now more than ever companies realize that ignoring topics on social justice in the workplace directly impacts employees higher education is currently filling this gap by offering new courses in social justice tonight we meet an educator who's created this course to help shape organizational culture across the globe it's good to have you here from los angeles this is klcs pbs welcome to everybody with angela williamson an innovation arts education and public affairs program everybody with angela williamson is made possible by viewers like you thank you and now your host dr angela williamson dr connie corley is our guest dr connie thank you so much for joining us i'm delighted to be here well we have so much you want to talk about this tonight but first of all tell us a little bit about yourself well i am going on 20 years being a californian but i originally grew up in the midwest in st louis and then spent a number of years on the east coast so i feel like i'm i'm a real american here so you've been on both sides of the country exactly but you know what what's really interesting about you is that you have this specialization but you do so many things around research so talk a little bit about your specialization and the different types of research that you've done okay well first of all the the part that brought me from the midwest to the east coast was after i went to graduate school at the university of michigan i'm a social worker and a psychologist so i've spent pretty much my entire career in academia mostly teaching social work and i came to california to head a program at cal state la on aging within the school of social work and also uh there was a research center that i was the associate director of research for this gerontology center and so i've done a lot of research in my in my career even though my focus is on older adults and in particular things like caregiving uh creativity spirituality i've kind of covered the waterfront in a lot of these different arenas and so now that i'm teaching at field and graduate university which is based out of santa barbara we're right now completely virtual and i had this program called the creative longevity and wisdom concentration in our doctoral program within the school of leadership studies and why do you think it's important for us to know about creative longevity well there's so many stereotypes about what happens when people grow older and i use that word grow older because a lot of people assume that as you get older you become automatically more frail or incapable of doing things but as a matter of fact a lot of research shows that people often feel more creative sometimes it's because they feel like they care less about what people think about them so they have a little more creative energy and also there are brain changes that that actually increase the left and right brain communication and so a lot of people take that time as they get older to learn new things and let's face it in today's world in particular we need a lot of creative responses to things that are happening so you've done a lot of research in aging and why do you think it's important for us to understand how we age as adults well for one thing there's a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions so it's really important for people to understand that yes there are changes that happen with age but there are normal changes and then there are changes that are not so a lot of people think for example if you start forgetting things or get confused and so on and so forth oh well that's because my aunt is whatever age and so on but actually there are changes that are not age predictable but a lot of people just assume that you can't do as many things you slow down and so on and so forth and so my question to you as i'm getting older i could change the way that i do for example i could probably pick up a new instrument or learn how to hulu dance or things like that absolutely well that's why a lot of programs for older adults who used to be called seniors but now that that term is is a little bit um out of favor especially for baby boomers like myself and so a lot of people call it active adulthood or the opportunity to learn the things that you might have wanted to do so you mentioned picking up a new instrument and that's my goal i want to play the ukulele i don't want to do the hula dance but there are things that will keep the brain active so music activates many areas of the brain a lot of people take up painting and different arts and crafts in fact most folk art is actually done by older people wow really interesting and you also mentioned a little bit about you know the stereotype of the older adult and what we see right and you've also talked about in some of your research of how we look at older adults in the arts and entertainment so can you talk a little bit about that because of course we are here in los angeles so we are the entertainment capital so what can we do to actually portray older adults in what your research is supporting one thing that i think is very very important is the power of stories and you know that better than anyone else because most people when they get to be 60 70 80 they've lived through a lot of things and i have a very dear friend who is almost 100 years old and she's a holocaust survivor erica leon and i've written about her and studied her art and her storytelling and the reality is is most people get a lot of gratification when they can share their story especially if they feel like people don't understand or they've lost interest in certain historical things so for people to be able to tell their stories make them more relatable and and to inspire people so a lot of the younger people i meet they really want to know more about older adults like what was it like growing up uh during the the even now like the 1950s if we think about uh especially women who've been activists who had to go through and and fight their way to have the rights that some of us take for granted so those stories are very powerful and i think having opportunities for people to to write to speak to to share their stories and art this is how we stay active and engaged as we get older as we grow older as we grow older i love that phrase and a little bit i want to go a little bit with your background because it's you it's a personal mission for you because of the relationship