Becca Williams Oral History Interview, February 17, 2021

NICO ENRIQUEZ: This interview is being video recorded as a component of classwork assigned for the course, "The Hidden History of Women at Oregon State University." Once completed the interview will be deposited into the permanent historical record at the OSU Library Special Collections and Archives Research Center. The interview will also be described with a biographical sketch, interview abstract, and detailed index and made freely available to the public through a dedicated web portal. During the Covid-19 era we are asking narrators to provide verbal consent rather than signing paper permission forms. Do you agree to allow this interview to be preserved, described, and made freely available online as indicated?

BECCA WILLIAMS: Yes. I agree.

NE: Awesome. Well, why don't we begin by you telling us who you are?

BW: Sure. My name is Becca Williams. I use she/her pronouns. I'm 00:01:00currently the director of the Oregon State University's Survivor & Advocacy Resource Center. I've been in this position since September of 2019. Still feels kind of recent, although it has been about a year and a half.

NE: Cool. Tell me about your childhood. Where did you grow up?

BW: I grew up in Santa Barbara, California, which is technically the central coast, although I'm sure a lot of them will say it's Southern California. It's really not. It's a little coastal community, or it was a lot smaller when I was growing up there, a little beach town. My mom was also born and raised there as well. I lived there on and off throughout my life, definitely the first 18 years and then for a couple bursts of time after that as 00:02:00well. I was living there right before I moved up here as well.

NE: What was your childhood like?

BW: That's a really good question. I have two older brothers. One is about, I feel like I should know this off the top of my head and I don't. I think he's four years older than me and the other is about eight years older than me. My parents, they've been married for over 45 years. They're still together and still going strong. My childhood was both of my parents grew up really poor. My dad grew up in "the sticks," is what he called it on a farm outside of Redding, California, in a town that had maybe, I don't know, a couple hundred people in it. He lived a couple miles away from most things. My mom grew up in Santa Barbara and she 00:03:00has 13 siblings. A very large family. My grandmother raised them, or my mom's father died shortly after the last child was born. My grandmother and a lot of the older children shared in some of the responsibilities of taking care of the younger children. My childhood was informed by that. A lot of that family, my mom's side of the family, still live in Santa Barbara, and I have maybe 45 first cousins and we're all actually kind of shockingly close for how big of a family it is. Like, I know all of them. I see all of them as often as possible. Some live in town here, which is kind of odd and great. We get together as a big family pretty regularly, not during the pandemic, but most times pretty regularly. My childhood was a 00:04:00lot of time with cousins.

I went to private Catholic schools for preschool, grade school, and high school. The same preschool, grade school, and high school that my mom and most of her siblings went to, which was right across the street from the house that they all grew up in, which is now a block and a half from the house that my parents live in. Very, very close. We could always walk to each other's houses. I had a group of cousins that live like a block and a half from me growing up. We hung out all the time. I was involved in a lot of stuff. My dad, I thought he was really strict and rigid growing up. He just wanted us to be as multifaceted as possible, which led to a lot of pressure then to play as many sports as possible, be athletic and smart and intelligent and sociable 00:05:00and do all the things and my brothers were a little bit more active in the church growing up than I was. They got confirmed and did all of that. My mom's mom, my grandmother, was one of the most religious and spiritual people I've ever met. They all grew up in that faith. I didn't so much, but I still had a lot of time playing sports, hanging out with family, doing a lot of homework. We went on a lot of family vacations when I was younger to the mountains, skiing, stuff like that.

NE: Fun.

BW: Yeah.

NE: You briefly mentioned religion. Was religion just sort of an optional thing? Sometimes it's not very common for older siblings to be more religious than younger, typically.

BW: I think we were-they did. Getting confirmed... I don't know what your religious background 00:06:00is but getting confirmed is a process. You have to take a class and you have to go through a whole thing, and a lot of my friends who grew up with me were also Catholic are always surprised to remember that I'm not confirmed, baptized and all of that. My opinion on that: religion was, my grandmother went to church every single day. She lived right across the street from the church. From her deathbed, she could see straight into the altar of the church. That's how close they were. She went every day to the church that was attached to the school that I went to. We went every Sunday growing up and still, sometimes we will go, or we used to be C&E Catholics: Christmas and Easter Catholics [laughs]. We would go for those holidays, because a lot of my big family would go, and it was more of a family 00:07:00time. It was optional for me.

I had a choice when I was in middle school, a choice mostly brought about my grandmother who said I could do either Irish dancing, because we are Irish Catholic, or I could be an altar server. I opted to be an altar server, because I would have been the first-little feminist me-the first female-identified altar server in our family, and the last, because it's something no one else has done since me. I did that for a bit and then around the time that that was happening, this was like, let's see, around late '90s/early 2000s, this was when a lot of the Catholic church child molestation scandals were happening. I've never explicitly spoken to my mom about this, but I think that played a large part in us backing away from the church and it not being seen 00:08:00as the safe space that it used to be and that we were able to meet the need of having large family gatherings outside of church. When I went to Catholic high school, I was very much against a lot of their teachings, and outspokenly against a lot of their teachings, which being at a relatively, not relatively, at a privileged, predominantly white Catholic high school I wasn't disciplined for it. It was an element of our learning. I never really subscribed to the idea that we had to build our lives around this very abstract, ethereal man who would tell us what to do but not let women represent that faith in really any avenue.

NE: Thank you. You've touched on your 00:09:00education. Were you a good student? Were you a bad student? You said you were athletic, you were busy, but what kind of student were you?

