Event

Please join us for the Food for Thought Talks Series Fall 2024 with the Asian American Studies Undergraduate Research Fellows 2024-2025. 

ASAM Fellow Fariha Nawar presents: "OCA-Asian American Pacific Advocates Summer Internship Program"

Lunch will be provided for all registrants! Please RSVP  and join us in person or  join us by Zoom here!

Bio:

Fariha Nawar (she/her) is a senior in the College majoring in Political Science and English, and minoring in Comparative Literature. She grew up in Vermont, and now lives in upstate New York. She aspires to be an advocate in the human rights field and is interested in comparative politics, political theory, and the literature, politics, and history of the Global South. At Penn, Fariha has been heavily involved in the Asian American community through being founder and former President of Penn Bangla, former Political Chair of the Asian Pacific Student Coalition, and on the ASAM UAB. She has conducted international human rights research for Perry World House's Borders and Boundaries Project and is an SNF Paideia Fellow. You can generally find her performing her spoken word poetry with the Excelano Project, exploring every bookstore within a 50-mile radius, or convincing the people around her that tea is infinitely better than coffee.

Abstract: 

OCA—Asian Pacific American Advocates is the second-oldest U.S. civil rights organization advocating for the civil, political, and economic rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs). Selected for the OCA Summer Internship cohort, Fariha spent the summer working for the National Council for Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA) and engaging in a multitude of advocacy efforts, including researching disinformation narratives surrounding data disaggregation, pushing for congressional legislation reducing barriers to accessing mental health treatment within AANHPI communities, and facilitating dialogue around AANHPI advocacy work at the 2024 OCA National Convention. Her internship culminated in a research project emphasizing parallels between historic and current anti-imperialist student movements, and compliments her summer spent coalition-building for the collective empowerment of AANHPIs.