Myanmar has been enveloped in seemingly endless civil strife since their independence from British colonization in 1949. The country is comprised of a wide array of ethnic minorities, each with their respective language and culture. Myanmar’s government may publicly announce its pride at the country’s diversity, but within, human rights violations committed by the military abound. The peace process towards a federalist state is long and hard, and has seen many cycles of ceasefires and armed conflict. My time in Thailand during CHID’s Gender, Peacekeeping and Human Rights program addressed this conflict from a myriad of perspectives. As a result, I have learned about the silent heroes of Myanmar’s peacekeeping process: the community based organizations that are actively changing the power landscape of rural areas within the ethnic minority states. There are several community-based organizations operating from the Thailand-Myanmar border that are addressing and spreading awareness of the human rights violations inside ethnic states. Most importantly, they are addressing maternal and child health in high risk areas where maternal mortality rates are some of the highest in the world. Through meetings and interviews with various community-based organizations, I am exploring the relationship between family planning and maternal health programs on the ground and women’s participation in the peace process in the country overall. I am also using content analysis of reports done by the organizations, who have obtained valuable, on the ground data from remote areas within Myanmar. I am interested in whether investing in these programs and supporting this communtiy-based approach could be one possible solution to creating multilateral agreements that last in Myanmar because of the additional involvement of women in politics and leadership.

Students who speak English as a foreign language (EFLs) are pushed within U.S. academic settings to strive for “standard” English—an academic English heralding grammar “correctness” and adherence to rules. EFL curriculum prioritizes for “standard” English, but ignores the ways that terms like “standard” are exclusive, and rarely addresses how an EFL writer may use language in more inventive ways. How do we re-imagine the teaching of writing in ways that can not only help EFL writers in formal high-stakes writing, but also open the door to other creative uses of writing which need not adhere to such strict and increasingly hackneyed standards? My research will draw from many of the conversations focused on second-language acquisition and bilingual education, including work from scholars such as David Freeman and Sara Alvarez, to understand the most recent and effective approaches to teaching English as a second language, as well as discover what approaches to teaching creative writing hold untapped potential for EFL students to acquire new language skills. I will use The Chicago Manual of Style as a contemporary example of a style guide which prescribes “standard” grammar convention. Using an assortment of the grammar topics selected from Chicago for comparison, I will discuss examples of deviations from grammar conventions by writers from various linguistic backgrounds, including Safiya Sinclair, Ocean Vuong, and Mohsin Hamid. By investigating who makes English “standards,” how EFLs best learn, and how these standards have been broken for the better, I aim to create a subversive style guide for EFL writers which is useful for both formal and creative writing.