Zoë Fuad is a 2023.5'er, whose independent concentration explores digital communities as sites of resistance. She got her start with community organizing in the Summer of 2020 when she became co-leader of Students for Educational Equity at Brown, where she remains today, and has since taken on the position of Communications Organizer at the Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for Education Justice (ARISE). Most of her time in these positions have been looking at how the resources and privileges afforded by the university can be redistributed to the communities that they owe. It was during this time that she simultaneously recognized the necessity of community – as spaces to rest, breathe, and imagine different futures – and became increasingly interested with how these homeplaces (hooks, 1990) can be created in a place so rooted in harmful logics. Having already learnt a lot from the people she works with (and for whom she's so very grateful!!!), she hopes to tie these goals into her passion with academia in order to strengthen the work already being done.

Project:

Southeast Asian (SEA) communities face disproportionate rates of poverty, racialized criminalization/deportation, and PTSD. These struggles are often overshadowed by the aggregation of “Asian” demographic data and the model minority myth, which posits that Asians have overcome racialized barriers. Consequently, many SEA youth blame themselves, rather than structural inequities, for not reaching typical standards of “success.” Simultaneously, this myth invisibilizes the ways SEA struggles overlap with those facing other BIPOC communities, thereby isolating social movements from each other. By conducting participatory action research with ARISE, a youth advocacy program composed of SEA, Black and Latinx high-schoolers, we aim to examine how civic advocacy programming can mitigate these challenges by increasing youth’s critical consciousness.