Spotlight: Zina Jawadi
Zina Jawadi, from Trisha Stan's PWR 1 "10,000 Ways That Didn't Work: The Rhetoric of Innovation" class, has certainly done great things with her PWR project. Zina, a hearing-impaired student, wrote a moving essay on why health insurance should cover the cost of hearing aids for youth (currently not totally covered). She presented a PowerPoint based on her paper at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies last summer and she published her essay in the most recent issue of Stanford's Intersect.
Here's what Zina has to say about her experience:
My name is Zina Jawadi, and I am a sophomore planning to major in biology. The PWR program has had a very positive impact on my experience at Stanford. I took PWR1, "The Rhetoric of Biomedical Science," with Dr. Trisha Stan in Winter Quarter 2015. My RBA paper, which was titled, “Wedding Processions and the Case for Universal Hearing Aid Insurance,” pleaded for hearing aid insurance coverage, especially for youth with hearing loss. I am humbled to have been nominated for the Boothe Prize Award by Dr. Stan. Hearing loss advocacy is very important for me as a student with significant hearing loss of my own. Furthermore, I have personally witnessed the effects of lack of hearing aid insurance coverage in America on others with hearing loss and recognize the serious ramifications on the individual and societal level.
In writing my PWR1 paper, I planned to use the research as a platform for my advocacy work. On September 10, I spoke in a panel at the Institute of Medicine via WebEx about improving accessibility and affordability of hearing aids from a young adult’s perspective. My PWR1 paper helped me develop arguments for this presentation. My PWR1 paper has also been published in the Intersect Journal, Volume 9, Number 2. In my PWR2 class this quarter, my RBA focuses advocates for attitudinal and legal change towards people with disabilities in the Arab World. I am involved with advocacy work outside of Stanford through nonprofit organizations. My research in PWR classes is changing my perspective on my advocacy work.
Student Publications
Elise Kostial, Ethan Plaut's student, had her RBA, "Picturing Democracy: Analyzing Religious Exemptions to Voter ID," published in the Undergrad Law Review from Ohio State.
Max Melin & Cindy Zang Liu, students from Meg Formato's fall PWR 1 course “Imagining Technology: The Rhetoric of Humans and Machines" have published revised versions of their RBAs in Intersect: The Stanford Journal of Science, Technology and Society. Max David Melin’s article is “The Industrial Revolution and the Advent of Modern Surgery” and Cindy’s Zang Liu’s is “Making Inception a Reality: Lucid Dreaming in Science Fiction and Technology.” Both Max and Cindy shared with Meg that they found the peer review system and process of working with the editors at Intersect to be really useful in extending the work they did in PWR and continuing to grow as writers. They are really excited to have the papers they wrote for PWR reach a wider audience.
Grace O'Brien, a student from Norah Fahim's class, published her RBA, "The Word on the Street is Not a Word: It's an [Smiley face emoticon]" in Digital America, an institutionally-based journal "that focuses on digitization and digital culture."
Habib Olapade, who, as we reported in our March Student Spotlight, published his RBA in the Texas Undergraduate Law Review has had that same article published in the University of Chicago Undergraduate Law Review.
