UCI Humanities Core Podcast

Three Humanities Core alumni, now a decade or more into their post-UCI careers, discuss their memories of the program and the impact it had on their lives and work. Additionally, they identify things they wish they’d learned as undergrads and give their own recommendations for texts and topics related to our current theme of “Worldbuilding.”

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Transcript

Robin Stewart 

Hello, and welcome to the podcast of the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine. My name is Robin Stewart, and I’ve been a teacher in Humcore, as it’s affectionately known by UCI students and faculty, for over a decade. Since it was established in 1970, only five years after the founding of the university itself, UCI’s Humanities Core Program has offered a rich and multifaceted introduction to humanist scholarship and the humanistic approach to inquiry. As part of this mission, the Humcore Program sponsors events, workshops and hosts guest speakers throughout the year to encourage its students to build a vibrant intellectual community beyond the confines of their coursework and classrooms. One such event from June of last year was a Humanities Core alumni panel, where three former students, now a decade or more into their post college careers, returned to campus to discuss the impact of the program on their lives and what building a career from a humanities foundation looks like. These three alumni were kind enough to stick around after the event to be the first guests on our program’s podcast. Thank you, guys, so much for coming today and sharing your experiences. If we could do another round of introductions. And so, Traci, please start with your name, and what are you doing now?

Traci Lee 

Yeah. So my name is Traci Lee. I graduated in 2011. I was a double major in literary journalism and global cultures. Currently, I am at the Walt Disney Company. I’m a senior manager in cross platform development and growth, so it’s mostly in business development and operations. But previous to that, I was working as a journalist for about eight years at NBC Universal. I oversaw the network’s coverage of Asian American and Pacific Islander issues, and then I also consult and freelance, both as a writer and editor, but mostly in organic, digital, and social strategy, and in newsroom consultation. So I have some experience teaching. Taught at USC for a bit. Everything that I do is kind of rooted in storytelling, though, and particularly digital storytelling.

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

My name is Michaela. I graduated in 2016. I have a very multi hyphenate background, so I actually still dance and perform when I can. But I would say for my day job, I work in digital reality storytelling, so it’s a little bit of a step further than what Traci was talking about. So going beyond just kind of the traditional written word and podcasting and social media, but actually going into now like technology, like virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, looking at things like 3D capturing of the world, like photogrammetry and videogrammetry. And really what I do with these mediums as a storyteller is I work with people who want to tell their stories using those mediums, but also tell my own stories using those mediums. My background at UC Irvine was in literary journalism. I did not quite finish my digital filmmaking minor, but I had studied a lot of those classes, and I went on to really want to create journalism that was more equitable, where audience had more agency and they were fully immersed in the story and could interact in the story. And that led me to work with Time Magazine, guiding and leading their VR/AR initiatives across many of the different brands that was under their conglomerative, like Sports Illustrated, People Magazine, Sunset Magazine, Life Magazine. And then I went on to be a freelancer, and have been working a lot in social impact because VR, I think, and AR is very like personal and so social impact is very key. And I’ve been working closely with Games for Change, creating research around impact and managing and leading an impact campaign. And then I am premiering constantly my own projects at different festivals, and trying to figure out how creatives in this system can have more of an equitable financial stability with these new rising technologies.

Robin Stewart 

Any recent project you’d like to plug right now?

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

Oh, wow. Okay, thanks. So Reimagined Volume II: Mahal is making its world premiere at Tribeca festival next week. It is a project that is hand animated and hand painted in virtual reality using a platform called Oculus Quill, and it is actually a story that is deeply personal to me. It’s my first foray into narrative, so I wrote the script, I produced and I directed it, and it is a piece that is inspired by Philippine mythology that centers around the grief of losing a father.

David Lumb 

Following up on that, I’m David, a mobile reporter for CNET. I cover phones, smart watches and tablets, and everything about life on the go. So most of my work is in reviewing products and sort of translating them for individuals, for readers – buy this, buy that. But also, what is the greater cost of these things? What are the impacts on society? So I do sort of side reporting on games, climate change, and a lot of social, cultural impact of a lot of the things that we find kind of mundane, but are always on the cusp and edge of changing what our lives are like. I’m also pretty active in the Writers Guild of America, East. I’m a union member and so fighting for writer rights and making sure that, as much as we can, we have a space in a turbulent industry, but also a lot of negotiating a way that writing as an occupation can continue in very tough environments.

