Month hopes to engage students with mental health dialogue

For the first time, UC Davis is hosting Mental Health Awareness Month this May as a component of the UC Davis Mental Health Initiative. The month was organized by ASUCD Senator Samantha Chiang, a third-year English and psychology double major, who also successfully planned the first ever UC Davis Mental Health Conference in February.

Chiang started planning the awareness month shortly after the Mental Health Conference. She had a large team of volunteers and board members to assist her in planning the initiative.

According to the The UC Davis Mental Health Initiative Facebook page, the initiative “aims to engage students in destigmatization and education efforts, prompt attendees to organize around mental health issues and offer them the opportunity for self-reflection and healing through mental health discourse.”

In the future, Chiang hopes to start planning earlier for Mental Health Awareness Month so that the preparations for the conference and awareness month can overlap. Funding for the initiative this year came from ASUCD, UC Davis Student Affairs, UC Davis Campus Stores and Acacia Counseling & Wellness. The initiative is comprised of 53 events throughout the month.

“Everyday we have multiple events hosted with different departments, student organizations and centers on campus,” Chiang said. “We’re working with four out of five centers housed within the Student Community Center, […] Student Health and Counseling Services, specifically Health Education and Promotion, Office of Advocacy and Student Representation, Intercollegiate Athletics, as well as all of the mental health organizations on campus — Active Minds, Students Against Suicide and National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).”

Chiang is excited about the “Affirmation in the Dorms” event, in which volunteers will table at various dining commons and encourage students to write positive affirmations to themselves or to other students.

“There’s so much psychological research that shows the good outcomes of writing yourself affirmations as well as writing other folks gratitude letters,” Chiang said.

The keynote speaker from the Mental Health Conference, Monica Porter, an attorney of the Disability Rights Advocates organization, will be returning to Davis to host a Know Your Rights seminar about how mental health fits into the frameworks of disability rights advocacy and legally entitled disability accommodations.

Another event Chiang is looking forward to is having State Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, author of legislation AB 2017, come to campus.

“AB 2017 proposed a $40 million grant […] to go towards mental health in the UC, CSU and community college systems,” Chiang said. “Unfortunately this was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown but Assemblymember McCarty is working on reintroducing this in the budget for this year. Hopefully we’ll be able to see some very tangible outcomes in terms of funding allocated for UC direct mental health services.”

Many events during the awareness month are collaborations with departments on campus. The bookstore will hold a display with sales of Mental Health Awareness Month shirts and a 25 percent discount will be given on books concerning mental health on the first Friday of May. The Coffee House’s drink of the month will be strawberry basil lemonade because the drink’s colors are similar to the Mental Health Awareness Month logo.

Jacklyn Leonardo, a fourth-year neurobiology, physiology and behavior major and NAMI president, got involved after feeling the need to help raise awareness which will in turn allow students to help themselves and others. Leonardo believes that while it is not possible to completely break the negative stigma against mental health in such a short duration, the Mental Health Awareness Month can educate the students on available support and allows people to learn more about mental health clubs on campus.

“Mental health isn’t something that people know how to talk about, and if we have a whole month dedicated to it, it gives everyone space and time to slowly learn the dialogue,” Leonardo said via email. “It’s been so shunned that many don’t even know what the stigma actually is and if they have it at all.”

Emily Prieto-Tseregounis, the assistant vice chancellor and chief of staff to the vice chancellor of student affairs, met Chiang on The Council on Student Affairs on Fees (COSAF) and is also involved with the mental health initiative.

“We are funding a pretty big portion of the mental health awareness month,” Prieto-Tseregounis said.

Prieto-Tseregounis explained that it is a priority of the Division of Student Affairs to increase mental health awareness and resources for students. Prieto-Tseregounis explained that there will be a new executive director of health and wellness starting July 1.

“She has been charged with making this an absolute top priority to address the overall physical and mental health of the students,” Prieto-Tseregounis said. “She will be looking [to make sure] we have the leadership in place, the resources and support to be in the best place to support our students.”

