Chang Prize

A Toolkit for Telling an Alternate Institutional History

by Niv KarthikeyanThis third quarter of my Chang Prize project has been both preparatory and reflective. I have been glad to look forward to my upcoming digital publication, “Fragile Solidarities,” and dive into archival work for it. The past few months have thus seen...

Student Support Text Line

Preethi Periyakoil (BS ’18) It seems fitting that this Chang Prize update fall in the month of September, which is widely recognized as Suicide Prevention Month. Over the past three years, as I have had the invaluable opportunity to serve as a crisis counselor both at...

Intersections: From My ‘Personal Archive’

by Niv KarthikeyanThe last seven months have been transformative. To give you a taste of the projects I have been working on, the communities I have connected with, and the ways that my experiences have allowed me to start reimagining both myself and the world, I...

Archiving Communities of Resilience and Resistance in Caltech’s Present & Past

This panel marked the end of the first quarter of my 2020 Chang Prize project, “Intersections” – a project that I imagined would explore the ways that recording and remembering community histories could inform, ground, and inspire new forms of solidarity building. I...
Write Your Health

Write Your Health

There’s an introspection that occurs when you write and discover things about your past that start to combine into a complex tapestry of trauma, pain, but also humor and light. This is not what I set out to do initially when I began the MFA in Bilingual Creative Writing at UTEP, but it’s something that has emerged through my first two years in the program. I have more insight into my thought process, and the memories that are welling up don’t plague me as much.

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Greening the Golden State

Greening the Golden State

In the first quarter of my project, “Understanding and Alleviating Environmental Inequality in Underprivileged Communities,” I was able to explore different facets of the fight for environmental justice while contributing to the efforts in my local community.

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