We are using this blog space to share messages from the WGSS@StonyBrook community, far and wide. Here is an inspiring message to the WGSS class of 2020 from Asher Aron O’Donnell, WGSS class of 2010.

Congratulations WGSS Class of 2020!!

My name is Asher Aron O’Donnell, WGSS class of 2010, writing to you from Oakland, California! It is a joy and pleasure both to congratulate you on your accomplishment, and to reflect on how my degree in WGSS has shaped my last decade.

I am sitting outside a laundromat, breathing through a homemade mask gifted to me from a crafty, leather-dyke seamstress friend. With each breath moving heavily across the cotton, it feels impossible to not also consider the unhappy global circumstances in which I am participating in celebrating you. Perhaps as such, it is more important than ever to mark your achievements, to slow down amidst the internal and external chaos, and to think about how your WGSS training will serve you moving forward. It is here, in the space of you dreaming up your next steps, that I arrive to share my WGSS experience and where I have gone with my degree.

Being a WGSS student profoundly affected my internal world, from my sense of self and how I relate to others, to how I began making sense of my past and my positionality in the world. I suspect WGSS students often are drawn to the program, as I was, because we sense that beneath the specific topics of each course rests a foundation of values that contradict those of the mainstream, status quo. At the time I started WGSS I didn’t have the words or concepts to articulate what was being contradicted (white supremacy, capitalism, racism, heterosexism, classism, ableism). It was an emotionally driven experience, a feeling inside that deeply resonated with what we were doing in the classroom. As I studied marginalized histories, feminist philosophies, queer literature, and honed skills in applying feminist methodologies, the values that resonated early on—social justice, lifting voices of the oppressed, body autonomy, self-definition—were nurtured and took root inside me. My experience in WGSS continues to inform my process of growth and deep healing, an ongoing work of connecting my own and others’ experiences of trauma and harm within the larger social and political structures of oppression and inequity.

My career path is driven by the values I cultivated as a WGSS student. Today I work at the University of California, San Francisco in the Division of HIV, AIDS and Global Health as a clinical research coordinator. I am heading into my fourth research study looking at how medically tailored meals provided with nutrition education by a registered dietician impact chronic disease management among food insecure people in the San Francisco Bay Area. The populations I have worked with so far include people living with HIV/AIDS and patients hospitalized due to heart failure, and the latest study I am joining will address type 2 diabetes mellitus. Last year I completed a two-year fellowship with the California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center and published a policy brief looking at food resource utilization among people living with HIV/AIDS in Alameda County. I am currently working on two papers on the findings from these studies to be published in peer-reviewed journals.

I have the pleasure of working alongside both leaders and some of the brightest up and coming thinkers in the field of food insecurity and HIV/AIDS. More broadly, this field groups within population health, and investigators study social determinants of health in order to come up with ways to intervene to improve health outcomes among groups disproportionately experiencing health risks and poor health outcomes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines social determinants of health as the conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play that affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes. Food insecurity is defined as a lack in ability, or worry about a lack in ability, to regularly acquire enough food in socially acceptable ways to meet one’s dietary requirements. Food insecurity is the social determinant of health at the center of our research, and we look at other factors such as mental health, social support and substance use to understand health outcomes and to ascertain if our “food is medicine” intervention has an impact.

I plan to apply to MA and PhD programs in the coming year. I am motivated to continue moving up in my career addressing social inequities in the health field, an area very well suited for the critical skills I developed in WGSS. In these uncertain times, with whispers of different possible futures floating in the unpolluted air while human activity is halted, I look back and feel the strength and wisdom of my ancestors. And I look to the future, and I see you, with your ingenuity and leadership, informed by WGSS values, working to build a more just world.