Within the Margins The Emory Wheel

Roughly 2.5% of the overall Emory community identify as Muslim according to Emory Spiritual and Religious life. With Emory’s legal and traditional ties with the United Methodist Church, organizations like Emory’s Muslim Student Association (MSA) are imperative for finding community, inclusion, and identity

In this episode, we talk to Ibrahim Jouja (25C) and Ilsa Qureshi (26C) to discuss their experiences as Muslims on campus: from the perceptions of different Muslim sects, prayer spaces and Ramadan to the everyday life of a Muslim student. To shed light and understanding on marginalized communities, we want to include and uplift their voices to be heard through this episode of Within the Margins: The Muslim community at Emory.

In this week’s episode of Within the Margins, we explored Hispanic representation at Emory and in the greater Atlanta area. The Hispanic student population makes up the second-smallest ethnic demographic at Emory and are typically clumped together under that overarching umbrella. What's it like adjusting to Emory and Atlanta as a Hispanic student? What can student Hispanic/Latinx organizations/spaces do to make spaces more inclusive? How can Emory work to prevent future misrepresentation?

We sat down with Wheel Editorial Board member Sara Perez (24C) and Amy Herrera (25C) to discuss intersectional identities, Emory’s treatment of Hispanic students, the monolith myth and more.

Content Warning: At the beginning of the episode one of the interviewees uses the F-slur.

LGBTQ+ students on Emory’s campus exist with almost no student-run LGBTQ+ groups. Instead, Emory’s official Office of LGBTQ+ life is the main space for students to come together and discuss their sexuality. Community is essential to queer spaces, and the lack of queer community on Emory’s campus leaves questions about how the increasing population of queer students experiences the campus. . What about other spaces on campus? How are LGBTQ+ students treated throughout campus life? How do LGBTQ+ students find community?

In this episode, Isabella Montealegre (23BBA) and Marc Goedmans (24C) joined us to discuss their experiences as queer students on Emory’s campus. They discussed athletics, business, and queer community on Emory’s campus.

Affinity groups across Emory’s campus are crucial to the yearly get out of the vote fervor. Organizations like Asian Pacific Islander and Desi American Activists (APIDAA) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are stewards of ending voting repression both on Emory’s campus and in the wider Atlanta community. Georgia is a deeply purple state, and with such uncertainty entering the midterm election, we wanted to sit down with two campus leaders directing the voting movement at Emory.

Vivian Liu (24C) and Alvaro Perez (23C) are at the front lines of the drive to get Emory students to vote. Their organizations focus on enriching the lives of students, but their reach spreads far beyond Emory’s campus. In this episode, we hear how APIDAA and the NAACP are encouraging students to vote and make change in the community.

“Identity is contradictory; fluid yet stationary, malleable yet unyielding, complicated yet beautiful.” - Sophia Ling. Lutalica is an identity series created by the Emory Wheel's executive opinion editor, Sophia Ling. The series includes 12 opinion contributors sharing their processes to discovering and solidifying their identities. Today, we are joined by three of those contributors: Dani Parra Del Riego (25C), Martinna Rodan (25C) and Sophia Ling (24C).

You can find the rest of the Lutalica series here.  

Don’t forget to subscribe to Within the Margins to never miss an episode. Join us next time as we hear from more studies from historically underrepresented groups at Emory.

As class disparities rise in the United States, access to education continues to serve as a financial obstacle to low-income families. At Emory, a pronounced wealth gap creates significant deviations in students’ interactions with university resources, administration and their peers. Today, we are joined by students Elisabet Ortiz (24C) and Nicole Ramirez (23C) to discuss how these social, political, economic obstacles may continue even after low-income students are accepted into post-secondary institutions.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Within the Margins to never miss an episode, and join us next time for a discussion about the experiences of Native American students and staff at Emory University.