BW: I was really busy. I notice that now if I'm really busy I can do so many more things and if I'm not busy I will flounder and do nothing. I think it comes from that time in my life. I was often playing multiple sports at once, and yes, I was a really good student. I was lucky enough to go to a school that really enabled, this might not be a real word, an intimate educational experience, where a lot of things were tailored to our needs because it was a really small school. My high school had 57 kids in my graduating class. In my grade school, I think we had 10 or 15 kids in my graduating class. Really small learning environments. I was in a really bad car accident when I was 00:10:0015 at the end of my freshman year of high school and suffered a pretty severe traumatic brain injury. That meant that I had to go to rehab three days a week for about eight months to relearn a lot of things, like brain remap. I was seeing an occupational, I think it was actually a speech therapist, for quite some time to do a lot of cognitive retraining. That's definitely impacted my academic experience really all throughout high school and college, even a little bit in grad school as well in terms of the things that cause me a significant amount of anxiety around test-taking and essentially having an invisible learning disability. With that, a lot of my teachers in high school 00:11:00were really accommodating and enabled a lot of different pathways to success that were maybe a bit alternative.

NE: That's awesome. Post high school, where did you go? What did you do? What were you majoring in?

BW: Post high school, I went to Chapman University in Orange County, California. Let's see, I was not in a good space to make decisions about my future. I don't think really a lot of us are when we're 17, 18 to make such a huge decision about how we spend the next four years of our life, or really understand the depth and the importance that society unfortunately places on those four years of our lives. But, yeah, went to Chapman. I changed my 00:12:00major a lot of times [laughs]. Chapman is a private school as well, so again really lucky and privileged to be able to go there and they really catered to that individualized, tailored learning experience. I think I first majored in psychology and then changed to peace studies. I ended up majoring in sociology with an emphasis in social work and then minoring in Spanish and anthropology. When I was in college I studied abroad twice, which was really fantastic. It was a great program, because the scholarship that I got to be able to go there applied to my study abroad experience, so it enabled me financially to be able to afford to do that twice, which was awesome. I went to Costa Rica. I 00:13:00spent six months there when I was 19 and I went to Ghana in West Africa when I was 21, the fall semester of my senior year.

NE: That's awesome. What was that like? What was that international experience like? Did it change or inform your decisions in any way?

BW: Yeah. I would say it definitely-it was the most impactful thing that I did. College wasn't, I remember hearing a lot of people say college is the best four years of your life and I never felt that that was true for me. That's the bulk of advice that I give my younger cousins when they go off to college is that it might be difficult. It might not be the best four years of your life and that's okay. I actually hope that your life continues to get better after college. Being on a campus: Chapman is a really small campus. It's predominantly white student body, very 00:14:00wealthy student body. Because of its proximity to Hollywood and because they have a really nice film school, a lot of famous people sent their kids there. It was my first, despite growing up in a very privileged place, my first time becoming self-aware of privilege and what that meant and to juxtaposed that to the places I studied abroad in and the programs that I did.

In Costa Rica, I was in a really small program where we traveled all around the country, and we did sociology and ecology projects with different communities and different organizations and then we did our own research based on that and then for the last month and a half or so we by ourselves went to live essentially alone with a host family in the part of the country to do our own research. That was really immersive, and I went without knowing anybody and I saw 00:15:00how most people live and the ways in which they navigate their daily lives and the impacts that tourism and education abroad can have on that. That was really enticing, and it gave me a sense of, it was a really fast way for me to get to a deeper sense of who I was when I was removed from college campus where I had all these ideas about who I should be.

Costa Rica was really impactful. Ghana was really different. I don't think I was mentally prepared. I didn't know a lot about Ghana's history. I hadn't done a lot of interrogating or critiquing of my own whiteness and how that shows up. That was more challenging on a day-to-day basis to be there. That was a really-I went to the University of Ghana for a 00:16:00semester. It was a huge public school, which was an adjustment in and of itself. I lived on campus. We were just in it while I was in Ghana and going to classes and all of that, which was really different than Costa Rica, which was more six months of field work.

NE: You talked a little bit about privilege and how being white gives you certain privileges but when did you first hear about or start thinking about getting involved with gender equity?

BW: Probably, I remember the first time I ever learned about privilege. I was at Chapman at this program that one student group was doing and there were like maybe six of us there. It was just this oh my gosh, it makes so much sense to me given how I grew up and how I was raised and everything that I've seen on this campus. Gender equity 00:17:00work probably came about, I remember being in late high school and feeling really comfortable in my own body in a way that felt taboo, given the stigma around women's bodies and how they're portrayed in the media, how they're supposed to be. I don't know what it was, but I felt really comfortable talking about my body and talking to my friends in high school about what was going on with their bodies and talking about our first sexual experiences and things like that. I don't know if that was a response to how rigid things were in high school, and then that morphed into a lot of talk about autonomy.

In late high 00:18:00school, especially when we were learning about abortion being a sin in our religion classes and me not feeling like that was-that didn't sit right with me. It didn't sit right with a lot of us, and that transformed into a deeper understanding of what it was to be a woman and at that point in time it was religious that what it was to be a woman fighting against white male supremacy. I felt like that fight belongs to all women and I didn't take into consideration that immense added privilege of being a white woman doing this and the problems associated with that. When I was a junior, well, when I was in Costa Rica, we learned a lot about gender equity and gender equality because we worked a lot with women's groups and things like that in Costa Rica. After that sociology and social work tapped into that as well. When I was a junior or senior at Chapman, I began doing sexual assault 00:19:00response team work. I began volunteering for a local crisis center and responding to the hospital when survivors would go for their, what's called a sexual assault forensic exam. That started with me actually practicing doing work around gender-based violence, which is inherently tied to gender equity and it carried on from there. Oh, you're muted, Nico.

NE: Yeah. I figured that would be a problem [laughs]. Moving onto your work life. Immediately after undergrad, did you immediately start working or did you go to your graduate school? What happened after that?

