As an undergraduate advisor and area coordinator in the residence halls, Maryam Kia-Keating was helping students find their voice and build supportive communities. When she moved into a career in clinical psychology, her focus didn’t waver; she honed those skills in her community-based participatory research—mostly with refugee communities and young people—and found vulnerabilities and strengths that she knew, from experience, were there all along. Find out how giving people voice and understanding their resilience can be the key to strengthening community
Guest Maryam Kia-Keating, Dartmouth ’96, was keen to help students find their voice and build supportive communities as an undergraduate advisor and area coordinator in the residence halls. And she could see a life full of this sort of work with broader populations. But with a psychology major and volunteer activities such as sexual assault peer counselor, the honor code committee, and psychiatric care work, she kept having to confront the reactive end of the spectrum of care, where things had already gone bad and helpers were having to try to make things better. She found her natural inclination, however, was to start from a place of strength and instead think about building stronger communities so that the bad stuff doesn’t happen in the first place. She found a graduate program that helped foster this idea and then held tight to it (if quietly) through her clinical psychology training.
She began to focus her career on the idea of resilience and concentrated on a group she understood deeply from her own lived experience: refugee communities. Again, she found that giving voice to others yields stronger policy outcomes and heathier communities, thus she committed to using a community-based participatory research methodology in her work with both refugee groups and young people. Through the work, she has found vulnerabilities and strengths that she knew, from experience, were there all along.
In this episode, find out from Maryam how giving people voice and understanding their resilience can be the key to strengthening community…on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Bonus: Maryam also gives us thoughts for tapping our own resilience for the good of the young people around us.
About This Episode's Guest
Maryam Kia-Keating is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in its school of Education’s Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology. Her scholarship and activism centers around resilience and empowers individuals, families, schools, and communities through participatory action and human centered design. She is also a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and a mom of two.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Maryam Kia-Keating: We have so much more in common across countries and cultures and languages than we have different, but so many people are unaware of that, or don't want to hear that I still have the idealistic perspective that we can all really unite like that potential is there. And yet I'm also really aware of all the obstacles.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: As an undergraduate advisor and area coordinator in the residence halls, Maryam Kia-Keating was helping students find their voice and build supportive communities. When she moved into a career in clinical psychology, her focus didn't waiver. She honed those skills in her community-based participatory research, mostly with refugee communities and young people and found vulnerabilities and strengths that she knew from experience where they're all in. Find out how giving people voice and understanding their resilience can be key to strengthening community on today's roads taken with me. Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today, I'm here with Maryam Kia-Keating, and we're going to talk about having rich inner lives and outer lives and where that takes us. So Maryam, thank you so much for being here and welcome.
MKK: Thank you so much for having me.
LJR: So I start these conversations each time with the same two questions and they are when we were in college. Who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
MKK: In college? I guess I started out very idealistic and excited, so excited to be at Dartmouth.
I had only visited one time before I got to campus and it had been two summers before starting at Dartmouth. And so I visited when it was green and lush and beautiful and warm. And so I think I didn't quite have a full understanding of the drastic cold that I was going to encounter. And it really really impacted me so much more than I ever realized, especially in January. So I would go home in December. And when I would come back in January, I was coming from Hawaii and I would be going into 88 degrees, tropical weather. And then in January I would return to sometimes zero degrees and I would seriously be cold maybe two weeks straight and not be able to warm up. My body was just in shock. And I just, I knew of course that I was going to New Hampshire. I knew it was going to be colder, but I think I bought like the only wool jacket on the island, on my Dartmouth. And then my first year, everybody just kept handing me the right thing to wear. Cause they were like, well, you're hopelessly unprepared. So I really had no idea what I was getting into, but I loved being there. And part of that kind of journey that I took every year, at least once or maybe a few times a year, going back and forth really impacted me in terms of being very aware of what it took to get there. And so even though I had many friends who were from the Northeast that I was jealous of because they could just jump in a car and drive home. I also knew there were people from all over the world who had come to Dartmouth. And so really from all four years, I was just very invested and felt very responsible in trying to do my part, to create a sense of community.
Make people feel that they belonged, give people a voice, a place to feel connected and to find their social circle. So in my sophomore and senior years, I worked in residential life and I was an undergraduate advisor in my sophomore year. And then I was the area coordinator both times at the time we called them the New Dorms, they're not new anymore.