Robin Stewart 

I guess, similar to what I said to Michaela, any recent byline you might direct people to?

David Lumb 

Yes, just published an article on the video game industry waking up to climate change. At GDC this year, the game developer conference, I got to interview a lot of people. It was great to touch base and really discover a lot of the entertainment we have and what its costs are, not just the production of consoles and games and whatever – keeping the lights on in game studios – but when you play your games, that’s a tax on the environment as well, but especially how we can change that going forward and make a more efficient way that we are playing games in the future and not contributing to a warmer planet.

Robin Stewart 

Wonderful. Let me start the next round of questions here by asking you guys to tell us about something memorable from your Humanities Core experience. So Traci, we’ll start with you. What was the cycle that you were in, and is there a memorable text that was assigned or topics that were covered in that that you still think about?

Traci Lee 

Yeah, so my cycle was “Thinking, Making, Doing,” and so the first quarter covered philosophy, both what both Western and Eastern. The second quarter was the “Making” part – it was theater and art – and then the doing part was the creation… And like, I don’t know, making and doing seemed so similar at the time. And I remember really getting to differentiate, you know. The “Doing”, the third quarter was about architecture and about city planning. I remember looking at the textbooks that we had on our list to buy and being, “Why are we talking about city planning?” And being very confused. But it was quite interesting in the “Making” section, when we talked about theater. We got to dive into Shakespeare, which I grew up in high school, really loving Shakespeare. My sister really found kind of a passion in Shakespeare. We were part of a Shakespeare club in high school. And my parents, you know, my parents are immigrants to this country. They grew up here, but their English isn’t they’re not native English speakers, but they saw that we had an interest in Shakespeare, and so for the summers, we used to road trip up to Ashland and go to the Shakespeare festival there, which was really exciting and kind of fun and really wonderful for them to do for us. So, I always loved Shakespeare, but then coming into college and being a little intimidated by – Julia Lupton, was the professor at the time, incredible Shakespeare scholar – and I was very intimidated, thinking my knowledge or interest in Shakespeare is not to college level, and we’re studying it in this college level humanities core course. I feel like I’m not going to know enough, which I was also bypassing, the idea that you’re in this class to learn, and that they’re not expecting you to come in and be an expert in it already. And I got to experience and see Shakespeare through such a different perspective. You know, I’d only been taught it before from a single high school teacher, and then, you know, I watched movies, I read the text. There was so much I loved about Shakespeare, but then I really got to appreciate Shakespeare when I came and kind of experienced it in this larger forum, and then also in smaller discussions that was really interesting and exciting to me, because theater can often be siloed as the thought of, “Oh, that’s like a performing arts thing.” You have no reason, quote, unquote, “reason,” to learn it in the humanities. But like I said during the forum, this idea of multidisciplinary – different areas of learning, art, theater, architecture – all kind of coming together in humanities and informing the way that we view and interact with the world. I think was really exciting and instructive. I was so familiar with Shakespeare before, but I really got to again, appreciate how that interest and that passion can inform what I do in my day to day.

Robin Stewart 

Yeah, so same question, Michaela: what was the cycle, and any memorable text or topic?

