2023 – ACAM 320B student submissions

July 20, 2023July 21, 2023

How can I learn in a world of color when the text is white?

[H]ealthcare inequities…can be traced back to…the foundational knowledge that future healthcare practitioners are educated on.

Creator:
Ying Jie Li 李颖杰 (she/her)

Guest:
Melody (Chinese heritage, nursing student)

It would be so easy for us to think about health inequities as something situated within clinics and hospitals, especially in terms of the health outcomes. While that is a valid assessment of health inequities, there is much more to these issues. Who are the academics/physicians producing and publishing knowledge? Who are primarily the participants in these medical studies? What demographics is published knowledge based on? What are the identities, perspectives, and experiences of the people serving as frontline medical caregivers? Who are the people who make policy decisions in clinics, hospitals, and government ministries? All of these questions, and many others, colour the health inequities that patients experience. How do we address inequities within the healthcare system when these issues are so systemic? Listen to Ying Jie and her guest tackle these difficult issues, what these issues feel like, and think of what a way forward might look like.

Downloadable file here
Transcript here

July 16, 2023July 20, 2023

Take care of me when I’m older

[H]ow can filial piety be a double-edged sword in the context of caregivers’ mental health?

Host:
Eunice Lai 黎孝詩 (she/hers)

In this podcast submission, Eunice dives into the concept of filial piety within the context of a Hong Kong Canadian family. In particular, filial piety entails expectations about intergenerational caregiving from someone from a younger generation to someone from an older generation, with common interpretations of it requiring an immense level of self-sacrifice at the expense (or disregard) of one’s own well-being. This kind of caregiver role strain becomes compounded when the caregiver themselves is having to manage other issues and demands on their cognitive capacity on top of caregiving tasks. In Eunice’s case, her father took on a caregiving role for his father; but the stress of that role became exacerbated by her father’s own concerns and emotions surrounding the Hong Kong protests in 2019-2020. How does one navigate such an emotionally difficult situation?

Downloadable file here
Transcript here

July 16, 2023July 16, 2023

I don’t want being Asian Canadian to be the only thing they know about me

“[T]hat’ll be the day when we really have that freedom.”

Creator:
Kaitlyn Lee (she/hers)

Guest:
Cathy Huynh

Racialized and minoritized individuals involved in the arts often face a dilemma: On the one hand, being minoritized means feeling external pressure to have to tell stories associated with one’s minority group(s). On the other hand, there is an internal desire to tell stories that are true to themselves as an individual, and not to be known only as their minoritized identity. What does freedom from this dilemma mean? Kaitlyn interviews her friend and Vietnamese Canadian filmmaker, Cathy Huynh, to discuss how these opposing pressures play out in the filmmaking process, how they affect her as a filmmaker, and how she reconciles them.

Downloadable file here
Transcript here