Posted by By: John Sabato
Editor: Oliver Hackett and Yanxi Zhou
Every morning at 8:30 a.m., Professor Yezbick teaches an introduction-level film class in her fourth-floor Kresge Library classroom. While the pandemic led to some complications, Dr. Yezbick nevertheless persisted. For Dr. Yezbick, this is only her second normal semester at Oakland University. Since joining in 2019, she has had quite the journey as she faced a pandemic that sent classes virtual and continues to find her place within the university.
John Sabato: Describe an encounter with someone from a different culture, background, or orientation that has positively influenced you.
Julia Yezbick: When I was an undergraduate student, I did a study abroad program and spent a semester in Nepal. I lived with a host family, and it was, for all intents and purposes, far away from home, a very different way of life, halfway around the world in a small mountain village, and it was incredible. I had an amazing time, and I met really amazing people. I think it taught me a lot about how to see commonalities in humanity, despite vast differences between us, linguistics among them. I think that it really cemented my interest in anthropology as an academic pursuit because I realized the vast benefits that could be gained by learning about people who are different than you.
JS: How has diversity and/or inclusion on OU’s campus shaped your growth as an individual?
JY: I think this question has an implied positive, and I think that personally, I have not found OU to be a very diverse or inclusive place, and I think it could do a lot better on those fronts, to be honest. I think a lot of higher education institutions struggle with this, and, you know, have certain measures in place to diversify their student bodies and student organizations and things like that. But I’ve taught on a lot of college campuses, and you know, I think OU could be better on that front. Yeah, I think that there are still some steps that they could take to make it a more diverse student body to be more welcoming to students from various types of diverse backgrounds. You know, it’s hard for institutions to do that, but they need to; it’s crucially important that they make those efforts.
JS: Where do you feel comfortable and/or safe in expressing your identity on campus? Where do you feel you belong on campus?
JY: I do feel safe on campus, I do. I don’t feel threatened in any way. I think that there are often, in institutions of higher ed, microaggressions that can unfortunately affect many people. You know, as a woman who works in a field that is very male-dominated, I’m happy I’m in a department that has a pretty equal gender distribution in terms of the faculty that teach like production classes because I do know that in other places that I’ve been it is tough to be like the only woman who teaches filmmaking, and I have definitely felt that in other institutions where there’s a lot of microaggressive comments that are trying to test my knowledge on certain cameras or techniques, or software or whatever, and I haven’t felt that here, so I would say that OU has been very welcoming in that regard and my faculty colleagues are amazing, and very kind and open and welcoming people.
JS: If you could change (or improve) one thing about the world, what would it be?
JY: I mean, I think that if I could package together […] capitalist patriarchy […], that’s what I would do away with. Personally, I think that it has harmful effects that make us see even relationships of love in transactional ways, because we’ve been so… our brains have been so… we’ve been so perverted by these two intertwined ideological institutions, in a way that it tends to shape so many other aspects of how we think about human existence, when I think in reality there are many, many other ways to be in the world and to organize ourselves and to organize our lives and our relationships with others.
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