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

Yeah. So my cycle was “Humanity and its Other” and it was really looking at how humans see themselves, and then reinterpret that understanding to the other things they have in the world. And so the first quarter really covered God and religion. The second quarter really covered animals and otherly beings, and then the third quarter was man versus man. And I think what I really enjoyed wasn’t… well, I grew up in a very conservative Christian household, so the first quarter was sort of like, “Ha lolli, we’re gonna read the Bible.” It’s like, yeah, I’ve read this text about Abraham and Isaac multiple times. He doesn’t kill the kid, you know. So I think the first quarter, I was like, “Okay, well, religion I’m very familiar with”, but I think for me, I loved the last two quarters. Dante’s Inferno, all the like, anti-Christian tropes, where I was like, “Oh my god, we’re gonna go into hell!”  We’re gonna learn about these different rings of hell and learn about these different environments with Dante, and then the one that really stuck with me is Faust, who’s literally having a deal with the devil. Like, I think at that time, I was really exploring my secularism, and was really excited to be able to explore these, what would be called, “witchcraft or devilish texts” in my family. Growing up, I wasn’t even allowed to read Harry Potter. Like, that’s how concerned about crazy Christians. So, this was so cool and so exciting. And I think that they really stuck with me, you know, because it really helped me start to open up myself to the world, to be like, “Oh, these things aren’t good versus bad,” right? I think the beauty of really thinking about who Faust was and why he did the things he did, and then also really thinking about Dante’s Inferno, and what created the Inferno and why the Inferno existed. It was really interesting to me to be like, “Oh, we can actually just see things critically from different perspectives. We don’t have to constantly paint things as good because it’s God-centric, and bad because it’s devil-secular-centric. That I knew in my soul was a real thing, but I think I wasn’t ever really able to explore it growing up in my household, and so my first year at UCI to be able to really explore those things from this outside scholarly perspective, and then really digging deep into a more personal perspective, because that’s also what Humanities Core, I think, really kind of asks you to do, is not just about you thinking of it from a scholar perspective, but thinking about it as you as a human, was really impactful for me. And I’ve really taken that constantly into my day-to-day life. And I really think – this might get a little woo, woo – but my journey to discover my sexuality, as a queer, bisexual human – really started in these tiny little seeds that got planted in me and Humanities Core where things weren’t so black and white and good versus evil. Or, like, good Christian versus bad devil. And I really think that is so key to being able to see the world from that multidisciplinary perspective that Traci spoke about.

Robin Stewart 

David, if you could finish us off with the experience of the cycle and memorable texts?

David Lumb 

Sure, my cycle was “Associations and Dissociations” the social instinct and its consequences, which was a bit long and ponderous, as was the course. But it was a lot of deep texts that discuss socialization – the individual, with the community, with the nation, with the world – over three quarters. So, beginning with, actually, some of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and Ephesians, and moving on to the “Gettysburg Address” was thrown in there somewhere. But just the idea of rhetoric and speaking to a group, and then moving on into Olaudah Equiano and a lot of Londoners’ individual experiences under oppressive and colonial governments and social situations. That was all pretty heady stuff to bring in as a freshman…

Robin Stewart 

That was first quarter?

David Lumb 

Yeah, so a lot of it absolutely went over my head. But engaging with it was really important into a narrative focus of “what is an individual’s experience?” and “how do they push back on it?” But especially, how did the society that they’re in allow them to tell their stories? How can you popularize a narrative? What are the conditions that you have to engage in in order to get your story heard, told and whatnot? And sometimes it’s embellishments, sometimes it’s glossing over, you know, the actual things we grapple with today: institutional challenges and oppressive forces that keep us from telling the right story. And instead, we fall into the seduction of telling the easy story. And that’s, that’s sort of a communication breakdown that was exemplified in perhaps the most infamous portion of “Associations and Disassociations”, when they showed a Star Trek episode, which was… I forget the actual title, but it’s Darmok and Jalad. It’s Captain Picard beams down to a planet and he’s forced to talk with a character, an alien, who only speaks in idioms, right?

Robin Stewart 

It’s like allusions to their own culture, right?

David Lumb 

Yes, events.

Robin Stewart 

So, they translate it literally, what he’s [the alien] saying, but because he [Captain Picard] doesn’t have the history or the context, he can’t understand it.

David Lumb 

 Correct.

Robin Stewart 

Okay, and what was it about that episode?

David Lumb 

I mean, it’s fun to watch any sort of pop culture in a very textual heavy course, but it was definitely a mind-bending thing for every student to be like, “What is going on in this episode?” How does this deal with language? What are we doing?  How is language playing and how is being able to tell your story impacted by circumstances around you, and then just thrown in the deep end of this character, not being able to connect with an individual at all, lacking all context to not just the way their society works, but their history, right? Like, “what is going to lead them there?” So you take out all these blocks of an individual’s growth, and then, you are across a gulf of experience, and you have no idea how to connect with them. And the impulses: is this going to turn violent? Can, as Picard is famous for, can we diplomacy our way out of the situation? But it was fun to have that experience in class, to then recontextualize the rest of the works. Like, okay, well, that’s an extreme version of what all these characters are going through when they are socialized by a monoculture. For instance, Londoners, the British Empire, right? And disallowing, or oppressing, or even trying to ground out a culture that they deem inferior. And here it’s like, “well, what is first contact, and how does that work when you lack all context?” And I think, coming into a university, you lack a lot of context for a lot of your classmates, and, even a lot of the work, so you’re kind of bewildered by what your experience is going to be. You have a lot of expectations. And then you slowly understand far off places like Northern California – big SoCal, NorCal rivalry when you come in for some – but you’re really opening yourself up in a way that is amplified by a lot of the Humcore texts.

