Many communities of color have been disenfranchised as a result of interactions with the criminal legal system. While many studies have shown that access to higher education reduces recidivism and encourages upward mobility, a very small percentage of this impacted population are actually able to access institutions of higher education. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to address the disparate representation of system-impacted individuals in higher education. This project aims to answer and begin to respond to the following questions: 1) What are the challenges and outright barriers for system-impacted students who wish to continue their education at UW? 2) What can UW do to make it a feasible destination for students who are system-impacted? This research project includes: the collection and analysis of existing data on system-impacted individuals and access to higher education; interviews with UW administrative offices that may play a role in the access to higher education for system-impacted individuals. Thereafter, a working group consisting of: system-impacted individuals; system-impacted students; students interested in criminal justice reform; and UW faculty interested in criminal justice reform; will form and implement strategies on how to lower institutional barriers and create clearer pathways to the UW for system impacted-individuals. By building partnering strategies with the UW community, the goal of the Pathways to UW project is to develop more clearer and transparent pathways for individuals who have been system-impacted to enroll on UW campuses. I want to ultimately build a community and a working network on campus that supports access and welcomes individuals impacted by the criminal and immigration system. Currently, there is no system in place on campus that supports such a marginalized population. To have such a system in place would address many racial and class disparities among the marginalized communities these impacted individuals traditionally come from.

This is a decolonized narrative based on a three year body of collaborative work as a Native Student Advocate in community college and university student leadership programs. This paper will allow for Native American and Alaska Native students/faculty/staff (community members) to speak for themselves and to indigenize the way that Indigenous “research” is presented. The research question is more of a statement that has surfaced from the community, and so space is created for naming and documenting institutional racism, bias, and self-protective practices. Many Administrators, Department Chairs, Faculty, and Staff continue to cling to a one-sided narrative formulated by white cis-male society that has best suited the US federal and state governments and its institutions for centuries. Textbooks written, approved, and published by white cis-male faculty are allowed to dictate classroom conversations that are white-sided in perspective and perpetuate assaultive language on Indigenous lives and continue to create a dangerous environment for Native community members. This paper will speak to “decolonization” as a buzzword for work in diversity, equity and inclusion mission statements without disembedding settler logic so ingrained in higher education institutions. As a performative act of equity, Native community members are often called upon to speak for over 560+ tribes with different languages, cultural protocols, and cosmologies--only to be bullied or “corrected” when their truth does not suit the ideations of the institution. Decolonized writings and presentation styles by Indigenous scholars and authors will be invoked to support the body of work. It is my hope and utmost intention to create space to allow Indigenous voices to be heard by stating plainly our/their experiences without worry of dominant society conventions and opinions and to collaboratively claim self-determination on presentation of an Indigenized Research narrative that is respectful, relational, and responsible to the Indigenous community it engages.

The works of authors who blur the academic and the personal are often called genre-busting. Conferred that radical title, these authors occupy a liminal space in form and method. This is where I see a pivot to chart a course between recent discourses on queer affect and the potential of positionality in academic research. I will approach and put into dialogue Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue to analyze the link between methodology and form, and attend to the places where scholarship oozes personhood. My own method will be partly autoethnographic, coupled with textual analysis that mobiliizes queer and ecofeminist discourses. I will explore how genre-busting writers navigate autographic and academic writing to package and represent experience, thinking nimbly about how they communicate interiority. What kind of vulnerability does this mode of writing perform? This dialogue will be extended to the cultivation of an environmental ethics, in which I propose that writers who write between genres have mapped modes of vulnerability and rupture that are vital to a sustainable discourse.

Uruguay’s history as a place of refuge for European Jews fleeing antisemitism during the first half of the twentieth century and the rise of global fascism has been understudied. As survivors and children of survivors are now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, there is an urgency to record their stories. Some of these migrants fled Europe as early as the 1920s, while others arrived in Uruguay shortly after the war, surviving alone or with family members. Working with a team of student and faculty researchers who are studying the experiences of Jewish migrants now residing in the Hogar Israelita, a former orphanage and home for the aged founded in 1937 and current nursing home in Montevideo, I have translated primary and secondary documents for my non-Spanish-speaking professor as well as conducted historical research. I am helping build the photos and recordings that we collected in January into a digital project. I’ve worked to situate these individual stories within a greater history to understand how political tensions of the time period and ideology of the government affected individuals and their families. US immigration policy, which significantly restricted Jews from entry beginning in 1924, directly affected Uruguayan policy, which remained largely open to Jews until 1937. As Jewish immigrants arrived, the presence of antisemitism increased through restrictive policies and pressure from the Catholic Church, despite the government’s denial of racism and antisemitism. Study of previously recorded testimonies recorded in Spanish of Jewish immigrants, both before and after fleeing Europe, reveals the creation of organizations aimed to ease the transition of immigrants as well as women’s associations and orphanages. The newly collected testimonies of the residents of Hogar, their families, and the staff, bring additional insight and nuance into our understanding of the Holocaust, the Jewish diaspora, identity, and migration.