LJR: I’m not sure they were new when we were there.
MKK: So the east Wheelock cluster and, you know, I just spent a lot of my extra time thinking about how to support others and create that kind of home away from home. So I had that idealism that I mentioned, but I also, because of those kinds of activities, as well as things like being a sexual assault peer advisor and sitting on the committee on standards in my senior year, which was an honor to be, to be appointed to the committee on standards.
But I was also seeing kind of the dark side of the struggles and suffering that my peers were sometimes going through in terms of mental health. And the committee on standards was when people are violating the honor code, or they were either sitting there during a case. Talking about either accusing somebody or being the accused for an assault. I mean, it was pretty intense stuff. So while I maintained my idealism and hope that there was a way that we could create and support and continue to support, that sense of community and connection, I also had that reality check of the fact that behind the curtain and not that far behind there, there was a lot of struggle going on. And that was something we needed to attend to as well. So that's a long answer to where I was during Dartmouth and all the activities. And I guess I should add that during the summers, I went back to Hawaii and I worked for two of the summers inpatient psychiatric unit. And then I also worked in an inpatient psychiatric unit at Dartmouth Hitchcock. So I was very involved in sort of like the end of that line, like what happens when the full crisis occurs. Soo when I left Dartmouth, I knew I wanted to go into psychology. I had been doing this kind of work the whole time, but I was still very pensive about what exactly what was going to be my focus and how was I going to put all that together.
LJR: May I interrupt and just ask when you came to Dartmouth, did you know,already that this was a kind of career path for you, given just your innate empathy and where your interests lay?
MKK: I did. For the most part, I know that I was interested in something related to psychology. There were some other areas that I was sort of dabbling and checking out, but for the most part, this had always been a clear interest of mine. So I knew I was going to integrate it. Yeah.
LJR: So then did you jump directly to grad school?
MKK: No, I actually, after Dartmouth, I went to Yale and I worked at the child study center there and it was great because there, I worked on a few projects as well as got some public policy training and child development.
And so it kind of started to hone in. Cause I knew I liked research and I wanted to contribute to the science and the understanding of all of these things. But I also really wanted to have an impact. I wanted action. I didn't want to just be in a research lab. I had taken those psychology classes and I'd been one of the little undergraduates who was in the subject pool and did an experiment and didn't know what was the result. And did I do it right or not? Right. I still remember some experiments. Like what did, what did you think of me? What happened? Even though I appreciate that scientific research, I wanted science that also had action and impact on policy, on communities, on individuals. So the project that I worked on there that really impacted me was a partnership with the police department.
And it was a program that brought clinicians together with police officers to respond differently, be more aware when children are at the scene of a crime and not even just in the house, but maybe even on the sidewalk who may witness something that is pretty terrifying and being more responsive to children's needs in an important developmental time period. So I loved it because as much as it was coming from Yale and being sort of like having this clout in academia and science, it was also literally on the streets. And we were literally trying to have a positive impact on children and families, community.
LJR: That really speaks to what you were saying of like, not just doing the interesting thing, but having the impact. And as you did earlier, giving people voice, and making people seen. So that I'm sure is the through line that connects through all the rest of your training. So take us kind of hopping from one to another, the training that you received.
MKK: Yeah. So after Yale that's when I started graduate school and the first stop was at Harvard and I actually found a very unique program I truly just love to this day. It was called Risk and Prevention, but really the focus was on prevention. And I loved that because all of the things that I had done so far had been so focused on what happens when things go wrong and how do we react? So very much a disease model like there, somebody has a disease now let's respond to it. How do we treat it? And I loved this idea of how do we actually prevent it from happening at all. But we could just help people in such a more profound, unimaginable way if we prevent these negative things from happening to begin with. So I really loved that focus. And then the other thing that I started focusing on was the study of resilience.
So instead of just looking at people who are suffering from mental health disorders, how do we look at those who have every checkbox of risk that you could imagine they've gone through all sorts of adversity and trauma, but they're doing okay. So what happened? Let's learn from that group and figure out what are the factors that can help people, because some of those stories, I think we're all drawn to, right? When we hear that hero's story of somebody who overcomes the kinds of challenges that are put in their way. So let's actually hone into that and see what we can do to help support each other, because we all really want some degree of challenge and obstacle and adversity in our lives, right?