Robin Stewart 

Yeah, that idea of how do you orient your orient yourself? What are the strategies for getting your own orientation in a context that you come in. That’s fantastic. I wanted to ask if you guys had any follow up kind of questions or things that you’d like to respond to each other from the forum today?

Traci Lee 

I do. I actually, even just now in talking, I’ve been thinking about this, because, David, you talked about the text and what’s presented to us, and what we can learn from different things, learning context. And I think about this as applicable to all of our experiences coming into college and then leaving college, right? We came into – and I know I definitely did – came into UCI from schools where there is a curriculum that is set out for you by people way above, right? Someone is making the curriculum. Someone tells you what text to read. And here it’s very much the same thing, but you’re not thinking as critically about it, perhaps, in elementary school, middle school or high school. The things you learn are set out for you based on a test, right? And so one of the things I really appreciated with Humcore was you’re taking in the context or the text that is being assigned to you, but you also have the opportunity to branch out, to apply the things you learned to other mediums: pop culture, television, whatever that you are consuming. And I guess my I would love to ask the both of you, because I think about this a lot, especially when it came to Asian American storytelling in the news: there’s so much that is left out of our curriculum, in like the AAPI experience, that I felt, even when I was stepping into my role, that I didn’t even know. And I would see this when I would talk with my peers, who I might assign to help produce something; they didn’t have the context for World War Two era incarceration camps because they didn’t learn about it. Were there things that either of you experienced in the post-UCI world where you realized you didn’t have a context for it and you needed to learn it?

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, like you’re talking about Traci, you and I share an AAPI background. As a mixed-race Filipino, I had no idea that the Philippines were named after King Philip. If there had been a Filipino studies… Like, I learned everything I could about Imperial Japan at my Imperial Japanese History 102 class, right? So, I could name the Tokugawa era. I know about samurais. I know about shoguns. I know about the Meiji period and industrialization of Japan, and the anti-colonialization that then led into the industry. So, I can tell you, wax poetry, all about Japanese history. But, as a Filipino and a Filipino-American, I didn’t have a drop of knowledge of Filipino culture, and, I had to go out and learn that – school of hard knocks, a little bit too sometimes. Especially now that I really want to try and embrace my Filipino culture and try and tell stories, like, Reimagined Volume II: Mahal, where it’s like, “oh wow, we actually have our own mythology.” We’re not just a monolith of Catholicism and Christianity. I had no idea. I had to find some of those things through Instagram, through Twitter, through online blogs, and so yeah, even into the AAPI narrative. But even the larger narrative of contracts, salary negotiation…. You know, just the hands-on-real-world-stuff that no one really talks to you about in Humanities Core. And that makes sense why, but, yeah, those things you kind of have to learn. Or even like, “Oh, that’s a toxic boss.” I didn’t realize I was working under a toxic boss; I don’t know why I was feeling oppressed and depressed, but it’s because we don’t learn these things about patterns in the world that everyone goes through just because they’re in the workplace.

David Lumb 

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I got an English degree with a film Media Minor, and I’m somehow a tech reporter, right? There was a lot of other stuff I was learning along the way, just for my trade, but it’s the business of being in an organization and having to negotiate with people, partially on your team, but partially negotiating in industry. I mean, just being in journalism has been a grapple, right? Whereas, yes, as you said in the seminar today, we had so much structure learning and having a guidepost laid out that by the time you get out, it’s an adjustment, no matter what. And that’s not Humcore’s job to tell you how to get out in the world. It’s to nurture a lot of curiosity and storytelling that you can do when you get out there, but it really is kind of a long drop until you figure out how to get some traction with jobs you can do. And then you have to deal with industries and people and bad bosses or bad employment situations. And so, you know, negotiating that is tough. Gonna hawk the union stuff here. Just learning about that too. How much you can advocate for yourself and how to advocate for yourself is such a such a struggle, because you kind of read about it. We read heroic stories all the time, you know? We even read resistance stories against systems. But it takes a lot of a lot of work to ingest and understand how these systemic injustices actually affect… You know, I don’t know what it was like to be in school and in Humcore when the pandemic happened, and especially when the BLM protests happened. Because in SoCal, we’re so cut off from a lot of things, or at least in Irvine, but there’s so much history in SoCal proper that I wasn’t told or didn’t know about, right? Like, the Watts riots, or the 92 LA riots. There’s so much about the history of where we are that I wish I had absorbed, and that just takes time.