Each week’s events for the Mental Health Awareness Month are available on the event page and there will be tabling every day from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m at the Memorial Union.
Written by: Jayashri Padmanabhan — campus@theaggie.org

Research on SEaB’s FLEXIBUSTER to be conducted at U.S. Naval Base in Ventura County

In order to tackle food waste concerns, UC Davis researchers are collaborating with the SEaB Energy company to install sustainable energy technology at a United States Naval Base in Ventura County this fall.

Making its way from Southampton, United Kingdom, SEaB’s FLEXIBUSTER is an anaerobic digester (AD) designed to convert organic waste into energy and heat for immediate use, according to the SEaB website. Through grant-funded research by the California Energy Commission, the principal investigator, UC Davis Associate Professor Edward Spang, will lead his team in studying the AD at a prototypical scale from Oct. 18, 2017 to Oct. 18, 2021.

“This is a prestigious win for SEaB Energy and gives us coast-to-coast visibility in the US where we already have a burgeoning pipeline of contracts to fulfil this year,” said Sandra Sassow, the SEaB Energy CEO and co-founder, in a press release. “British engineering and manufacturing has an important place in the U.K. economy, and we’re very proud to be creating jobs and exporting worldwide.”

As an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology and the associate director at the Center for Water-Energy Efficiency, Spang was interested in the research because he believes that there is potential for many prevention efforts to address food waste. His concerns lay in the fact that 30 to 40 percent of food in the U.S. is misused, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture website.

Spang stressed the importance of finding alternative disposal methods of organic waste to prevent greenhouse gas emissions by methane.

“The project is focusing on this issue of diverting organic waste […] away from landfills,” Spang said. “There’s always going to be food waste. This project was looking into how we can take some of those food waste streams and convert it back into reusable resources as energy.”

The research will be conducted in Ventura County with the help of Biodico, a sustainable energy and biodiesel production company, as it already has a cooperative research and development agreement with the US. Navy. Additionally, Biodico has a preexisting network of food waste providers from the naval base and other institutions in the area that will be suitable for Spang’s research.

“Our company philosophy is [to] produce clean energy from locally available resources,” said Trey Teall, the vice president of operations at Biodico.

The physical FLEXIBUSTER will be at the naval base for Biodico to operate the system and aid in the collection of data. However, it will be monitored remotely by the research team in Davis to evaluate and improve the AD’s performance on a larger scale.

“[We will evaluate] the potential economic and environmental costs and benefits of deploying this size of technology versus some of the larger technologies that we’re familiar with,” Spang said.

Though Spang’s team consists of only a few UC Davis faculty, their study will be shared with the campus community through presentations. Student teams will also have the opportunity to contribute to the research. Spang said the team will use SEaB’s small-scale AD’s to determine how the system would work in full force.

“There’s a tradeoff between energy required to transport the food waste to the anaerobic digestion site and the amount of energy actually produced by the digester,” Spang said. “There’s a value in keeping the digester closer to the waste source so you don’t lose energy in its transport.”

Andy Pyke, the SEaB sales manager, said the project will hopefully prove the “viability of [..] converting organic waste into energy.”

“It really is a privilege to be involved with an American university and have our technology be brought out to California,” Pyke said.

Spang hopes the research will yield promising results for the future of recycling organic waste through sustainable energy technology.

“We do have quite a bit of wasted energy, water and food,” Spang said. “[But] there’s a lot of potential for us to be more efficient across these resources [and] for cities and communities to be more sustainable.”

Written by: Jeanna Totah — campus@theaggie.org

Liza Grandia’s research will merge social, environmental sciences to study the intersection of toxicology, rights of indigenous communities  

Liza Grandia, an associate professor of Native American Studies, recently received a $270,000 New Direction Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation for her research proposal entitled “Toxic Trespass.”

In her proposal, Grandia detailed the goals of her research.

