From: Out in STEM Date: February 26 Subject: O4U Guests This Wednesday + Radical Self Care
Queers Read This!
Hi, radicals! Thank you, ExxonMobil for this lovely February weather! What is that snake-like noise?? I thought it was Taylor Swift, but I’d also hear the engine of a private jet if it was her (/s pls don’t crucify me swifties). Ohhh it’s the alliterative resonance of everyone talking about oSTEM’s Spring Speaker Series starting so soon!!
This Week
O4U Guest Speakers this Wednesday at 7 pm in LeChase 161!!!
We’re starting the series strong with our guests, Francine Marie Reyes Vega and Caleb Triche, who will be speaking about their work with Out 4 Undergrad. O4U is an amazing non-profit organization that’s dedicated to helping high-achieving LGBTQ+ undergrads reach their full potential professionally and interpersonally, specifically through their legendary conferences. Caleb Triche (he/they) is Technical Project Manager at Blue Origin outside of Seattle, WA. Caleb first received a BA in International Relations from the University of Southern California, but then went on to pursue a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from New York University. Before their current role at Blue Origin, they held a variety of positions, such as Product Management Specialist, Project Engineer, and Engineering Execution Specialist, at companies like Honeywell, AECOM, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Caleb has been involved in oSTEM since they were an undergrad and was a corporate sponsor + conference mentor at O4UE in 2023. Francine Marie Reyes-Vega (she/her) is a Mechanical Engineer at Logistic Services International (LSI) in Jacksonville, FL. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus during which she attended the 2017 & 2018 O4U Engineering Conferences as a student, to then participate as a volunteer in 2020. She was an O4U Admissions Director from 2021-2023, and this year she is the Director of O4U’s MOSAIC and TRANSFORM programs (for queer BIPOC and trans/gender diverse attendees).
Join us this Wednesday at 7 pm in LeChase 161 to learn from these icons talk about being queer POC in STEM, how to make the most of conferences & orgs like O4U, and answer your questions! Afterwards, we’re doing a lil workshop to start your application with the help of our student panel of oSTEM members who have gone to O4U’s conferences! You don’t have to stay for the whole thing, but you don’t wanna miss this slay event. Note that Francine will be joining us via Zoom, but we will not record the meeting per our member privacy standards.
Coming Up
oSTEM
- Website
Browse through our CCC website to take advantage of our compiled Resources & Opportunities (scholarships, conferences, etc.), read more about our iconic E-Board, and find other general oSTEM links. The website is regularly updated, if you spot any issues or know of an R&O we haven’t included, our Feedback Form is always open!
University
- SAIC’s Social Justice and Religion Banquet: This Saturday
The Students’ Association for Interfaith Cooperation (SAIC) is hosting a banquet focused on Social Justice and Religion this Saturday (March 2) from 6 - 8 pm on the river level of the Interfaith Chapel. For this event, we will be bringing in speakers from organizations in the community that engage in social justice work with a faith-based lens to speak to the interplay between religion and social justice in their lives and work. We’re co-sponsoring the banquet and E-Board will be there if you wanna join!
In the News
TW: The second In the News entry below discusses death, hate crime, and violence. • The BIC’s LGBTQ+ Leadership L&D: L&D Description + Kris & Col on WXXI News
The BIC held their iconic LGBTQ+ Leadership Lecture & Dinner last week featuring Kris Hayashi, former Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center and current director of Advocacy and Action for the National LGBTQ Task Force. As a public transgender POC with over 20 years of movement-building, leadership, and organizing experience under his belt, the wisdom and stories he shared were such queer gems we hope you also enjoyed! oSTEM contributed the most registrations by any student org, go queer nerds (we loved seeing sm familiar faces)!! • Mourning Nex Benedict:Them Article + HRC Article
Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old non-binary student at Owasso High School in Owasso, Oklahoma, was brutally and viciously beaten inside a school bathroom on February 7, 2024. Text messages from the night of the fight describe them getting jumped by three bullies picking on Nex and their friends, a fight breaking out, and the school not reporting the incident to the police or taking anyone to the hospital. Nex died the next day after being rushed to the hospital, and an official cause of death has not been released.
Nex reportedly enjoyed cooking, spending time in nature, playing with their cat Zeus, watching The Walking Dead, and playing Minecraft. They were a straight-A student. Alongside family, friends, and countless advocates across the nation, we mourn their death as we seek answers and accountability.
Radical Self Care: Vital Political Warfare
Sometimes I feel like I’m living on a different star from the one I am used to calling home. It has not been a steady progression. I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not a self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
- Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
Audre Lorde’s pioneer work in crip/queer theory, radical feminism, and civil rights activism is extensive and serves as a great resource for intersectional academia as a Black feminist lesbian poet and theorist. The quote above is from the titular section of her book A Burst of Light: And Other Essays, where she establishes self care as deeply political and based in multiply-marginalized experiences to evaluate the entanglement (parallels) between race and disability. Lorde’s notion of radical self care is physical and mental, purposeful, necessary, political, and resistant to normative, capitalist ideals that stand in opposition to the wellness of marginalized people.
Lorde frames her cancer as a result and extension of the state-sanctioned systems that aim to contain and exploit specific communities for capitalist profit (re: Bio/Nero-politics as the state’s policing of livelihood and death). Through this intersectional lens, care inherently becomes political on an individual and communal scale. Consequently, disability and race are inextricably linked where both are defined through stigmatized traits by social conditions contoured by capitalist, neoliberal devaluation.
I love how Audre Lorde’s work here also works in dialogue with crip of color critique that also necessitates care for communities the state hasn’t meant for to survive, let alone thrive. Lorde’s work helps me remove unneeded capitalistic focus for profit and productivity that limits my (and my communities’) journey to joy.
Coming from a single-parent, low-income, immigrant family, the responsibility of breaking the cycle of poverty so my family can move out of a mobile home literally built in 1960 (valued at $730) has ingrained a capitalist drive in me that’s taken years to (partly) dismantle. Now, the Office of Disability Resources, UHS, UCC, and several other UR departments/offices have gotten very familiar with me addressing institutional shortcomings and incompetence (but those are stories for another day, feel free to reach out if they’re giving you pushback).
Layered with even more intersecting identities devalued biopolitically, it’s politically vital for us to slow down, rest, and care for ourselves, in order for us to care for our community.