Traci Lee 

Yeah, Humcore was like the first ripping off of the blindfold and then being like, “oh, we should ask questions.” Because, I mean, when I did my double major, I had to do a capstone project. I did it on the history of activism at UCI, which, activism and UCI don’t seem like things that go together.

Robin Stewart 

Langston library just had an exhibit where they drew from their archives, and they showed the history of activism at the school.

Traci Lee 

Yeah, I used a lot of those archives when I was writing my capstone, because it was fascinating for me to see how the campus developed and then how the city developed around it, and how it changed the campus. And getting to ask those questions and really dive into it, to treat it as a joint journalism, global cultures capstone project that I worked on, so much of that, again, is owed to being in a yearlong course like Humcore, where suddenly, you are encouraged to ask questions and to challenge the things that you’re being assigned, and then apply it to this idea of “what can the humanities do for you?” I remember that we used to always ask, “what can the humanities do for you?” And I was like, “I don’t know. Why are you asking me? You’re supposed to tell me; you’re the School of Humanities!” But that question is very individual to every student and everyone who graduates, because it is going to be different for every single person.

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

Yeah. And one other thing I think we really learned in Humcore was how to articulate those questions and how to articulate those kinds of struggles, of I’m struggling with this idea and this idea, and I’m going to articulate it first in the written word of an essay, but then even sometimes in presentations, or even sometimes in debates. And then being able to build and grow that storytelling part of it, too. I think is important. And I think I have one question I want to pose to my fellow panelists: if you had to teach a class at UCI – no boundaries – what would you teach? Just because we’re going off this conversation about unions and Asian American, what would you teach at UCI? If you could take any group of students from any walk of life, any number of them, what kind of world building would you do around them to give them skills? Goals that you wish you had.

Robin Stewart 

I love this question.

Traci Lee 

That’s a very good question.

David Lumb 

Right, I wish I had like 10 minutes think of a good answer.

Traci Lee 

Because I said I had taught at USC for some time, and I taught specifically podcasting and audio journalism with the goal of really encouraging students to think about how to tell a visual, visual story in a different format, right? Radio journalism is as old as time, right? Everyone knows that. But podcasting is also different; you need a different structure to it. There are things about it where you can’t just, you know, turn on a mic with no plan, right? You’ve got to have a plan. You’ve got to have a plan. You’ve got to have the right guests, you’ve got to have the right questions, you’ve got to have sound bites and all that stuff. How do you build a story for someone who…

Robin Stewart 

Let me just take some notes.

Traci Lee 

With podcasting, people have to find your story as well, right? I think as an extension of that, and this goes back to the work I did at NBC with Asian American and Pacific Islander storytelling, you have to really focus in on what it means to tell stories from marginalized communities. You know, I did correct you at one point when you said minority communities, because I don’t like that term. And I think a lot of folks will, especially in activism communities, will say, you know, minority somehow implies that those stories are less than, that they’re not as worth telling, even though that’s not their implied intention.

David Lumb 

No, but thank you for correcting me.

Traci Lee 

Yeah. And I think, you know, we often will try to redirect that language so that it’s focusing on less about who gets to be at the top, who gets to be the majority. Because we are a melting pot nation. People like to talk about that. How do we let those experiences tell their own stories? I think one of the things I really wanted to focus on at NBC Asian America was giving Asian American and Pacific Islander individuals the power to tell their own stories. I think, like I said about incarceration camps, what we are often finding is who gets to write those narratives, and as they’re writing them, how did they change the original intention of it? You know, you’ve got this language of “internment” camp. Well, at NBC, we started encouraging people in their style guide to stop using “internment” because internment implies guilt. People were interned because they did something. The Japanese Americans who were held in these camps, quote, unquote “camps,” were never given a trial. They were just rounded up and taken to these places. They called it the relocation order. What it was people being rounded up, arrested and incarcerated, and so really getting to challenge the language. That’s my long way of answering that. I would love to really dive into what it means to tell those stories from the perspective of the communities who lived them, and really encourage journalism from that standpoint. And again, allowing yourself as a journalist – the reason why we are journalists is so that we can go to other people and ask them to tell their stories and help them tell their stories, not be the ones to solely control what part of their story gets told.

