Our Bodies, Our Stories: Reproductive Justice with Vayla New Orleans
By Syna Pal
This fall, I had the opportunity to continue working with Vayla New Orleans as a reproductive justice intern. My co-intern Aimee Bowling and I work on a podcast titled “Our Bodies, Our Stories,” which aims to create a space for important conversations in the reproductive justice realm, specifically through an AAPI lens.
The internship has been an enriching experience that not only allowed me to help educate on the subject but also allowed me to learn and grow both as an advocate and an individual. However, over the course of my several internship terms, I have learned that working in this field definitely has its ups and downs. Sometimes, it is easy to feel as if the work we are doing isn’t having any real impact on the world. That is why Aimee and I took a different approach to the podcast this year. Instead of simply focusing on education (which, while important, has several avenues), we decided to take a more critical-thinking approach to the podcast, both for us and our audience. Instead of simply sharing information, we tried to question things more deeply- how do we know what we know, why is it structured like this, in our research who do we consider as experts, and so on. This semester, we spoke about the intersection of environmental and reproductive justice, the role of popular media in shaping our biases, and intersex justice. This approach did make it a lot harder to write out episode scripts and took much longer, resulting in us only publishing a few new episodes this semester. However, we learned a lot more after adopting this approach and hope that our readers did too.
Overall, I once again had a great experience working with VAYLA. I loved getting more involved with the organization and its different departments. I cannot wait to work with them again. This is the link to the Podcast; I hope you enjoy listening to it 🙂