Salon Discussion Series: Self-Care and Mental Health at the University

In honor of mental health awareness month, the GRN and the Think Tank Programme on War, Conflict and Global Migration would like to create a space for you to discuss the challenges you face as graduate students.

What types of support would you like to receive from universities? Is your institution providing Programmes and support that contributes positively to your mental health?

We warmly welcome your participation in this unrecorded session that focuses on your journey through academia during Covid-19 and beyond.

Bava Dharani will share examples of incidents where universities are being exploitative or inconsiderate towards researchers and students, as in the viral tweets about the email exchange between a professor from York and a student from Myanmar, the mass lay-offs of Teaching Assistants in numerous universities in the USA for wanting to unionize and the locking down of student halls and issuing of expensive compulsory food rations in the UK during COVID-19 lockdown.

Anisa Abeytia will share her experiences working internally in the university, with regards to self care and mental health.

Finally, we will open up the space to allow anyone to share their experiences, problems they have encountered, issues they wish to be supported on.

About the Speakers

Anisa Abeytia is currently the student assistant for the Migration Studies Department and the Center for Latina/o Studies in the Americas at the University of San Francisco (USF). She is also a student mentor at Project Success at USF. Previously she was the Assistant to the Assistant Dean of Students/Multicultural Educator at Stanford University, She consultant for the Institute of International Education's Syrian Consortium for Higher Education and was invited by UNESCO to write a policy brief on higher education integration of rouges in Norway. Anisa is GRN’s Think Tank Programme Co-ordinator.

Bava Dharani completed her LLB and LLM in SOAS, UOL. She is currently pursuing the LPC at BPP University. Bava is interested in the Indian indentured history is Singapore and Malaysia, and the parallels and differences this labor movement bears to modern day migrant workers' movement chains. Previously, Bava worked as a paralegal in Singapore, specializing in criminal, civil and employment law. Bava is the Lead for GRN's Think Tank Programme in War, Conflict & Global Migration.