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

Totally, I always say, in my work, I’m the bridge. You can walk all over me; I just am trying to connect two big dots together. I’m not here to put my own perspective or spin on it. And another language barrier that I always come up with journalists is when they call their people they’re collaborating with “subjects,” because then it sounds like they are lesser than human, and it sounds like you’re in a test, kind of like science experiment, or you’re like, in this anthropology… you are this foreigner coming into this space, versus being like, “Oh, they’re humans. They’re collaborating with me. We’re co-creating this experience of this reportage or this written word or this podcast or this photography together, right? So, they’re collaborators; they’re basically almost co-producers in this, right? So, a lot of that language I agree with.

David Lumb 

Is there a language you prefer, other than “subject”?

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

Collaborator, or individual. Like, “Hey, I’m working with this really great individual to tell their story” versus “Oh, I’ve got this really great subject.”

David Lumb 

That’s great. And yes, we are framing this in terms of “journalism,” quote, unquote, but it’s anytime you tell someone’s story, right? So that is broadly applicable to all of Humcore or even starting project. Mine would be “Context and History.” I think one thing growing up in here in Orange County, is a lot of bubble, right? You are aware of a history and like, “oh yes, there is an Asian American community. There’s a heavy Vietnamese community in Fountain Valley and Garden Grove.” But what does that mean? How do they come here? And so, it takes years and years to understand how that affects you, even if you aren’t in the AAPI community. So, giving students the ability, to give them a question, have them dig back far enough to where they can understand what forces are acting on their life that they don’t know, right? And I think part of any time you’re starting a project is… You know, this happens all the time in articles. I just did it with my video game and climate change article, which is like, “Oh, this is interesting. I’m sure nobody’s ever reported on this before.” And so, it’s understanding the landscape of just how these things come to be, and it’s a huge, expansive process every time. But you know, applying that to your own life as a way that you can understand why are you the way you are because of the environmental forces around you, and that’s like a tough thing to do, especially as an 18 – 19-year-old just entering college. But it’s something that can open up commonalities between you and a lot of your fellow students that I think would get you to understand. And especially we’re in a pretty privileged place, and as a white dude, I am privileged on the top of that. And what did I get that other people did not? And in a way, to start having a conversation with yourself, to disable a lot of the guilt and shame that’s going to prevent you from really connecting and understanding how that enables you, or gives you more opportunities than other people, how that changes access to a lot of things – equity, opportunities – that is going to rebound your entire life. So even just the smallest window into, cracking open the door of why are you the way you are in ways that you can’t control, that your family couldn’t control. And it’s tough because you’re especially in a spot in your life, where you are being exposed to so much, and you might not want to open those doors, but I think it’s going to, it would give you a lot of a head start on a lot of the deep introspection that you should do as a storyteller, especially because it’ll tell you what your biases you have when you approach collaborators and people that you may think you don’t have a lot in common with. And that, for journalism specifically, is a way we can fix a lot of this. You know, New York Times style, incredibly distance, air quotes, “objective” reporting.

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

Yeah, no, I agree with all that. And I think, too, what you’re talking about is this radicalization of diversity, inclusion and equity; but from this personal perspective. Because you can learn all you want at those courses and those workshops, but really going into what makes you tick and what fabrics of society have you gotten to put onto yourself, like as a jacket or as a pair of pants, and you don’t even realize you’re walking around wearing them. I think that’s really cool. I think I was just thinking about this, so I had a much longer time to think. So, I’m sorry if I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got an idea.” I would do something around the lines of personal branding and digital and cultural currency. So many people are going out into the world and they don’t have a website, or they don’t have a very… And here’s the thing. I wish someone told me, you can have 3000 Instagrams, as long as you have a handle that you’re committed to that potentially shows you as a professional. You can have your “friends-tagram” or whatever, and really get your Twitter really clean looking, or get your personal headshot. And all these things that I think we don’t realize are now digital currency in the world. People are constantly judging you on these digital spaces that you exist in, that you don’t even realize go into the hiring management process now. It goes beyond the resume and the cover letter now.