“[I’ll work] at the interstices of environmental justice, Native American and indigenous studies, and cultural anthropology […] for building new transnational alliances based on mutual vulnerabilities to environmental hazards,” Grandia said.

Grandia will begin her research by spending a year at UC Davis taking toxicology and environmental epidemiology courses.

Zoila Mendoza, a professor and the chair of the Native American Studies Department, expressed her appreciation for the topic that Grandia’s research focuses on.

“UC Davis and the department of Native American Studies are fortunate to have among the faculty people like Professor Grandia who is a committed and engaged scholar who works closely with indigenous communities that rely on informed and effective interlocutors like her in order to fight for their rights and a better future,” Mendoza said via email.

The intersection of different educational spheres particularly interests Grandia.

“At UC Davis, there is an aspiration to bring the humanities and social sciences together with the hard sciences, and I hope to do that,” Grandia said to UC Dateline.

This opportunity will enable her to become “a more productive interlocutor” between indigenous communities and the environmental health sciences.

Mendoza conveyed the same sentiments regarding the importance of an intersectional understanding of socio-cultural and scientific circumstances when approaching issues of human-induced environmental hazard.

“It is certainly crucial in the case of any kind of community, because science and understanding of human and social behavior have to go hand in hand in order to develop strategies that work and that are sustainable,” Mendoza said via email. “Indigenous communities around the world need to have access to knowledge such as that which will come out of Professor Grandia’s interdisciplinary research in order to fight for their lives and rights which are constantly threatened by corporate interests.”

Although some of the courses Grandia will be taking are out of her field, she is nevertheless excited to learn material that will ameliorate her knowledge about toxicology.

“I need to put some organic chemistry where my mouth is,” Grandia said. “In a world in which corporations have released 85,000 chemicals into the environment, I’m interested in looking at the chronic impact it has on our everyday life and rais[ing] awareness about the greater injustices suffered by indigenous people and people of color from environmental hazards.”

According to Grandia, the acquired knowledge from the science courses will “enhance the scientific rigor” of her ongoing research with the Q’eqchi’ Maya people and also help her start her ethnography project on “ordinary people’s cultural perceptions of the risks associated with toxic chemicals in everyday life.”

Grandia further elaborated that in her role as a “translator” between anthropology and environmental science, she strives to know enough about the assumptions behind the science in order to learn the cutting edge environmental health research. By doing so, she aims to connect researchers with indigenous communities.

“In a complex, corporate-dominated world we have to understand the forces of globalization and nationalism that are pinging on the sovereignty and wellbeing of indigenous people,” Grandia said.

Grandia’s attempt to acquire an intersectional understanding of the social and hard sciences sheds light on the importance of a holistic perspective when approaching issues like the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

“The kinds of environmental injustices that indigenous people routinely suffer through the hemisphere and that the native people in America have suffered for a long time just made news this time,” Grandia said.

Grandia recounted her time in Guatemala when a Palm Oil company deforested the rainforest and exuded one of the very few illegal pesticides into the river. This contamination action resulted in the accumulation of several dead species which cost $10 million.

“No one bothered to measure the pesticide in the water,” Grandia said. “It would be helpful to provide the hard data to be used in legal settings but also in political and social movements to validate the citizen science that indigenous people have long had as they compare stories and take note of the health impact in their own lives. In certain political and social jurisdictions [the scientific data] is needed to validate the local understanding of pollution.”

Grandia’s proposal states that she will use a legal principle called “free prior informed consent” (FPIC) from the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in order to “draw attention to the non-consensual presence of synthetic chemicals in the bloodstreams of indigenous peoples […] and virtually everyone else on the planet.”

This inspiration stemmed from an unfortunate turn of events when Grandia was unexpectedly diagnosed with lymphoma. As a result, she was required to go through chemotherapy, which sparked her idea to investigate toxicology.

