“Every place has a queer history.” Those are some of the impactful words shared by our guest today, Fulbright 2022-2023 U.S. Student Researcher to Chile, Sam Apostolopoulos. Sam’s Fulbright project focuses on understanding the legal history of LGBTQ+ rights in Chile and comparing that with the history of LGBTQ+ legal frameworks in the United States. Through this conversation, Sam shares a great deal of insights about how LGBTQ+ legal rights evolved in Chile, the discourse used to protect and advocate for these rights, the challenges that the queer community faced during eras such as the Pinochet dictatorship, and where things stand now in the country. Sam also touches a bit on this legal history in the U.S. including a court case involving a nonbinary person that occurred 400 years ago! In this way, his message is clear. There is queer history everywhere, and we can all play a part in remembering, reviving, and sustaining it!

Another important aspect of this conversation is the way that Sam’s project also works to interrupt existing narratives of the United States’s relationship to LGBTQ+ rights. The U.S. has often attempted to portray itself as a beacon of queer and trans rights that other countries should follow, despite the U.S.’s own record of lack of protections and attacks on its own LGBTQ+ community, and the fact that nations it tries to advise sometimes have stronger systems. In the case of Sam, he shows that Chile often has legalized protections for queer and trans people before the United States, and to this day offers greater federal legal support for the LGBTQ+ community. Furthermore, Sam also articulates how the embrace of LGBTQ+ protections in Chile as human rights and the U.S.’s resistance towards that framework have helped exacerbate some of these differences. So the question remains: what is it that the United States can learn from other countries such as Chile? We hope you enjoy this episode!

In this episode of Fulbright Forward, Kelli Swazey, D&I Liaison for Fulbright Programs in East Asia and the Pacific, talks story with grantees who are shaping the future of Fulbright by pushing the program to expand its engagement with issues of representation, inclusion, equity and justice as a core part of the Fulbright experience.

The guests on this episode are members of the Taiwan DEI Committees, a self-organized group of English Teaching Assistants, or “ETAs” at the Taiwan Fulbright Program. In the first half of this episode, Lily Tang & Samantha Tran from the Empowerment Committee, and Jaime Ragos from the Education Committee discuss what drew to them to the Fulbright program, and how their personal stories connect to the issues they have engaged with through their work with the DEI Committees during their Fulbright grants in Taiwan. The second half of the episode features Carlo Juntilla and Ayana Harscoet from the Empowerment Committee, and Jocelyn Chi from the Education Committee, who share their paths to Fulbright, and their reflections on why the activism and advocacy work they've undertaken with the DEI committees has been essential not only to their experiences as educators, but also has allowed them to reflect on their own identities and expand the relationships they made in their communities and cohorts during their grant periods.

Episode Links and Resources
Taiwan DEI Committees Linktree
Taiwan DEI Committees Instagram

Guest Bios

Lily Tang (she/her) is a 2021-2022 Fulbright Taiwan English Teaching Assistant in Yilan County, which is on the traditional land of the Taiya people.  Currently, Lily is embarking on a year of Chinese language study through the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship. Lily can be reached on Instagram or TikTok @lilytvng.

Samantha Tran (she/her) Samantha Tran (she/her) is a first-generation Vietnamese-American. She completed her 2021-2022 Fulbright Taiwan ETA grant year in Taitung, Taiwan, and is currently fulfilling her Foundation of Scholarly Exchange ETF grant in New Taipei City.

Jaime Ragos (she/her) was a 2021-2022 ETA to Kaohsiung, Taiwan in the Dashu District. She was a co-chair of the education committee. Jaime can be reached at jaimeragos2015@gmail.com.

Carlo Juntilla (he/him) is an education policy fellow for the U.S. Senate and a former teacher. Prior to teaching in public schools in Taiwan with the Fulbright program, he was a Teach for America corps member in the Bay Area where he taught high school history and government. Currently, Carlo works on the education policy portfolio for Senator Elizabeth Warren, and lives in Washington, D.C., with his partner and their rescue dog Carlo.Juntilla1@gmail.com.

Jocelyn Chi (she/her) was a 2021-2022 Fulbright Taiwan ETA in Chiayi and the education co-chair. Currently, she is completing her second year in Chiayi under the English Teaching Flagship award. She can be reached at jocelync888@gmail.com. 

This episode features Fulbright Alumna Evi Mariani. Evi was a 2011 Hubert Humphrey Fellow from Indonesia at Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Her critical work has been widely recognized, and she is the recipient of several prestigious journalism awards including a Society of Publishers in Asia award for excellence in public journalism, the Tasrif Award, the Indonesia Print Media Awards Golden Award for investigative journalism, and the Influential Media Figure award from MAW Talk Awards. She was also a reporter and later Managing Editor at the Jakarta Post, one of Indonesia’s most respected and long-running English-language daily newspapers.

Evi and her colleagues founded Project Multatuli in 2021. Project Multatuli is a public service journalism initiative dedicated to carrying out the ideals of giving a voice to the voiceless, spotlighting the marginalized, and reporting on the underreported. The organization produces data-based, deeply researched news stories. They collaborate with other news organizations, research bodies, and civil society groups that strive for democracy, human rights, social justice, environmental sustainability, and equal rights for all.

Evi shares with the story of how she came to create Project Multatuli and how the collective is using innovative approaches to produce journalism aligned with their mission to serve the underreported and hold power accountable. We discuss the Project’s strategies to disrupt dominant practices in Indonesia’s media industry, and the challenges of creating a work culture and societal structures that support truly inclusive media production.

Related Links:
Project Multatuli
Alumni & Voices: Evi Mariani Sofian
In CONVERSATION with Evi Mariani, Executive Director of Project Multatuli