About
South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU) is a transnational feminist collective that empowers young South Asian Houstonians by creating spaces where they can engage in, learn about, and effectively respond to complex social issues in their lives and our communities in Texas. In our approach to learning, teaching, and advocating for social justice and civic engagement that centers the diverse stories of South Asian Houstonians, we have developed the Preservation Project, a SAYHU archive. In 2020 we expanded our reach more broadly across Texas.
This online space has been created as a repository for oral histories and documents that capture a diversity of experiences of South Asians in Texas. The Preservation Project was initiated in part by the scholarly investigation of SAYHU co-founder Saneea Sakhyani and the archiving experience of co-founder Gayatri Joshi (both University of Houston students at the time), with the guidance of Dr. Rachel Afi Quinn, an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. We hope you'll join us in building this new archive about the lives and histories of South Asian Houstonians!
More information about how to contribute feminist oral histories for the SAYHU archive is now up on our site and details on best practices for conducting them. And please explore our recommended resources to learn more about the ways that we seek to do this work as we build this community archive in Texas.
Meet Our Interns:
In summer 2021 our dedicated interns revising the site and building up the archive with dynamic interviews are Vega Shah and Nishant Pradhan.
Nishant Pradhan (he/they/any) is another summer 2021 intern. He is originally from Columbus, Ohio but came to Houston for college. He recently graduated from Rice University where he studied Anthropology and Health Sciences. His interests lie in health, healing, and care, and more specifically how these relate to community-building and organizing. He’ll be working on the Preservation Project to expand the archive of diverse experiences of members within our community as well as on expanding the Sexualities page and other projects this summer. He looks forward to exploring the intricacies of experiences of members in our community while learning a lot through the process.
Vega (she/her), is a SAYHU summer intern! She is currently a rising senior at the university of Texas at Austin, studying Anthropology, Museum Studies, and Art History. Vega is very passionate about expanding conversations and comfort around often stigmatized issues such as mental health, sexuality, politics, and religion within South Asian communities. Through previous experience in archival research and preservation projects, she hopes to create documentation of such conversations and experiences of South Asian individuals across Texas. In turn, creating a broader and more all encompassing understanding of what it means to be South Asian and how this intersects with other communities.
In Spring 2021, Jennifer Koshy joined the Preservation Project as an intern after having previously volunteered for SAYHU as Blog Editor in Summer and Fall 2020. Jennifer was a participant in SAYHU's 4th annual Summer Institute, which took place for the first time as a virtual institute due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jennifer graduated from the University of Houston with a Bachelor of Science degree in Anthropology and a minor in Women's Studies. She is a Malayalee immigrant, born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and has lived in Houston for 16 years. Her research interests revolve around the intersection of gender, race, and power within law and policy. Check out her post about her experience on the SAYHU Blog.
In Summer and Fall 2020 we had our first official Intern for the SAYHU archive, Joshlyn Thomas. Joshlyn is a second-generation Malayalee Texan who was born and raised in El Paso and has been living in Houston since 2013. She graduated with her Bachelor of Arts in English literature with a minor in Women’s Studies from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing her Master of Science in Library Science at the University of North Texas as part of their Houston cohort. She participated in SAYHU’s inaugural summer institute in 2017 and worked with Dr. Quinn in shaping the direction of the Preservation Project. Joshlyn's research interests include feminist digital humanities, archiving South Asian feminist activists and scholars, and zines.
Questions? For more information on how to get involved with the Preservation Project, please contact us at info@sayhu.org.