“To commit to chemo is an act of voluntary poisoning,” Grandia said. “Somewhat consensual, but somewhat not. […] Pumping poisons into my blood that were damaging to my health […] [made me think about] the body burden we are all carrying around, with hundreds of synthetic chemicals in it without permission.”

Grandia is interested in an unconventional approach to the regulation of chemicals in the human body. She would like to explore the interactive effects of the many chemicals that are present in the bloodstream at low doses.

This approach would contrast the single chemical regulation method that measures blood for a particular exposure.

“[This idea is] very new in the environmental sciences, and I think it’s very provocative,” Grandia said. “[I]t has the potential to mobilize new constituencies around environmental chemicals.”

According to Grandia, her efforts for environmental justice take place during a critical point in history when it is important to not only be environmentally conscious but also politically active.

“I think the discourse about eliminating two environmental regulations […] is quite insidious and an ideology we’re going to have to contend with for a long time,” Grandia said. “For every personal defense mechanism that we do to protect our environmental health we need to take steps to protect that civically […] so if you commit an act of green consumerism you should write two letters to Congress at the same time because otherwise we’re not going to push back the anti-regulatory tide.”

Mendoza believes that Grandia’s research will be very successful in bringing attention to environmental and health-related issues.

“Professor Grandia’s research will contribute greatly to bridge tremendous gaps between the knowledge that exists in different disciplines, specifically in our campus, and the results will be a well-argued and well-researched corpus of knowledge that will be appealing for large audiences and that will have effects in policies and actions,” Mendoza said.

Written by Kimia Akbari — campus@theaggie.org

Workshop seeks to build awareness, understanding about racism

Students of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersex Asexual Resource Center (LGBTQIARC) held a workshop titled “Dismantling White Supremacy: Part 1” on April 19.

The workshop’s purpose was to build awareness and understanding around issues of race, racism and white supremacy as well as to discuss ways to combat these issues.

Beth Boylan, graduate student in the Department of Sociology, and Matt Reese, a third-year linguistics and Chinese double major, work together at the LGBTQIARC and presented the workshop.

“I felt that I haven’t done enough relating to race and racism,” Boylan said when asked why she decided to hold the workshop.

In the first section of the workshop, the presenters defined key terms, which included white supremacy, racism and oppression. They pointed out that racism is intrinsically connected to the systematic imbalance of power.

During this section, workshop participants were each given a copy of Peggy McIntosh’s “Privilege Checklist,” which is a document that allows students to see how privileged they are based on how they answer a series of statements. These statements include “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color and have them more or less match my skin” and “I can turn on the television or open the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.”

The audience and presenters discussed the difference between oppression of people of color versus what might be perceived as “oppression” toward white people. The presenters pointed out that, because racism must be related to the systematic imbalance of power, the oppression that white people might experience (such as bullying) is importantly different from systematic racism.

In the second part of the workshop, the presenters talked about the different dimensions of identity using an atom model with one’s race, sexual orientation, class and other factors surrounding one’s core identity.  

Next, the presenters discussed the intersectionality of identities. One example in their PowerPoint was how a disabled African American woman would face various combined forms of oppression relating to her ableness, race and gender.

Toward the end of the workshop, the presenters showed a video about the history of the word “Caucasian.”

The workshop ended with a discussion of how students can be an accomplice — someone who actively takes a stand against racism — rather than simply an ally.

“I like how it [the workshop] provided a lot of concrete basics to talk about oppression and racism,” said Faryal Irfan, a fourth-year anthropology major. “It means a lot […] I’ve been dealing with staying silent when I could have stepped out against microaggression and racism I saw in my daily life but I didn’t have the language or way to bring up how uncomfortable I felt and why I felt what they were doing was wrong.”

This workshop was part one of a series of workshops the LGBTQIARC plans to hold. Future workshop topics will include microaggression and family.

“Racism is often hidden from those who do not experience it,”  Reese said. “I wanted to educate other white people on racism and clear up myths regarding the issue.”

Written by: Clara Zhao — campus@theaggie.org