Podcast Script Writer

Join Naya Magazine as a podcast script writer for their mental health-centric podcast, Decolonizing Healing, hosted by Thilini Weerakkody. This work will involve collaborating with Thilini on research and writing. The scripts are poetic, philosophical, and research oriented, almost like spoken word but with psycho and political educational segments.

This project aims to explore how colonialism and fascism has sculpted the relationship Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) have with mental health and healing. Through exploring personal narratives as well as offering psychoeducation on the history and research behind this historical violence, we can understand the complexity of the issues the AAPI community faces and hold space of the grief of all the violence we have collectively experienced.

Moreover, this project aims to humanize the injustice that has occurred in our communities, highlighting that we are not just victims to systematic violence, but instead active participants in resistance, reclamation, and remembering.

The project will unfold in four thematic parts: forgetting, seeing, remembering, and resisting. Each of these parts are interconnecting, offering a narrative arc about theft, awareness, cultural reclamation and liberation.

The goals of the podcast are the following:

• Name and explore the history of systemic violence and how it contributed to the erasure of ancestral healing practices
• Spend time grieving the cultural loss as an act of resistance against a society that is uncomfortable with the violence they reaped
• Explore the benefits of forgetting, and how it’s promoted by the very elders who raised you, in order to survive and assimilate in American society
• Must be interested in delving into AAPI mental health