LJR: Even if it's not just born of our own kind of individual contexts, like societaly this last year, a case in point has really challenged us in many ways and we've needed to tap into different types of resilience. So that is a track within clinical psychology that you were working on?
MKK: No, that was graduate school of education at Harvard. And I worked with a clinical psychologist. My mentor was a clinical psychologist and I worked at McLean hospital, which is a really famous psychiatric. So I knew that I still wanted to go down that route and get the doctorate in clinical psychology, but I did struggle with that.
It was a competitive program and wonderful, you know, an honor privilege to be there. I got, I went across the river to Boston University, to their clinical program (at the time Harvard didn't have a clinical program, but now they do.) You know, it was wonderful to be there. And I wanted the training and the degree, but I, I struggled with the fact that I, I had to swing all the way back again to everybody talking about psychopathology and very much a reactionary instead of preventative-oriented.
So I just held onto my initial, I held onto the fact that I wanted to be strength based and resilience focused. And I also knew that the community that I really wanted to work with next was refugees at the time. No one in my program was doing that work, but I knew that that was a huge community. I mean, now over 79 million people who are forcibly displaced around the globe.
And so I thought, how is no one focused on this? It’s a vast, enormous number. And these are people who did nothing except exist in a context that didn't allow them to stay for whatever reason, related to instability of the context and more and more we're facing that, not just because of war and armed conflict and persecution, but also climate change-related disasters are causing some of the most displacement around the globe today. So for lots of reasons, many innocent people are being forced from where they live and are seeking refuge somewhere else. And they experienced so much adversity in that context of having to leave. And then in the flight, when they're not knowing where they're going to end. And then finally finding, hopefully, not all, but some who are lucky enough to find a new place still face extreme adversities and often are rejected or not included in the contexts, or there's lots of racism and just a sense that people don't want them.
And so it's just an uphill battle. And so I wanted to put some of my effort into research and action with refugee communities who were resettling in the U.S. So that's what I did.
LJR: Now Maryam, was the motivation for that strictly, like, I see this gigantic number out there around the world and it fits so well with that, again, the giving people voice, the being seen the integrating community. Or did you have kind of personal ties to that community or—I know it's not one big community, but you know—people in that situation.
MKK: Yeah, absolutely. My own personal background was having to flee with my family in the context of armed conflict. I lived in four countries. Three languages and seven schools in seven years growing up. So, so I knew that experience quite personally. And so I was very aware from having had that experience in my own childhood. Exile of being forcibly displaced of never being able to go back and having to figure out how to be in a new home and craving that sense of belonging and welcome, and how to create that community.
And so I knew that, and it also just taught me because this was in my childhood and it taught me at a very young age, how observant children are and how important children's perspectives are. That was just something that was so obvious to me because I, myself experienced all this and was very well aware of what I had experienced.
And so I think a lot of people put less on what they expect that children are experiencing and witnessing. So I was very aware of that piece that children's voices mattered and their empowerment matters. And then the other piece that I learned from those experiences was just that we have so much more in common across countries and cultures and languages than we have different. But so many people are unaware of that, or don't want to hear that or see that. And they're so worried about drawing a border around their little territory and saying, you know, you go over there and I'll stay over here or. You know, whatever it is, I still have the idealistic perspective that we can all really unite like that potential is there. And yet I'm also really aware of all the obstacles, Right?
LJR: Right. So when you threw yourself into kind of this area of work research, was it with a lens, you said no one was really doing this at the time. And so were you able to say, well, not only is no one doing this, but I want to do that from a child perspective or did you really need to do a full kind of family perspective or community perspective-based research paradigm?
MKK: Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, so nobody in my program was doing it. So I was looking for mentors. I was looking outside my program to try to figure out, okay, where can I find someone doing this work. I mean, somebody was doing this work, right? There's a lot of resettlement agencies. There are some here and there and there were, there were some rumblings and I actually found some challenges that I faced, you know, around trying to seek out mentorship and going to some senior people.