that you had with your mom and what your mom went through so i think our viewers would love to hear a little bit about what makes dr connie go forward and do these amazing things so tell us a little bit about that well my parents i i grew up in a very typical post world war ii family i'm the middle of five baby boomers and my dad who was a high school dropout joined the navy almost died on a ship that was bombed in world war ii but then he came back and on the gi bill got an engineering degree and my mother had worked in the garment industry during the war and then of course mostly stayed home to raise her children but she always herself had wished that she had gone to college so my parents did a lot to to help all five of us get through through school through all 12 years of school and college so over the last few years of their lives my father passed away in 2013 he had cancer but my mother who was his caregiver had alzheimer's disease and so it was very difficult to to be so far away so i traveled quite a bit to st louis and worked with my siblings to make sure that both of our parents got the best care but as my mother's condition got worse and it was not possible for her to live at home anymore she ended up in in several institutions but we did have a brain autopsy and it confirmed that she had alzheimer's because technically speaking that's the only way to know for sure if somebody has that kind of dementia alzheimer's disease there are other tests that they can do and pretty much confirm it but because there's no cure there's no known ways to prevent it so i decided that i wanted to be involved in research and i found out that university of southern california has a study called learn it but i've been in this study now actually finished the post-testing but it's a pretty rigorous study in terms of the tests that they do mri two pet scans those are positive positron emission tomography but this way they see at the beginning what your functioning is and then it turned out it was supposed to be six months but because of covet it took a year to get the follow-up but um and i won't know my own particular results but i did know that i had to have a healthy brain to be in the study so one of the things that i've learned again being in the field of gerontology but also learning a lot about alzheimer's is that the brain changes happen 20 years before they manifest so my mother was 85 when she started having memory issues and confusion and so on her brain was changing in her 60s so i said i want to know if my brain is going through this now in my 60s so that i can plan ahead and and so i felt it was a way to both honor the fact that you know my mother endured what she did and and that there's no no cure we still don't know there's not really very many good treatments so i wanted to contribute to science and then i want to be writing about this and sharing my experience so it's nice to be able to do that here wow well and thank you so much because a lot of people are wondering about that especially how we research aging adults right now and so so going back to your contributions you actually have a pretty recent contribution to recent ones you have a podcast and you just started teaching a course in social justice so why does dr connie think that that's important right now okay well the podcast came about and it's called love goes viral is the name that i picked because at the time when when when i initiated it that was at the outset of the coronavirus and i felt that we needed some positive stories and some some real life experiences so it was a series of four interviews including a couple dr paige mars and her husband dawn mars who are relationship experts and they talked about what it's like to communicate when you're stuck in the home with the person that you're usually out and about having your own space during different times of the day or the week mirabai bush who co-authored a book with ram das who's the famous progenitor of the phrase be here now and she and mirabi bush and ram das wrote this book called walking each other home conversations on love and dying and i wanted to talk to her about what's it like to have this concept that we could die at any time from something that no one had been thinking about a pandemic really up until uh well not nobody but most people weren't thinking that death could be something very close to home much more so than before and then i spoke to one of our doctoral students uh dr uh well show soon view doctor margie warrell who whose husband was hospitalized at the time that we did our interview with kovid in singapore and what it was like for him to be in the hospital for the family to be in lockdown and i thought that that would be very valuable for people going through that experience and then the fourth interview was with maureen feldman who is the head of a program at the motion picture and television fund and this program is a called the daily call sheet and volunteers call uh isolated people mostly older people who've retired from the motion picture uh entertain entertainment industry so those four are the love goes viral podcasts and it sort of was a spin-off from my work i used to be on a show at kpf kfm in los angeles pacifica station and i was a co-host and producer of experience talks for over 10 years so i wanted to continue in that vein and then the social the social change course so fielding graduate university has a very strong commitment to social and ecological justice and originally this fall i was going to be teaching human development and advanced course but then i said let me do that later in the academic year because social change right at the time of george floyd's murder and and the the immense unrest in the united states and the protests around the world and so i said this is the time to be teaching social change so it's a great group of students from all of we have someone in canada someone in qatar several people across the united states for all different backgrounds and a teaching fellow who lives in africa so we're going to be studying icons that's why you were a guest in our class to talk about rosa parks and we want to look at some of the key figures who've been instrumental in in social movements in particular oh that's so wonderful dr connie thank you so much for everything that you are doing so that we can understand how our population grows and age