BW: No, I took like a seven year break between undergrad and grad school, which I highly recommend people do because it really gives you a chance to 00:20:00understand who you are and what you want to do before you invest a huge amount of money into something. Immediately after undergrad, it was 2009, so we were still in an economic recession, I moved back to Santa Barbara, which is home. I ended up getting a bunch of jobs hobbling, cobbling together some part-time jobs. I really wanted to work at a domestic violence shelter, so I got a job there as an advocate and as someone managing their childcare program when moms were in meetings or recovery meetings or whatever they were in. Then I also worked at an afterschool mentorship program where high school students mentored what they called "at risk" [gestures air quotes] middle school students. Students that were either gang affiliated or potentially 00:21:00about to be gang affiliated, so we had a whole curriculum that I taught for this program. I did that for a couple of years and then I moved to Thailand. A friend of mine from college was like "hey do you want to teach in Thailand?" I was like," yeah. I really do. I want to go back abroad." I really wanted to figure out a way to go back abroad that wasn't so voyeuristic, so I wasn't just watching how people lived their lives, but I was there and working and contributing. This felt like a really good way to do that. I moved to Thailand, lived there for a while, taught first grade, which I was woefully underprepared for and not good at and quit [laughs] after like a month. I signed a year-long contract and I 00:22:00quit that job after a month, but sometimes quitting's the best thing you can do for yourself.

After that, the town I lived in Thailand was really, was a town where there was a lot of sex trafficking and sex tourism happening and it was really interesting to live there as somebody who was not participating in that element of the town. It was really uncomfortable for a lot of reasons. I couldn't be there that much longer. It was really hard on my heart to see that and not really know enough about how the world works to be able to comprehend what was going on. I left and then I moved to another part of Thailand where I helped a non-profit sort out their crisis hotline response for people who were leaving Burma or Myanmar and crossing over to Thailand. We were 00:23:00right on the border, not in a refugee camp but in a town that had a lot of really you would call them migrants from Burma. We developed a crisis hotline response for folks who were getting trafficked across the border. That felt good and that was my first experience with international work in gender equity stuff. I did that for a little bit, and I just traveled around southeast Asia for a while on my own.

After that I moved to San Francisco where I worked at Planned Parenthood as what they called Reproductive Health Specialist, which is sort of a medical assistant. I was doing intakes and blood draws and injections and helping people sort out what to do after receiving a positive pregnancy test, helping them throughout what's the best method of contraception for them, what types of 00:24:00testing they wanted to get done for sexually transmitted infections. I realized I'm not cut out for that, specifically blood draws and injections. It was really bad [laughs]. I would get more nauseous than the people whose blood I was drawing. They'd be like "are you okay?" I'm like, "yes" [laughs]. I need a juice box after this.

After that I moved to Peru and I was in Peru for almost two and a half years and there I oversaw a non-profit that was at the foot of the Andes, the Andes Mountains. We trained primarily indigenous women in really rural communities to be community health workers. I oversaw that program for a while. That was really when I really came face-to-face 00:25:00with what international development meant and the ways in which it's problematic in terms of enabling white saviorism and us imposing our ideas around western medicine and western bodies on primarily indigenous populations. That was fascinating.

After that I went to grad school. I went to get my Master's in Gender and Development from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, which is in a town called Brighton, which is about an hour and a half south of London. I got my master's degree in the UK, which was a really incredible experience. The program I was in had I think there were 90 of us in the whole institute from, I think 35 or 40 different countries. It was like my brain opened and all of this knowledge was pouring in. It was really fantastic. After 00:26:00that I moved back to Santa Barbara, and I began my work in higher education.

NE: That's awesome. What sent you to England? Did you just see the college and apply? How did that happen?

BW: A couple of things sent me to England. It was exactly the program I wanted. I wanted to study international developments with a focus on gender and gender equity. It was also, I didn't know this until way after I got accepted, but it was one of the higher, I think it was the highest-ranked school for International Development Studies at the time, which is kind of a niche program. That's not really saying much, but that was the draw for a lot of other people. A lot of folks who wrote really groundbreaking pieces on bottom-up developments and participatory action research and community participation when it comes 00:27:00to rural initiatives around agriculture, a lot of folks are professors at this institute. That was really neat. Other fantastic elements that were more front of mind for me, because I was applying when I was living in Peru, so I was applying from my dirt-floor adobe home with an internet stick that I would plug into my computer. I really did not want to have to take the GREs, because at that point in time I would've had to have flown somewhere else to take it and I opened up the math study book for the GREs and it was like add these two fractions together and I was like, oh no I'm not going to be able to do this. I could have done it, but I didn't want to put the energy into it. Schools in the UK didn't require the GREs, and they were only one year in length, and it was significantly cheaper to go to grad school there and to only go for half the 00:28:00time. Those are what really informed my decision.

NE: Awesome. I know that you were doing some sort of research while you were in graduate school. What kind of research were you doing? Talk about that?

BW: The school was research focused. We picked a lot of our own research topics. A lot of the things that I personally researched outside of my paid position as a research assistant were around, let's see, around the ways in which large UN organizations, like UNFPA, which is the United Nations Council on Population and Reproductive Health, I think. I'm totally blanking on that right now. The ways in which they distribute contraceptive methods 00:29:00in developing countries and how that defines both access and availability for primarily indigenous communities and how that also impacts, or I guess comes up against indigenous ways of knowing and being around reproductive autonomy and reproductive health. Some of the research I did, my big dissertation was on how grant funding-I'm trying to think of a good way to describe this-how grant funding for rural, international communities in developing countries, grant funding specific to sexual and reproductive health and rights, can 00:30:00fracture different types of feminisms that exist-really theoretical. I basically looked at one specific grant that was given or received by this feminist organization in Peru and then how they used that grant funding to create programming in primarily indigenous communities and how that shifted definitions around feminism and feminist movements in that area of Peru. It was my own research.

