UW Tacoma Campus Events

Join the Institute for Innovation and Global Engagement for a virtual panel on immigration and asylum during the global pandemic. UWT faculty and community practitioners will share their experiences working in the field and ways to get involved.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by November 30th to Autumn Diaz, Institute for Innovation and Global Engagement, diaza3@uw.edu.

Panelist Bios

• Stteffany Durán was born in Mexico and moved to Washington state when she was 5 years old. She is a UWT alumna, graduating in 2018 as the Chancellor's Medalist with a BA in Psychology. While in school, Stteffany worked with Dr. Rachel Hershberg and Dr. Vanessa de Veritch Woodside on a research project focusing on recently released detainees in the South Sound region. They partnered with Advocates for Immigrants in Detention Northwest (AIDNW) and Tacoma Community House (TCH) for interviews. After Stteffany graduated, she worked at TCH from 2018-2020 as a legal advocate for victims of general crime (mostly immigrants and refugees). Since October 2020, she has worked at Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) at the front desk. She also serves on the Board of Directors of AIDNW and is serving her second consecutive term. 
• Rachel Hershberg is an Applied Developmental and Community Psychologist and an Associate Professor at UWT. She is also an associate faculty member at the UW Center for Human Rights. She received her PhD in Applied Developmental Psychology from Boston College (BC) in 2012, while also pursuing her Certificate in Human Rights and International Justice from the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at BC. She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University where she codirected longitudinal and mixed-method studies of positive youth development in youth and educational settings throughout the country, with a focus on how such settings could be enhanced to more effectively promote inclusion and well-being for youth of color and youth from other minoritized backgrounds. Her community-based and participatory research is in two main areas: She examines the experiences of transnational and mixed-status migrant families throughout the U.S., and how family relationships are developed and maintained within such complex families and sociopolitical contexts. She focuses in particular on adolescents’ contributions to their families and communities, with an interest in how adolescents resist and respond to such punitive sociopolitical forces in their lives. She also explores critical consciousness development in adolescents and young adults, and how critical consciousness and social justice-oriented development may be related to well-being for different groups of youth.
• Courtney Queen holds a PhD in Social Work from the University of Pittsburgh where her research focused on global gender-based violence, specifically on the mental health impact of female genital cutting/mutilation (FGC/M). Through her research, Courtney came to have a greater understanding of the social challenges women face, both in their countries of origin and countries they migrate to. Courtney received a David L. Boren Fellowship to complete her doctoral studies which allowed her an opportunity to work with asylum seekers at the federal level with USCIS, further enhancing her appreciation for the challenges migrants face when immigrating to the US. There, she was able to learn and apply asylum law and collaborate with other government entities with immigration as their primary area of focus. As a result, Courtney has become an avid consumer of books, shows, movies and podcasts discussing all things immigration, foreign policy and community engagement. 

• Hi everyone, my name is Perla Vazquez. I'm in my second year at UW Tacoma and plan on majoring in Law and Policy with a minor in Latino Studies. My plan after college is to pursue a career in the law field with a focus on Undocumented, Daca, and Mixed-status students. I'm part of the Undocumented Student Support Implementation Team and known as the Undocumented Peer Advisor at UW Tacoma. My goal is to support, advocate, and provide resources for Undocumented, Daca, and Mixed-status to help them achieve a higher education and for them to feel welcomed at UW Tacoma and all the communities in which they all belong.