with them. Remember the responsibility In the commitment that you must have, because I think that also we need to stop researchers of doing that. Don’t allow it. If you would like to participate in research, make sure that you trust the researcher. Sometimes you read the description or the flyer and it’s just beautiful. But then when you route when you read the CB of the researcher, there might be some red flags. So just make sure to be also careful on what service are you responding? And then also just ask, How is this data going to inform future social movements are also how he’s going to keep moving forward with these agenda of social justice and liberation.

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