but also to what you're doing now to feed with future generations and teaching them social justice and social change so thank you so much you're welcome it's been wonderful talking [Music] you'll see [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh the muslim public affair council's hollywood bureau advocates for stories that eliminates misconceptions of islam and muslims while showing us we have much more in common than what divides us tonight we meet a writer who talks about being a muslim woman in america and in hollywood acer salmon is our guest acer thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me this is a pleasure you have this wonderful book and we are going to talk about this book but your background is what makes this book so let's talk about that first tell us a little bit about yourself well i uh as the book suggests or says i am a muslim uh i'm from iraq and i was so i was born in iraq i grew up in kentucky um and this was in the 70s before iraq was really a household name so it kind of it gave me this this you know feeling of being an outsider um at the time i thought i was the only one who was the outsider i thought everybody else had it all figured out you know and um because of that and i didn't realize that at the time it gave me this desire to want to be a writer to put my my stories down if only to document them for myself so i can go back and look at them and go okay you know what i was feeling was valid you know that kind of thing and it wasn't until years later actually when i wrote the book that i realized that i wasn't alone in this whole feeling like an other uh situation my first question for you and let's go back to 2016. because in 2016 before you started writing this book you are actually you're working in hollywood and ended up kind of on the wrong end of the table there so let's talk about that uh well okay you're putting me on the spot here yes so i what she's referring to uh audience is uh i worked for miramax um which then became the weinstein company which as i'm sure everybody knows by now was precipitated the whole metoo movement um i am in i'm a my other life as a i'm a writer and i'm also a producer editor and what that means is um i you know i'm an editor who basically produce or who produces so i don't work with somebody sitting behind me they just kind of give me the material and i work independently so what that means is i'm in a room all the time i'm in a dark room and i'm usually removed from any of the stuff that's you know and any of the people that you'd associate with that company so that in that regard i was lucky and that i didn't have to i wasn't i i never encountered the man who shall be who not who shall not be named but also too it was really after everything came out and you changed positions that this wonderful book started to be in development for you right were you always thinking about this book oh i was always thinking about this book so so a little bit about my backstory is i came out you know to california i grew up in kentucky and i went to journalism school being from iraq being middle eastern being the eldest woman you know the eldest woman i'm sorry the eldest daughter the eldest kid child in the family you know there's a lot of expectations as you may as you may know with with families with immigrant families that kind of thing and at the time they wanted me to go into not necessarily the family business they're both pharmacists but they wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or or something like that now i think i tried going to um the doctor route i took i think organic chemistry and i came home crying for a week every you know saying i can't do this and my mom's like okay i got i hear you cool don't don't do that but at that time and i didn't know um i you know i i hadn't i didn't really understand i guess journalism um i know it existed obviously but for some reason i i sort of discovered it for myself and this was also around at the time that christian amanpour became popular so then it became this thing where my family was like oh okay cool she could be that you know it again it's i as as as it turns out all i needed was just somebody to be the the trailblazer you know that's that's what in in a lot of families like mine you need that trailblazer so they can go oh it's like this person and um and so i i went into journalism school i went into broadcasting and it was local news and so when i graduated i hated it i did not want to do local news and i also did not want to be on camera so that was also something that my family was a little um you know disappointed by they're like oh come on you could be on you know you could represent us well so um i came to california because i thought i want to make up stories i will two things i i wanted to either do documentaries i want to do longer in depth i was just interested in people and i think that comes from my background um you know being from iraq i grew up in kentucky uh that made me feel like an outsider and um i was always i felt like i was the only one who was the outsider i feel like i was the only one who felt that way and so i was constantly looking at other people to see what they were doing to not be outsiders so in a way like it was kind of a double i'd like i wish i could give you like a more learned answer and they're like you know okay yes it is true that because i was i um you know we were from a different culture we came to this country i also lived in saudi arabia and so just kind of having a lot of contact with a lot of different cultures made me interested in other cultures so that's the that's the the you know the learned answer then there's the neurotic answer which is the you know teenager who just wanted to be like everybody else who was like what are you you know let's just see how are you doing this and so then it was kind of you put those two things together and i was really fascinated by people and what made them tick and um and so when i came to film school i thought well great i'm going to make i'm going to tell stories about people and you know and then they always say write what you know well what i know is a very beautiful loud crazy dysfunctional family and so i ended up writing all you know stories usually all of my my um every story i wrote had a protagonist who wanted to get out of the family somehow and you know the family that was just