Opinion

At 21, I’ve had a lot of jobs. In-N-Out Burger, Trader Joe’s, selling chocolate milk at a Farmers Market and  a handful of other gigs with local Mom & Pops stores. Working while in college can be difficult due to demands on our time, but I feel lucky about the fact that I’ve had so […]

So far I’ve talked a lot about recognizing and deconstructing behaviors and thought patterns reliant on forms of oppression and marginalisation like racism, femmephobia, sexual entitlement, monosexism and a whole bunch of other -isms and -phobias. But I don’t think I’ve actually addressed how to go about holding ourselves and others accountable for participating in […]

As a member of a minority group in the U.S., I have many relatives with firsthand experience of the structural violence within medical institutions. Structural violence refers to the way the mechanisms of social structures harm or disadvantage people from meeting their basic needs. Such structures would include, but are not limited to, the school […]

Over the last three years here at UC Davis, I have learned a lot about myself, and in particular, a lot about who I want to be. They say college is the time when you really get to know yourself and explore different ways of living in order to figure out where you belong in […]

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunlight flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you And the storms their energy While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” John Muir Mountains  have always held a special place in the hearts and imaginations […]

It is fact that one in six females will get raped at some point during their lifetime. And every 107 seconds, another rape occurs in America. So I don’t know about you, but reading those statistics motivates me to pretty much do whatever I can to be one of the OTHER 5 people who won’t […]

To conclude this series of columns relating to oppressive ideologies and behaviors connected to the LGBTQIA+ community and because it’s Pride Month, I want to talk about something more directly related to sexuality than gender – monosexism and bi/pan/poly-phobia (a term I recently learned). Not to be confused with sexism, monosexism is a discriminatory idea/practice […]

Diet talk is everywhere. You hear or read about it in a variety of settings. Even a simple commute to the grocery store might result in unsolicited dietary advice. For instance, at the market, you may encounter advertisements or overhear a person’s weight loss experience. On the road, you might see diet programs plastered on […]

One thing I’ve always loved about hiking in the great outdoors is how friendly all the people you meet on the trail tend to be. It doesn’t matter how old they are or how big their group is; when you pass another human being on the trail, they’re more than likely going to smile and […]

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about intersections. Specifically, the places where people, objects and ideas converge to produce some sort of result. The interesting thing about intersections is that some are visible while others aren’t. For instance, how we express ourselves physically might differ from the way we communicate emotionally, and […]

It’s almost electric, that shiver down my spine when I’m out walking on a dark night. Traversing a starlit marsh or wood, the eerie stillness is breached only faintly by the occasional owl or whip-poor-will. Although some, like my dad, are astronomers and lovers of the quiet night, the dark was always my biggest fear […]

What is it about medical categories that makes them so powerful? Why are people, particularly from the U.S., so confident in their accuracies? Why is it that simply getting the name right makes all the difference in the experience of illness? And why does it give people the right to hierarchize the way things are […]