I also did some research on the ways in which the extracting industry, primarily gold harvesting in Guyana, has very gendered impacts on the men and women who live there. The research that I was getting paid to do, or that I was serving as the research assistant for, was about the gendered, this 00:31:00sounds so boring now, the gendered nature of tax systems primarily in Ethiopia. They did some more meta research analysis on gender tax systems. I guess a way to simplify that is when we think of the pink tax here, the fact that women, or people with vaginas, have to pay, I should say people who menstruate, have to pay extra for things like tampons or pads or menstrual cups and that that is inherently not fair and not right, that there are similar taxes that exist in other countries as well. Maybe like a value-added tax or a vat tax for some type of oil that only women use for primarily cooking in Armenia. That's the type of research that I was 00:32:00doing. Not super exciting but it helped pay the bills. Then I also helped take notes for this big symposium that helps dictate the gender research agenda for international developing organizations for the next ten years. That was cool.

NE: This is just like a personal interest-so, you mentioned feminism in different areas. How did you help develop feminism? Did you just witness feminism in other places? How did that feminism in your travels compare to what you would find here?

BW: In the States, you mean?

NE: Yeah.

BW: Here I guess one way I could equate it is that we think of first-wave feminists, when we think of the history of 00:33:00feminism it's very white-washed and not historically accurate. When we think of the ways in which we tend to know or I tended to learn about first-wave feminism was Susan B. Anthony and the Seneca Falls, whatever that was where they wanted to get women the right to vote and own property. Then you think about second-wave feminism being more like Gloria Steinem, '60s, '70s, feminism, again very white-washed. Then third-wave feminism and ideas about intersectional feminism, black feminism, indigenous feminisms, coming more to the forefront and again I say that knowing that they've always been there, and they were the ones who really started this work a long, long time ago and have not been historically given credit for 00:34:00it. That was how I came to learn about feminisms. The feminisms that I saw in places like Peru and Thailand were really different, and the feminisms that we studied in England were really different and they were really a lot more holistic, and I think representative of the ways in which we talk about the voices that we have erased in feminism in the United States. In Peru, for example, they did have their own what they would call the second-wave feminists, which were mainstream feminists in more urban areas that had a platform that were pretty vocal about women's rights and equity in the household and things like that.

Then when you think about ideas 00:35:00around-what I was trying to juxtapose is that when groups like that receive funding how do they interpret feminist ideologies into these indigenous communities where there's a lot of complementarity and that is really homogenizing a lot of that. I'm not an expert in this, and how those two interacted to fracture feminisms in a way that external grant funding imposes second-wave feminism on a lot of groups. It mirrored what I was seeing happening Stateside and when I was in grad school is when Brexit was happening, when Donald Trump was winning the primary. There was a lot of talk beginning in mainstream media about white women and what that 00:36:00meant and the impacts of second-wave feminism and what I see in other places is a much more multifaceted and layered approach. There is definingly interpersonal dynamics around feminism. There is also the government response and discrimination against indigenous people, primarily indigenous women. Then there's also outside external forces from things like free trade agreements and the impacts that American purchasing power has on those communities that negatively impacts women and has a lot of gendered impacts in terms of who's harvesting what and selling what for lower prices. It was all very much mixed into the context of the entirety of their humanity and existence. That was a very long and vague 00:37:00 answer.

NE: Thank you. Now, if you don't mind, I kind of am interested in stepping back a little bit back into your experiences in Thailand and maybe even Ghana. What were your days like? Walk me through a day.

BW: In Thailand or in Ghana?

NE: Both.

BW: Sure. When I was teaching in Thailand, I lived in, so within a town called Pattaya, which was that town where there was a lot of sex trafficking and sex tourism happening. I had a little scooter. I would wake up, I lived in a super bright green 00:38:00room that my friend who I was with, no maybe my room was bright neon blue and hers was neon green... she lived right above me in this small apartment complex that was really just a glorified hotel. We lived there. We paid rent. There was a fried chicken stand right outside that we would sometimes work at after work to help our landlords make some additional money. We would wake up, scooter, my friend and I because she was also teaching at the same school. We'd scooter to school, which was wild. It was a huge urban place, and they drive on the left side of the road in Thailand, so that was always tricky. Then we'd teach and not being a teacher or having any formal teacher training that was always tough. My class there had anywhere 00:39:00between, sometimes I'd be at the whiteboard writing something and I'd turn around and there'd be more students in the classroom. It was just-there are a lot of kids there and they range from ages four to eight in first grade, which is developmentally a huge gap. We'd do that for a couple hours. We taught barefoot. No shoes allowed in the classrooms, and you could only have the air conditioning on when students were there with you. Otherwise, it would get so hot. Then after that we usually just scooter home and eat pizza and go to bed, because teaching is exhausting, especially when, again, you have no formal training. That wasn't like I was teaching the same English class over and over again. I was teaching social studies and history and English and PE and science, which I don't know that much about.

Again, that town was really hard to live 00:40:00in. Pretty much every club, or every bar, was a sex bar. There would be naked women out in front selling sex, and I didn't really understand, like I said before, the nuances of sex work or sex trafficking or what that meant. There were a huge amount of Russians in that town, primarily people who are not Thai, who were Russian, that also added a different element. I got into a motorcycle accident, and that facilitated me leaving because I had to take some time off work and when I did, I realized I didn't really feel good there. I left. That was a good decision. Let's see, my day in Ghana. So, we lived in dorms kind of on the outskirts of campus, international student housing. It 00:41:00was a dorm with an outside courtyard in the middle. Our doors open up to the outside. Very little electricity. Very poor internet. No hot water, which we didn't really need because it was super hot there anyway. Sometimes not a lot of running water, so take a lot of bucket showers, which I love. I would wake up-classes there were really different.