like overbearing but still lovable i've written a couple of pilots um that that had revolved around them and basically the long story of that is that i had a mentor who who said you know have you ever thought about putting your stories in a book and i hadn't i had never thought about writing my own story i just thought you know being an author was just too you know grand for for you know it it's like an author like it's something that you do when you're 60 or something like that not now and a memoir i mean i'm too young to write a memoir kind of thing um but i had i started writing i wrote it because i thought all right sure let me put you know let me maybe i can use this as ip intellectual property in hollywood and then take it so that then i can take that and say look this book has gotten some notice and you know uh let's make a show off of it so i had written this to make to originally with the idea of of getting it made as a tv show i am now working on developing as a tv show but that kind of that sort of sort of got pushed aside for a little bit um as i sat down and started writing it so that brings me to the question of 2016. things were different then people were interested and um people wanted to to hear the story and so that kind of that incur that buoyed me in my writing because i can talk about my story and then also you know connect it back to the to people who may also have felt as an as an other you know in in all of the ways that we know we were all starting to feel like the other in 2016. and definitely with your book now that you are tackling these issues and now you're showing us that we're not really the other we're all together in the same same boat so what kind of feedback wonderful feedback that you've heard from other people that now you're starting to really open people's eyes that yeah we are all the same you know it's interesting um for a while so i i wrote this book because i i wished it had existed when i was growing up again if i had my little neurotic teenage me who wanted to fit in and be like everybody else if i had that book then i could have said oh it was somebody else like me and so i've had i have been fortunate and then i've had um at least one woman who had kind of very similar to my experience although hers was a little more extreme her parents were very strict and when and when i say by one woman i mean she was um in kentucky she's 19. she's you know from the middle east region and she said that hearing my words here and she's also in journal in the journalism school there so that's how i found her where she found me so um so i've had those kinds of stories which has been really rewarding and because of that i've been able to um i've been i well when i was on the circuit last year i was you know speaking to adults but also it became my my thing to talk to young women you know in terms of empowering yourself in terms of it's not about you know being different it's about being who you are and that's the thing i mean i think the biggest thing for my book is that it's you know here i was trying to fit in with all of these ways another really interesting thing that that happened in terms of people that connected with the book were um white males from like in the the age of 30 to 60 who would email me or reach out to me and just say i learned a lot thank you my daughter's friend has is this way or blah blah you know is is is uh an immigrant or whatever and i learned about her or you know i learned a lot and i'm a white guy like it just so that was that was an interesting thing i thought oh cool all right i'll take it like you know when i was writing this book i and you think muslim memoir yeah for me i thought malala right you i thought ah okay what do i have to say yeah that's so important i didn't get you know attacked trying to go to school i had my my struggles but not certainly not that yeah and so i think that's the thing is and going back to why i never thought i would write a book because i thought i thought it had to be more grand it has to be truthful uh but it's comedy so you can kind of bend the truth so it's just all of this stuff was going in my head that you know i was like ah i don't know but um you know once i i think 2016 also helped in that regard um and you mentioned empac in the beginning of of your introduction in that their you know push and they're still doing that is to show that we're not monolithic and that was part of my when my agent was you know uh was you know incur ed helping me or he was editing the book he was the first editor of the book and then we we took to publisher and then that became the second editor um and his you know you know thing reminder is just you know be yourself you're not monolithic your story is your story it's not going to speak for all muslims so i think that's the thing is that i you know where originally the fear was and i've gotten some you know some of that you get some of it you're not you're encouraged not to read your reviews but i read some you know i whatever you know who's you're gonna do it right so i read my reviews some of them and and but i but the the good thing about that is that the ones that did have the thing that you know the ones that did have something less than stellar to say were the ones that said she didn't go too far i wanted to hear more about this story or the escape from blah blah blah i mean there's a couple of harrowing stories in here that didn't actually happen to me that i witnessed it was a friend of mine some stuff that happened in saudi arabia but i kind of knowing that that that was the criticism i thought okay cool like what i did what i set out to do with the book is basically tell my story not to say that i'm going to represent everybody and i think i did that and so in that it was success that on its own it was successful i love this story and i love the background that you gave us and definitely i want everybody to read the wrong end of the table acer thank you so much for just telling your story and showing us we're more alike than what we ever thought before so and definitely keep us posted when this hits the big screen because it's definitely that's the next step for it i will do that thank you and thank you for joining us on everybody with angela williamson it's viewers like you that make this show possible stay in touch with us on social media good night and stay well [Music] you