Robin Stewart 

But to teach students how to do it?

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

Like, here’s how you get into Squarespace. You don’t have to be a CS major, right? Here’s how – I’m sure we’ve all used it- Canva. Here’s how you use Canva to make yourself look better and cooler. And, “Oh, you’re doing that one thing off campus?” Blow it up! Make sure you’re documenting it. Make sure you know it’s there. Because I think you don’t realize there’s some really amazing things that happened to you in college that you don’t realize you could use to help push you further into the world, whether that’s getting a job or whatever. And then I would probably walk them through an employment process of here’s what it’s like if you’re a freelancer, here’s what it’s like if you’re… So, some sort of personal branding, digital currency class would be really cool, I think.

Traci Lee 

So, UCI admin, if you’re listening to this, hire us!

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

I don’t have a master’s. I hear that’s the biggest issue, right?

Robin Stewart 

All pitches, we’re waiting for the schedule to open up, and emails to go out. Yeah, well, I think we’re nearing the end of our time. We have just a couple, I think, minutes for any final reflective thoughts that you guys might like to express here.

David Lumb 

Do I get to? They got to ask each other questions. Can I ask one?

Robin Stewart 

All right, yeah, you can give us the last question.

David Lumb 

Alright, real quick. So, this rotation is world building. What is the one text you would add to it? Any multimedia?

Robin Stewart 

That’s a good question.

Traci Lee 

Oh, world building. Oh, gosh, do you have an answer?

David Lumb 

No, I was waiting for you guys to talk.

Robin Stewart 

He was going to ask it, so he could have time to think.

Traci Lee 

Let me think. I think I have less of a specific text. I would say, if I had ever gotten this project off the ground, I would plug it. But one of the things I think that fits in is the history of ethnic enclaves, right? So specifically, Chinatowns. I think that Chinatown itself is a very fascinating concept for an ethnic enclave, obviously. Chinese immigrants coming over here and building the spaces that they needed to survive and be safe. But one of the things I think a lot of people don’t realize – and this is the project I always wanted to produce and never got the funding for it from the company I worked for – some of the most, some of the largest and most active Chinatowns in the late 1800s and so forth, were in spaces that do not have active large Asian American populations, specifically Chinese American population. So Rock Springs, Wyoming. There was one in Montana, and a lot of it was because of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, so Chinese immigrants were a large part of that labor, and of course, for many decades, not recognized as having built the railroad. One of the big projects, one of the last projects, I did when I was at NBC, was there was a history, like anniversary, marking the Transcontinental Railroad, and descendants of a lot of those Chinese railroad workers came back to that spot in Utah and kind of recreated the big photo that everyone knows of. You know, the people who were all of the white folks who got to celebrate the building of this railroad, and the Chinese immigrants were completely left out of the photo. And a lot of these descendants of the railroad workers came and got to take that picture and be like, “We built this. We did this.” I think Chinatowns that popped up in those spaces, because that’s where the railroad workers were, a lot of them were burned to the ground. They were destroyed. They were…You know, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, there was the Rock Springs Massacre. The folks who lived in Chinatown were put on a train and told to leave, and then that train turned around and came back, and then they were right in the center of all of the destruction, and many of them died. And all of that stuff is not talked about in our history textbooks. Even if you were to go, and I called some of the museums in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and I would ask them, “Do you have any exhibits or anything about this?” And they’d say, “Oh, we have, like, one or two things.” But if you go back to those spots, there are remnants of the Chinatown that existed in the buildings and plaques and small things here and there. But a lot of people don’t know about that history, and I think that that’s so interesting. Because when you think about Chinatown, you think about the big ones, perhaps in San Francisco or New York or LA, and even those have such a complicated history, and those spaces have changed so much based on the community and what was needed, that I think that’s a really interesting area to explore. So, I don’t know if there’s a single textbook that is up to date that can really go into that, but I think that is a unit that should definitely be added.

Robin Stewart 

Yeah, start with that reunion and just work from there.