The first couple weeks that I was in Ghana the teachers were on strike because they hadn't been paid yet for the semester prior. For the first three or four weeks of a semester, we didn't have class. We just kind of hung out. I was living with a Ghanaian roommate at the time. She was wonderful. There was in between, so walking to campus sometimes was like a two-mile walk because we lived on the way on the outskirts of campus, and it was a huge campus. We 00:42:00would pass, there was a day market- [looks over shoulder] there's my cat-and a night market and we would pass the day market on our way to school, and we would get these egg sandwiches, which I think were called chiiboms and it would come just like a fried egg with laughing cow cheese and a really soft bun. It would be so good. We would take that. Eat that in the morning, walk to class, or walk-it was a beautiful campus so sometimes we just walked around campus, or we'd try to go into town. We were in Legun, which is outside of Accra, which is the capital of Ghana, which is-coming from a small town like Santa Barbara, living in a small town like Orange, Accra was like whoa. It was hectic and chaotic and colorful and beautiful and all the things. But when we would go to class, I'd have to oftentimes take my own, 00:43:00find a plastic chair outside of the classroom to bring in because the classes were so full. That was interesting. The structure of the class itself, it was based on British educational system. Still very much a colonized educational system in terms of how things were graded and what was deemed worthy information to remember and retain for tests. I think I took an urban sociology class. I took a drumming class as my extracurricular course that I failed [laughs]. I was so bad at drumming. It was really shameful. To fail there, you have to get like a 60% is still passing. I super failed.

What other classes did I take? I took sociological theory. I took an archeology class that 00:44:00never, it just like never materialized. I was enrolled in it. We'd keep going to the class and nobody else would show up and the professor just wasn't there for some of it, was out on these archeological digs that I just never really knew about. I don't know what happened to that class in the end. Then we would usually eat dinner. We would get dinner from the night market, which we're on a budget. I say we, because I met someone there and we were dating, and we did pretty much everything together. We would go to the night market and get, you could pay one dollar for a bag of cooked rice, called waakye rice, or jollof rice, depending on what flavors you were feeling. It was super spicy rice so to cut the spice if you paid $.25 extra you could get a boiled egg thrown in 00:45:00there. We would do that and eat rice out of a bag for dinner or we would cook our own, or if we were lucky, we would eat. We'd go to the further from us night market, which was also called the Black Market. Not in the way that we think of a black market; it's just what they called it. You could get little shots of gin for $.10 in a sealed plastic baggy. It was like moonshine, bathtub gin that one shot and you'd be done. That's all you would need [laughs]. If you went there, you could get goat soup with, what did they call it, fufu, I am probably really not pronouncing that correctly, this ball of dough that you dip into goat soup and you eat and that was super tasty. If we were feeling ourselves, we'd get goat soup for 00:46:00dinner. Then try to do our homework or we had washed our clothes a lot, so that took a lot of time. That was my life in Ghana. I got really sick when I was there. I was in the hospital for like five days. That informed part of my experience, too.

NE: Sorry for jumping around. That was awesome. Could you tell me a little bit about a day in your life in Peru, perhaps?

BW: Yeah, totally. Is that level of detail what you're looking for? [Laughs].

NE: Anything is awesome.

BW: In Peru, let's see-I lived in a lot of different homes. The town I lived in is called Ollantaytambo. If you ever go to Peru and if you ever take the train from Cusco to Machu Picchu, you stop in that town. It's a bit touristy. It was the launch point for a lot 00:47:00of the more further-out communities that we would travel to to work with the community health workers. I lived all over town. That town had maybe 3,000 people in it. It was a pretty small town. I could walk to work. The most amount of time I spent living was in this two-story. The first story was a mixture of wood and concrete and adobe and had, I don't know if it-it was kind of a dirt floor. You could move your feet on it and dust would come up. It was a nice two-story house. We had a big kitchen at the bottom. My room and then my roommate's room. We had a backyard. We built a little fire pit in there. It was the cheapest rent I ever paid in my 00:48:00life, which was a lot. We also didn't have a lot. It was basically just an empty place. Our bathroom was outside. We had an electrical showerhead that they call a "widow maker," because water and electricity don't mix well. [Laughs] Sometimes if you got a little bit too close to the showerhead you would get a little bit electrocuted [laughs]. I don't know how else to better say that. It was always exciting. It was beautiful because the shower and bathtub were outside and just the stars and the star-scape. There was a glacier. You could see glacier off of one end and these beautiful quinoa fields and then these old Incan ruins on the other end. We lived next-door to the house that I first stayed at, which was my homestay family. They raised guinea pigs. We ate a lot of guinea pigs 00:49:00there. That's what they do. Guinea pigs are excellent tasting and really easy to raise because they have babies all the time. I don't know if you've ever heard the noise that guinea pigs make but it sounds kind of like you're in a video game. There's a ton of them right next door to us, so we'd always hear guinea pigs chirping. I had a lamb there. I raised a lamb for slaughter, which was fascinating and a really great experience that I highly recommend to anyone who's wondering if they are really a meat eater or a vegetarian. It's really interesting to learn the whole process of raising animals, slaughtering animals, and eating animals, particularly because here we're so disconnected from that.