And in particular, you know, I went to somebody who's an award winning psychologist, who you know, is well lauded and will probably continue to win awards. And I had this conversation of sort of thinking, oh, this is going to be somebody who will mentor me. And he ended up being very small minded and asking me pretty insulting questions about kind of questioning how it was possible that my parents, my family had even basically kind of allowed me to leave the house and gotten an education. And this is somebody who had my CV in front of him that said I had gone to Dartmouth, that said I went to Harvard, that said I worked at Yale, that said I was a graduate student at Boston University. And he was just like, so how is it that, you know… and I was shocked and, you know. I handled that conversation. He offered me to work together and I politely afterwards declined. And that, and a few other kinds of incidents like that, I realized that the people who were doing some of the work were not necessarily, they didn't have the perspective, maybe the personal perspective, you know, they were relying on stereotypes or, you know, sometimes people in this line of work are also out to save others.
Like the person who goes to another country to save those people who live over there. And there was a little bit of that kind of martyr-type of person. And so I just kept seeing over and over that there, there, I was like, okay, I just need to pursue this myself because it's important to have somebody who gets something from the community.
But I also had that humility and of realizing that I don't get what, you know, I've had also many privileges that, and, and differences from another community. Every refugee community, every immigrant community is different. So what I realized there was the important of partnership. And so the rest of my work has really, since that time tried to work directly with community members and other stakeholders in part in full partner.
And so I use a methodology called community-based participatory research where the ideal goal is that you're really pursuing research and action together in an equal manner, rather than coming in kind of from the ivory tower and, and being the expert. (LJR: Co-create) Yeah, exactly. The people that are the expert of their own lives.
LJR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is just an astounding story about barriers and people that you meet that you just hope would have been thinking differently, right? But you persisted and, you've been doing great work in that realm. So talk to me about your academic career, where you still feel as though you are doing the thought, research, and leadership and where you're seeing that impact and how you can marry those two things in academia, at least from your perspective.
MKK: Yeah. After I finished graduate school, I came out to California. I left the east coast finally, after being there, finally figuring out how to stay warm through a whole winter. I was like, okay, check. Now I moved to California. So I've been in Santa Barbara at UC Santa Barbara for quite a while, since 2007 now. And I've been able to really pursue that same kind of research methodology, but the communities here, and then also in other places, when I partner with other investigators on projects and you know, it's a challenge, but I feel like part of my role now to continue to do that work, involve communities in that work because it empowers them. It creates better research. I think better science, better knowledge and better practice because we can really inform policy and practice from the needs of the community and from their perspectives. And I've also, you know, I mentioned children's perspectives.
I've also really tried to find ways to involve youth in that leadership process. And I really truly believe in the fact that young people have an important perspective to share and really want their voices to be heard. It's a challenge because academia has its traditions and ways and expectations of doing things. So I feel like now as a professor, you know, I've made it down the chain to full professor. I'm considered, I can't believe I'm considered senior. So I feel like here I am in this privileged role to teach the next generation and to give these methodology not only validation that this is okay to do, but actually perhaps even question isn't this the most responsible, most ethical way to do things? And if you're not doing it, we should be asking you why you're not.
LJR: And that's great because not only do you have that mentorship role within academia and preparing kind of, as you say, the next leaders of the science, but you're creating leaders of on the ground science. Mentoring the youth that are part of these communities, which I think is great because not everybody is going to go through the umpteen years of schooling that you have, but you could really, you are making a difference in that leadership voice that is growing in these communities. So I think that it seems like it's a great balance right now. I know though, from looking at some of your other work, there are other shoots of this and media being one of them. Talk to me about how varied you've been able to be in your career as well.
MKK: I have a million things that I'm interested in, but they all kind of harmonize around resilience and strength based perspectives and how to support young people in their life trajectories, you know? Most recently I've become involved in our project where we're working towards giving voice to youth activists. And so you can see that there's that overlap in the topic, but doing it more through media, right? Like that's the way that information is passed most readily these days. And so I think it also just brings into question our methodologies of how we disseminate information and knowledge and make social change and impact. So some of it can be through science, but it's also can be exciting and maybe even fun faster at times to do it in the way in the places. Yeah. Where young people are listening and can get inspired from each other's stories and each other's work.
LJR: So I can hear the throngs now of our classmates and other listeners who have perhaps young people in their own lives who may feel like dinner table activists. Like mom, I'm going to tell you why I need more screen time. So what, what from your very academic and learned position—I also know you're a mother—might you be able to share about resilience and how to help young people through their trajectories that just kind of everyday parents might need to learn from you?
