Terri Bailey is a Yaya, community advocate, educator, poet, and second-year MA student. In addition to her studies, she continues working with her nonprofit the Bailey Learning and Arts Collective (BLAAC2basics.com), and BLAAC’s 1st official program, The Queens Room Women’s Empowerment Group (queensroom.org). Terri has been busy working on distributing heirs property information in gentrified communities in Gainesville, reading poetry and hosting art and community education events such as the Independence Day Sip and Create and Warrior Women’s Wellness: Self-care for the Divine Feminine. She participated in the recent Women’s March by reading poetry and giving away menstrual products, self-care booklets and masks. Her MA project is entitled The Manifesto of the Divine Feminine and the Laws of S.H.E. (self-care, healing, empowerment).
Priya Gurjar is a second-year MA student working on her thesis project under the supervision of committee chair Dr. Maddy Coy. Priya’s research explores the healing narratives that emerge in the wake of sexual violence. This semester, she will continue her research and graduate assistantship work.
Bailey Haas is a second year student in the Women’s Studies MA program. She is currently working on her non-thesis project under the supervision of Dr. Broad. Her project aims to explore the role of self work and healing in working in coalition with others towards social change. She will spend her remaining semesters in the program producing a podcast that will feature conversations with activists and organizers about their experiences. She hopes to center a queer disabled feminist perspective in her project.
Maria Saldana is a second-year Women’s Studies MA student. She is currently working on her thesis which centers the cuentos from the Queer Peruvian Diaspora under the supervision of committee chair, Dr. Jillian Hernandez. She will continue her research and aims to work full-time with her community doing healing and storytelling work.
Jess Trochez (she/they) is a second year Women’s Studies MA candidate. Their scholarship interrogates the colonial violence against queer communities in Central America, currently focusing on Honduras for their MA project. Her project centers sex workers and the creative, collective ways they promote their wellness and liberation such as through poetry, performance, and grassroots organizations. Positioning sex work as a site of queer resistance and decolonization, sex work illuminates and unravels the racialized heteropatriarchal values of Honduras, reminding of Honduras’ colonial legacy enforced by U.S. imperialism, in the violent targeting of sex workers.
Lucy Xie is a second year MA student and TA in the Women’s Studies program at the University of Florida. She studies the experience of racism and sexism in transnational Chinese American families that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. In her free time, she loves to roller skate, cook, and create jewelry.