Anyway, my daily life there I'd wake up. I'd usually drink 00:50:00tea. They drink a lot of cocoa leaf tea, and they chew on a lot of cocoa leaves there. It gives you energy, which you would imagine from the plant from which you make cocaine. It's not cocaine itself, but it does give you a little bit of that energy boost. I'd drink some mate de la cocoa. Then I would eat some really delicious yogurt. Then I would walk to work, and it would be a like a 12-minute walk, and I would see so many people that I knew because it was such a small town and there would always be lots of dogs around, usually dogs that we were familiar with and knew, which was fun. Lots of people that were coming down from the higher-up communities for stuff. We'd see friends of mine that lived at like 14,000 feet of elevation. That town itself was like 9,000 feet of elevation, which was pretty high. I'd walk to work and then at 00:51:00work we would do a myriad of things. I was the director of operations for this non-profit. That meant that I was doing anything from figuring out lunch for a big training of health workers and their children. Cooking food with a one-burner stove for like 40 people or planning curriculum or we had a staff of 15. Some international volunteers from the states and other countries and some Peruvian staff, so staff meetings. I would also work a lot with the community members.

A lot of it was just figuring out simple things, like our power would go out or our water would go out. We rarely ever had good internet, and if we needed to do something or if somebody needed to call home that was really difficult. 00:52:00Usually go to the market which was like a three-aisle by three-story place and the first story was food and I would go and get food to make dinner. It was really interesting because the meat section was in the back. If you wanted to go get some chicken to cook, you'd have to go all the way to the back, and they would say what do you want? You would say I want chicken. They'd be like how much and what part? I'll take an eighth of the chicken, chicken breast. They'd pull out a frozen whole chicken and hack it up in front of you and then put it in a bag and give it to you and you'd go home, and you make your chicken. I'd go to the market pretty much every day to get stuff to cook with or I'd go out to eat. I had a couple of friends who owned restaurants and bars in town, so I would 00:53:00eat there. Then a lot of my last year there was spent applying to grad school. If I wasn't getting drinks with coworkers after, which is not what we think of when we think of getting drinks with coworkers after here. It's a little bit different. I was working on grad school applications.

NE: Thank you. Before we move on to coming back to the States after Brighton, are there any people so far or even after that have stood out to you as mentors or role models or really just helped shape your life into what it is?

BW: Yeah, that's a good question. There's a lot. I think it's hard to go through life and not have people like that. 00:54:00My family as a whole, my large extended family, every single interaction I have with any one of them I always leave having learned a lot about humanity, just having a huge family like that is a longitudinal study in forgiveness and compassion. I've learned a lot from them. My grandmother was my hero. She died when I was 16. Before that she was someone that I always was safe around and her house, everything about her just felt like being wrapped up in the best hug, even if it was just a phone call. She lived across the street from my grade school, so I would oftentimes fake sick to go hang out with her [laughs], because my mom was working, and I could just walk over there.

I spent so much time with her. She taught 00:55:00me; she didn't try to inculcate me with a lot of religious stuff. I mean, she did. We read the Bible. But she also taught me a lot about unconditional love outside of a religious sense, just that's what we do because that's what we should do because we only have one life, and we should just love as much as possible. She really embodied that to a degree I have not ever seen in anybody since. She was probably my first role model. Growing up we had a family, or a couple that lived across the street from us. We assembled, my parents assembled, some of their closest friends to serve as like a village, a village to raise the children. One of the, what we called village elders, so she's like my mom's best friend, she 00:56:00lived across the street from me, from us, for a long time. She still lives in that same house, which my parents don't live in anymore across the street from. She has been extremely influential in terms of providing guidance from a really non-judgmental perspective. A lot of the times I was traveling I was traveling alone, and you go through some stuff, and I also had a really rough patch there for a couple of years in my life when I was trying to cope with some things. She always approached that with curiosity and never any harshness. She's incredibly brilliant and showed me that I don't have to stay in a job or in a career because I feel like I have to. If it's not serving me anymore, I can 00:57:00try something else. That's okay.

I think that's a lesson I've taken with me a lot in all the different career fields and jobs that I've worked in. It takes a long time to find a thing that fires you up, even though it's all been under the same umbrella, just been in a lot of different roles that I've had. She also taught me a lot about, and this might seem really trivial, but about editing my own work, which is really important in a lot of things that we do in life. It's not just editing a paper that you're writing or editing an email before you send it but it's like always making sure that you're putting your best foot forward and being okay if you can't and you're just like, not today. I don't have the space for that today. She always pushed me to go to places, either in writing or just in who I was, that I wouldn't have pushed myself to go to. That was 00:58:00great. A lot of the women that I worked with in Peru gave me a sense of the joy, just like joie de vivre. I don't know, living joyously and loving life in a way where life is delicious and there's ample room to laugh at yourself. They taught me that to not take myself seriously and that there's always laughs to be had, often at the expense of myself, which I think is great. I think it's great to be self-deprecating. They taught me a lot. 00:59:00Obviously, my parents played a really important role in who I am in how they channel and manifest all the different people that have shaped them into how they shaped me. That's been really important, too.

NE: Thank you. You finished grad school in Brighton and moved back. What did you do next?

BW: I moved back, and I worked at the Santa Barbara airport gift shop selling people water and chocolate bars before they got on their flights because finding a job after grad school is not easy, neither is just finding a job in general. I worked part-time at the airport gift shop while I lived with my parents at the ripe age of 29 or 30 and looked for jobs. My airport gift shop job was brutal because my shift started at 4:30 in the 01:00:00morning. I did that for a little bit. I found a part-time job at UC Santa Barbara managing a women's center. I did that and then from there a job, the assistant director of advocacy services opened up. That was a full-time position that paid more and enabled me to still put my grad schoolwork to use and to try to live in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara's a really expensive place to live. I applied for that job, and I got it and at that point in time, hold on let me close my window real quick. Okay. At that point in time, I was thinking about going abroad again and kind of wanting to and applying for jobs abroad. Trump had just been elected and cut funding to a lot of USAID 01:01:00programming, especially around abortion rights, which is what I wanted to do. It was really difficult. I think I applied to maybe 60 jobs abroad. It was really tough to find work and didn't get any of those jobs so decided, along with rolling back the rights of women and communities abroad, Trump is likely going to roll back the rights of survivors domestically. I thought working with survivors in a campus context would be interesting given the political context of where we were at that point in time.