MKK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a big area for me now is just working in a preventative lens with parents because I think parents are the ones who, you know, and starting right out, right? Children and babies. You know, what can we do for parents that helps them set that trajectory for their children and to be aware of adversities and how they impact child development and brain development. And then also some of the ways in which we can do better as parents in terms of just attending to our own regulation or dysregulation.
So part of that is, you know, and especially during this past year, people's stress levels have been through the roof and mental health is, you know, something that it cuts across social class and race, and it affects everyone if not yourself, first or second degrees away, right, of anxiety and depression and children are experiencing it. Adolescents, college students. I mean, we had that in our day, but it feels like on our campuses, that the level of the numbers of students who are seeking out mental health counseling in, on college campuses is just through the roof. I mean, it's really a public health crisis. So the first thing is always, and I would recommend to parents and all of us is to try to take care of our own mental health and to prioritize it.
It's something that I think we oftentimes just don't put as a priority; we're all busy. And so it feels like I have to, I have all these other things I have to take care of, but really if we're not taking care of that or putting in the time to maybe even deal with some of our past patterns, you know, there's a place for therapy. There's lots of ways to do therapy. You don't have to go to a psychologist. There's other ways to kind of process your past and try to think about, uh, intergenerational patterns that you might be repeating and, and have a chance to be reflective and grow and also just to take care of ourselves, especially when things are stressful around us, because our children are watching and they're taking all of that in and responding to that.
And then the second big thing, I won't give too many tips, general tips, but the second big thing is really to nurture our social systems. You know, there's no time like pandemic to really go back and reflect on who, who do I have in my social circle, who stayed in my social circle during this time? And what did I learn about what my needs are and where I need to maybe put some more time into nurturing these relationships and making sure that those are there for me as well as for my children?
LJR: Or even maybe letting go of ones that aren't as healthy, right?
MKK: Absolutely. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, making sure that social support network is there. Over and over again, just a key factor to people's kind of contentment and well-being over time. The truth is we'll probably face more natural disasters, pandemics, other kinds of community things that none of us can really control because it's happening and the environment around us. So the more prepared we are with that, the better, and it's always good to practice mindfulness. It's mindful parenting and exercise, you know, just healthy ways of being in the world and teaching our children compassion and connection.
LJR: Yeah. So Maryam, when I kind of think back to all those things that you said you were in college, the person looking at our context and seeing how can I make this community stronger and more comfortable for people. How do I give people a voice? Make sure they're seen. You have continued to do that over and over and over. So when you think back to that Maryam, do you see the same person or what didn't she know that you now know?
MKK: Hm. I mean, my quick response is I do see the same person and I think I've worked really hard, not hard, but intens..I've been very intentional about not getting jaded because through my line of work, I'm exposed over and over again to some of the most difficult experiences and stories and the harsher. The sides of things that people have gone through. When, when you hear somebody who's gone through something extremely traumatic and it's easy to fall into despair because you find out okay.
Some of the cruelest things that happen in the world and on, there are some days where you think animals are so much nicer and then people, not all animals, I guess, but at least puppies or cats.
Um, but I do think that I have been intentional about holding on to that idealism and holding onto that feeling that I had when I, when I got to Dartmouth and I saw all the people in our class who had such promise and potential, and my view was just like, how, how do you get. Promise and potential. How do you support that? How do we support that? Not just now for ourselves, but how do we create a world in which we're supporting each other on those paths? So in many ways I feel like that's, that's something I've carried with.
LJR: Yeah, well, we are delighted that you are among our number and have been looking out for us, whether we knew it or not along this way. And we'll just be so pleased to see how you take this in, into which communities you take this empathy and care. And so I want just to thank you for sharing your story with us and for being you.
MKK: Thank you so much, Leslie. I'm so excited to be part of this and can't wait to hear all the rest of the stories everybody has.
LJR: That was Miriam Kea Keating, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at school of education's department of counseling, clinical, and school psychology. Her scholarship and activism centers around resilience and empowers individuals, families, schools, and communities through participatory action and human centered design. She's also a licensed clinical psychologist and a mom of two.
As Maryam suggests that we all prioritize our mental health and me time, might I suggest listening to some back episodes of Roads Taken? Check out our full catalog at RoadsTakenShow.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hopefully you'll realize we've all had some ups and downs on the roads, getting to where we are. And if you're interested in sharing your story, please reach out so that we can feature you with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on an upcoming episode of Roads Taken.