In this episode, we invited a pair of first year PhD students from Ethnic Studies in UC Berkeley. The first guest is AJ Kurdi, who is originally from Hungary. He had extensive grass-root organizing experience before joining the PhD program. His research focuses on how ethnic minority queer organizing shapes the priorities and political orientations of mainstream LGBTQI movements and public policies.

Our second guest is Derek Wu, who came from a theology and divinity background. A second generation Taiwanese Bay Area local, he is interested in the intersection of AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) communities and religion. 

Terms mentioned
- Book: Asian Americans and the spirit of racial capitalism by Jonathan Tran
- Structural injustice: The violence and harm that result from the political, economic, cultural, military, and other structures of society that have developed historically and are arranged in ways that enable some people to have vastly more access than others to resources, tools for acquiring resources, and the power to determine the terms of common life (from World Encyclopedia of Law).
- Positionality: Roughly, the social and political context that creates one's identity and how that identity influences and biases the perception of and outlook on the world. 

Credits
Host | Xiaoyue Zhu
Edit | Xiaoyue Zhu
Theme music | Cody Cook, Zhiwei Li
Cover | Generated using DALL.E2

Twitter: @ResearchJourne1
Website: researchjourney.org
If you’d like to be our next guest, please email us at researchjourneyinitiative@gmail.com

Thank you for listening.