Queer Joy and Community Resilience: Voices from Stanford - Part One

Queer Joy and Community Resilience: Voices from Stanford Part 1: Conversation with members of REFUGE: Queerness, Spirituality, and Religion Elaine Lai (she/they), who was in the first cohort of Stanford University’s Office for Religious and Spiritual Life’s Meeting the Moment program, visits us again to present a two-part podcast titled “Queer Joy and Community Resilience: Voices from Stanford.” Part one features five members of the student group REFUGE: Queerness, Spirituality, and Religion, founded by Matta Zheng (’22). As a former member of REFUGE, Elaine wanted to create a time capsule for this community to remember the work, conversations, and aspirations created together, and to offer a source of refuge for other queer folks trying to cultivate joy, and a deepening relationship to spirituality and/or religion. The conversation today considers what it means to create safe community, everyday rituals of joy, and the constraints and possibilities to queering institutional and religious spaces. This podcast is made possible by Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis program hosted by the Office of Inclusion, Community, and Integrative Learning at Stanford. Featuring: Elaine Lai (PhD Candidate) Matta Zhen (’22) Sequoiah Blaire Hippolyte (’22) Three other anonymous members of REFUGE Podcast edited by Cahron Cross (’23) and Destiny Cunningham (’23) Elaine Lai (she/they) is a PhD candidate in the Religious Studies department at Stanford focusing on Buddhism. Their dissertation focuses on researching how time is narrated and embodied in Tibetan Buddhist literature, and what this might teach us about otherwise possibilities for storytelling and creating a more compassionate world. Prior to Stanford they spent ten years studying and working in China, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, and Nepal where they made lifelong friends who have drastically influenced the way they see the world. Outside of academia, they have served as the co-president of the Buddhist Community at Stanford (BCAS). By night they write plays, screenplays, and TV pilots that feature unconventional female and queer characters.