NE: You're saying that's what brought you to OSU?

BW: Sort of, yeah. I worked at UCSB for a while. There were some issues that I experienced there in terms of pay equity that also had some gender 01:02:00dynamics that made it really uncomfortable for me to be there and so was looking for a way to get out of that and also hopefully move up in this field. This job at OSU came about. I wasn't entirely set on staying in higher ed, because it can be really grinding and numbing to try to advocate for survivors and with survivors in these harsher, maybe more conservative bureaucratic environments. But I decided to give it a go at another university and with a different title. That's how I ended up here.

NE: Awesome. You 01:03:00started as director of SARC in 2019. Are there any major differences from how it was then to how it is now? Any changes you've implemented?

BW: Oh, yeah. The world's a really different place now than it was in September 2019 with the pandemic and civil uprisings and... yes. When I first arrived at SARC, it was, how do I describe it? I come from a background of community-based advocacy, where advocates do a myriad of different things. In addition to crisis counseling and emotional support, we go to court with folks. We help them fill out court paperwork. We do safety plans with them. We help them move housing. We help them get divorced. Whatever it is that they 01:04:00want, we do. It's a lot of action-oriented planning and logistically planning so that the survivors don't have to go through the logistical process of being a survivor and of moving through a system on their own.

When I came to OSU, a lot of the advocacy support that was happening was that but with the big element of emotional support and counseling. We've kind of shifted to more what would be reflective of a community-based advocacy organization but very specific to a campus. Trying to make it easier for different departments on campus to refer survivors to us, and I think when SARC first started in 2015, it was to begin with I think they had to come out of the shadows a little bit of the Title IX office, or the Office of Equal 01:05:00Opportunity and Access on campus (EOA). I think that's because that was the office that was handling sexual misconduct investigations and so SARC used a lot of the same language and definitions as EOA and then what we tried to do when I came on board was to really separate out reporting from survivor support. The two are not the same. They can be. There's definitely, it's kind of a Venn diagram and there's that middle part where about 20-25% of survivors want to report, and we support them in that in various different ways and to really focus on a whole survivor-centric approach and to be very openly and publicly survivor-centered. We're a department on campus that doesn't have to be neutral. We don't have to say we have to treat the other side the same as we'd treat this side. It's beautiful 01:06:00because we can throw all our weight behind the survivor in any setting and we can be unapologetically supportive of them, which everyone should be unapologetically supportive of survivors. Working in a big institution, it can be difficult when we have things like we have to be neutral or there's due process or any of these other things that are happening right now.

NE: Following up on SARC, how is and was SARC treated by OSU in general? Have you faced any professional issues or roadblocks at OSU?

BW: What do you mean by is and was? Now and-?

NE: Now and when you started. Are there developing it to where it is now and implementing the changes that you named. Were there any roadblocks to 01:07:00that and then on top of that was there any sort of treatment by, associated treatment by OSU administration?

BW: When I first came on, SARC was undergoing some reputational turbulence in terms of the way some folks at SARC interacted with some student groups on campus who primarily identified as women of color and that was what I stepped into. A lot of what I spent my time doing was repairing some of the harm that SARC had caused to survivors on campus and also recognizing that I am a white woman who is attempting to do this and that might not be ideal. In terms of the way OSU has treated 01:08:00us, I think there is a lot that can be said for the fact that a lot of folks who do work with survivors, a predominantly female-identified fields, a lot of us are survivors ourselves who are doing this work which adds some elements, a really personal close to your heart element regardless of how much healing or processing you've done that's still how you show up in any given space. It's part of you. Survivor advocacy offices on campuses tend to not have any power when it comes to making a decision about an outcome or about a policy or being able to really vocalize and say the 01:09:00school not only was this person harmed by another person but then going through a school process or in just living as a survivor with their intersecting identities on a campus every day. That's further harm caused to them. Trauma doesn't start and stop with the incident itself. It has really long-lasting impacts that are often exacerbated by the experiences survivors have in institutions themselves. As advocates seeing that and also being survivors in a role where we're often seen as maybe an afterthought or maybe the last entity mentioned in an email or maybe, oh if a survivor needs extra help or like wants to feel heard they'll go to SARC. Of course, that's what we do, and we also do and embody a lot more 01:10:00than that.

There's this maybe kind of conflict avoidance or maybe risk aversion that happens. The school needs to-larger institutional actors at play do need to keep things neutral. I understand that. That's how the laws are written. It can feel radical almost sometimes to say, no this is what we're advocating with survivors about this, just survivors. We need to be survivor centric as a community. We're all survivors in one way or another. We all want to be more trauma-informed, whatever that means for folks. That doesn't include just us providing advocacy services. That includes us really thinking about the ways that masculinity and white supremacy and consent show up in our daily interactions and in who we are at work and that means that we need to address that within our 01:11:00department within all the other departments on campus, within academic departments, law enforcement, public safety, within the upper level administration and look at all those dynamics at play in how we are all invested in and upholding, whether we want to or not, a rape culture on our campus that facilitates these types of-it's not even behaviors because that implies that it's individualistic, but facilitates it so that a lot of our students are causing harm to other students and a lot of our students are experiencing harm. I would say there's kind of the idea that if a survivor shows up somewhere and says I'm a survivor of this and maybe I'm not able finish this homework assignment because this happened or I needed accommodation because of this, that if given all of the options and if they choose not to participate in any of those options, that's on the 01:12:00survivor. They did not want that.