Traci Lee 

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

I hate to be that person, but I would build the course in a very specific way. But Ready Player Two, which is the sequel to Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, is a really great piece of text where you talk about world building, because it really asks the question to the audience, “who are we when we’re co-building the world with people around us?” And can there be a way we co-build a world that is fully inclusive, or will we always be dealing with these issues of race, these issues of income, and will the rich people just create a world off-world to go continue to create their own world, right? It’s a really beautiful idea of when we leave behind the physical world and go into the digital world. It highlights sexuality, it highlights race, it highlights gender and sexism, and so Ready Player Two, I think, would be really clear off the top of my head. But I would also go into the works of Nonny de la Peña, who is known as the grandmother of VR and really her start is also in journalism, where she was really just trying to bring people into the world of certain people that they weren’t used to. And really started to push the boundaries of photogrammetry and videogrammatry, which is basically real-world 3D capture, right? So, you usually capture photos or video on your phone. Those are all in a 2D space, but there are now outside your phone, where you can take multiple photos of one thing and it can then become a 3D model, or a 3D object, which you then can go and interact with in the digital reality. So, it’s these kind of building platforms. You’re not just creating a virtual world from scratch using, like a Unity or an Unreal, but you’re actually using textures and captures from the real world and then building virtual worlds using them. And the next piece of that puzzle isn’t just these standard models still objects, but now these moving objects, and humans and dogs and animals. That’s videogrammetry, right? It’s that next layer of 3D modeling, capturing. So, if I’m then captured as a real-life hologram and put into a space, then you embed me with AI, am I really real? And these questions, I think really are the questions I’m grappling with in my day-to-day world and what I’m doing. I think that would be a really interesting way to end that kind of project; I would push that kind of virtual world building a little further. But, yeah, those are some of the things I can think off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ve got like 12 more in my back pocket, but I don’t want to, like, take up the time.

David Lumb 

Oh no, that’s incredible. As a tech reporter, I would cover all of that. That’s fantastic. My answer is much less techie. Two texts that I – they’re actual books. So, the most boring – I mean, the most traditional of these – would be Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Each page is a different city, and it’s just a world building exercise, but in a book. And it’s sort of like, can you expand? Can you look at and then dig into, what are the inspirations for it? Anytime you have in a video game or otherwise a fantastical plant. It’s usually based on some mix of existing historical cultures. There’s a lot of interesting ways we can look at Tolkien’s mythology. Dwarves are big nosed, and they go after digging gold in the ground, right? You have these Jewish stereotypes for a lot of things. Elves can be flighty and ephemeral. Or you go to science fiction, and you have these coded villains that are either queer coded, or Asian coded, black coded, stuff like that. So, the world building of what we put into our fantasies.

Robin Stewart 

Just coding, as a concept and where can we see it going?

David Lumb 

Yeah, dissecting where are your influences for these fantastical things, and then breaking down how much of our Star Wars, Jedi are just sort of monastic traditions that are then filtered through. Versus so many other things that have been ground down into a slurry of a culturally consumable IP. That we all love. You know, Galaxy’s Edge is great. But then it becomes, how are these sorts of things we go out and see on the big screen filtering down from real experience that the edges get sanded off real hard, so that we can have something that’s consumable. That’s probably a long jump from Italo Calvino, but you know.

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

One piece of literature I’d add on top of that, because you inspired me, is Palaces for the People, which is an urban planning book that really highlights how certain spaces are built for humans in mind, and then how so many spaces are built to be lacking humanity. And one of those, a quick highlight would be the library is literally built for humanity. It’s a safe, welcoming space for all to come. It has free resources, versus something like a business center that literally builds physical architecture so that skaters can’t skate on it and homeless people can’t lay down on the benches. When we start building worlds that lack humanity is that saying something about humanity itself, and Invisible Cities made me think of that.

Robin Stewart 

So yes, to our student listeners, and I guess to our staff, recommendations for future years. Thank you, guys, so much for coming and talking to the students in the forum today and for sticking around and talking to each other afterwards. This has been so rewarding, and we hope that you come and visit us again soon.

Traci Lee 

Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

Michaela Ternasky-Holland 

 Thank you.

David Lumb 

Yeah. Thank you.

Robin Stewart 

Thanks again to our guests for this inaugural episode of the Humanities Core Podcast: Traci Lee, David Lum and Michaela Ternasky-Holland. The Humanities Core Podcast is produced by Robin Stewart, with the assistance of the program’s interns, Sammy Merabet and Arianna Vargas.