This is something that's not specific to OSU. It really is something that happens on a lot of college campuses and what we're trying to say is we want to be there right away when a survivor discloses so that they can maintain as much autonomy and agency and control over their narrative as possible and us being confidential enables that process to happen. Without that, a survivor can disclose and then right away those words are taken out of their mouth and put into a report that then goes to the school that's then on record and we want to create an environment where survivors consent to that and they opt into engaging with whatever they want to engage with and where 01:13:00folks can be transparent and also where, and this is a very far-away dream and I know that college campuses work very differently but where we can openly be compassionate toward and love the survivors that are on our campus and love ourselves as survivors and engage with everybody from that deeply personal and heartfelt space, where we can-I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and reading a lot of books and doing a lot of other learning about semantics and being in mergence and the ways that we can feel good in some of these space. I think a lot of what we try to 01:14:00do in SARC is to create ease where possible for survivors. I would love if everybody on campus did that for everybody else on a regular basis. You think some of the things that we run into is that is really juxtaposed to a system which is dictated by policy. In policy there's not a lot of space for that open sense of love and compassion and what can feel like crossing boundaries if we say hey, I really care about you and am really worried about you. What can I do to help you right now? And where we have this white supremacist view of what being professional means and or this field has been really professionalized lately. To try and fuse that with humanity and authenticity is difficult in an institution that's concerned about their reputation when it comes to media and cases and all of 01:15:00that, like every institution is.

We, for example, were trying to grow our office. We serve a lot of people and there's not a lot of us in the office. We're trying to expand that and to really articulate why we want to expand that runs into some of these political, policy-based, institution-based rigid structures. We're trying to build a community and a culture of care where SARC operates a lot on an interpersonal level, with clients and survivors. We talk about issues that happen here, but we know that gender-based violence is a public-health issue. It's a community issue and it requires that level of response. We're all complicit in that until we actively start doing things to not be. I get really worked up about 01:16:00this [laughs].

NE: That's okay. I appreciate it. Have you been able to continue your passion of international development at all while working at OSU? Or not much?

BW: Yeah. I still, well I still talk to a lot of my friends abroad. A lot of the skills I learned in international development are actually applicable. Technically the U.S. was considered international when I was in the UK, so we did use a lot of U.S. case studies, because our indicators for equity and equality are not the greatest. We used the U.S. in a lot of case studies for what we were trying to do. Things around different types of 01:17:00theories of change, power mapping, different types of needs assessments-logistically in my day-to-day I try to incorporate as much as what I have learned from my experience internationally as I can. I do still keep in touch with folks. When I was at UC Santa Barbara, I was part of the UC Global Health Institute. They do some small seed funding, and they receive other grants for helping universities abroad figure out their sexual misconduct policies. I sometimes serve as guiding some of those initiatives or people consult with me about their research proposals or the policies they want to implement and things like that. I've been able to do some side consulting just as a private citizen as 01:18:00well in the international development realm, which it keeps me really busy, but I love.

NE: Thank you. I'm trying to figure out how to word this question. Is the work that you're doing here at OSU and here in the United States very similar to or very different than the work that you'd be doing in places like Peru or Thailand or things like that?

BW: That is a wonderful question. I think about this a lot. I'm actually writing about this in my little writing desk over there, that it's very different. Peru and Thailand and the places I studied abroad are all 01:19:00super different contextually speaking. The place that I had the most experience within this realm is Peru and when I thought about doing work in higher ed in the States I thought, let's see, how should I-let me approach it from this way. In Peru there's not a lot of government structures and support for survivors of gender-based violence. There's not a lot of things available to help people strike out on their own if they want. If they want to leave their relationship, there's not a lot of built-in support for them to be able to do that. Here it's very bureaucratic. We still have things like HUD or Section 8 01:20:00housing, our welfare system, and the ways in which folks can get support in terms of searching for different jobs or having access to medical care.

As messed up as it is here, the systems still do exist. The extent to which they work is a bit different. In Peru they don't exist. I had to get, I unfortunately had to get a protective order against somebody when I was living in Peru. The process that I had to take to get that really showed me with abundant clarity that there is not a lot of systemic things in placed to support people, primarily women who are going through something like that where they would need to get a protective order, or they want to report something that happened. That being said, a lot of times they have mechanisms 01:21:00to handle this on their own and in ways that make sense to them which is really interesting to see. They might have their own justice system in the community that they live in. They might have their own way to report and to bring to the forefront reports of abuse or of gender-based violence in communities where the community decides the sanction and the punishment and where there actually is this element of what we really try to mimic here around transformative justice, or I guess I should say replicate. There's a lot of those systems in place in the absence of a functioning-if you live a two-day walk from the closest police station and if there is already racism that indigenous folks experience or perhaps, they can't speak the language of the police station, you're not going to go down there to report something that happened to 01:22:00you. You're going to figure it out. The community did rally around those issues a lot because it was seen as a community issue. One person harming someone else harmed a whole community. That was really wonderful to witness.

I thought when I would come back to the States that it would be a little bit easier to support survivors because those systems would be in place and that even saying that I'm like wow I was really naïve, because those very systems that are supposed to support oftentimes create further harm or they just straight up don't work. We can't recommend that survivors report when 99% of rapists don't get prosecuted, even when reported. The systems that we have however much we tout them unless they radically change and are 01:23:00dismantled may service some people, primarily cis-gendered white folks, but really at their core they're not serving anybody. That was a harsh awakening. Also, I'm realizing now it was really naïve me to think that oh this big government system is going to really work to support survivors.

NE: Well, I think that is actually all the questions I have for you. Is there any topic or conversation that you would like to talk about before we stop?

BW: I don't think so. I think we covered a lot.

NE: Awesome. Well, thank you very much!

BW: Yeah, absolutely.