Laura and Martina by Ekaterina Zhelyukova
Parallel Story #7
Laura Mentz Strakova & Martina Ulvrová
US & Czech Republic
This parallel story was put forward by AMIGA (Czech Republic) for Movement
Having left their home countries seeking work and study opportunities, Laura and Martina decided to harness their creativity to empower those with weaker voices in their communities. Laura Mentz Strakova found out about an interesting opportunity in academia in Prague by chance, and came from the United States without knowing much about the country she was entering. As she made a new life in the Czech Republic, she got to know stories of people of different backgrounds that have trouble making their voices heard in this relatively homogenous country. She learned the Theater of the Oppressed approach and founded her own social justice advocacy organisation called Rehearsal for Reality, that empowers communities such as LGBTQ, migrants, or others and helps them tell their stories in order to bring about change through on-stage performances. Martina Ulvrová decided to come to France on a prestigious scholarship after finishing her Master’s degree in Prague. As she advanced further in her chosen field of geophysics, she realized the discrimination and deep disadvantages that women in natural sciences face. She became involved in a number of projects that promoted gender equality in academia, including Did this really happen?, that turned sexist and discriminatory experiences in the academic setting into comic strips. She is currently working on a new project, enlisting various artists to create posters showing achievements of female scientists, meant for primary and secondary schools.
Laura’s story is first. To skip to Martina’s story click here.
Laura’s Story
“I’ve reinvented myself plenty of times. I’ve been in academia, I’ve done theatre, and many other things. I’m in a constant state of growth, stretching myself in new directions and taking risks – but calculated risks, not impulsive risks – to achieve some pretty lofty goals, but also to make sure I’m having fun doing all of that.”
No particular reason to choose Prague
I grew up in the United States, and from the time I was a child I knew I wanted to live in Europe. I remember writing a letter to my parents, on a typewriter when I was eight years old, telling them that I would be living in Europe by the time I was 35. But it wasn’t really planned. The opportunity to live in Europe actually sort of crashed into my life when I was in my 30’s. I was in academia, teaching as an adjunct professor at various colleges and universities in the Washington DC area. It was precarious work, and I was looking for something new. And I met this Czech man and ended up applying for a teaching position at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, at their center for academic writing in English. Within a year I moved to Prague. Originally, I didn’t expect to live specifically in the Czech Republic - I just knew I was heading to Europe. I simply happened to meet a Czech man, but if he happened to be French, I’d be in France now.
First impressions
I came here in July 2001, so just before 9/11. When I first got here, it was like the tingling of the skin. It was novel and exciting. And at first, I had a really high tolerance for frustration, though I normally have a low tolerance for it, because I had to suspend my expectations of how things work, since I didn’t know how they worked here.
People often believe that new beginnings are difficult, and things get easier the longer you adjust, but I did not have this experience. The longer I live here, the more I understand how things work here, the more annoyed I get when things don’t go as they should! But in the beginning, I didn’t know, so I accepted them more easily, realizing that it was out of my control.
I think one thing that made me feel at home here was my first true Czech friend. She heard me bellyache a lot. There were a lot of things that worked very differently here than in the US, but by acknowledging my feelings of helplessness and being present in my lowest moments, she did a lot. She also broke all the stereotypes I’d heard about Czech people. And that helped me break out of reducing the entire country to a stereotype.
It’s important to note that I came from privilege. I grew up in white upper middle class America. And I slid into a pretty privileged role here too, so my transition was probably much smoother than for many others. But the challenges haven’t stopped. I think the biggest challenge to feeling at home is the language. I am fairly conversant in Czech, but I do still sometimes shy away from situations where I would need to say something complicated. Language still creates a lot of anxiety for me.
Where is home?
In a funny way I feel more American here than I do in America, because I stick out. For most people here that is my defining feature. Sometimes I still have imposter syndrome, that I don’t feel I fully belong here. And when I go back to the US it is comfortably familiar, but also oddly unknown. I do feel much more at home as a European.
About ten years after I moved here someone asked me when I was going back home to the US, and I answered “I AM home”. I also think it was then that I went from being an ‘expat’ to being a ‘migrant’.
Change is a lot about changing habits. Physical habits, but also habits of mind – ways of looking at political reality, at the welfare state, educational systems, ways of looking at rigid structures of systemic oppression, and how they’re built in the US and how they’re built here. It took me twenty years to get a sense of those differences and have the confidence to open an organization that would tackle these issues and open conversations about them, and do it as a migrant. For a long time, I felt that I don’t have the right to talk about these things, because everyone tells me I’m American, I don’t know what’s what. But I have come to realize that I have the right to be engaged with this society, because this is my adopted home, that I have made a concerted effort to become part of this country and to understand what’s going on here.
Working toward change on stage and off
I stumbled upon Theatre of the Oppressed by accident. I was looking for ways to use applied theatre in educational and social contexts, and this popped up one day on Google. I’ve always been active in social issues, and this was a kind of theatre I’d never heard of. I took all sorts of training in it and have never looked back.
After a few years I decided to found my own organization, called Rehearsal for Reality. The goal is to open a conversation on social issues, and spark social change at the personal, social, or legislative level. The projects, workshops, and forum theatre performances we support strive to promote the inclusion of the socially excluded—the underprivileged, the LGBTQ community, migrants, survivors of violence, any community really.
We only work with non-actors. The idea is for people who have lived an oppression to be the ones who act it out on stage. This way we can support communities in imagining how things might be different, and help them to be agents of change. We basically ask “What would happen if?“ and then explore this in the theatre space and see what happens. We draw on Theatre of the Oppressed and other techniques to create an imaginative space where individuals can tell their stories, develop the agency and confidence to look at them from a different perspective, and create new narratives that allow for constructive choices. The ultimate goal is that participants – and audiences – would apply these constructive choices in a real context.
This year, I hope to work more with the migrant community and on creative community organizing. Last year, we had our first major forum theatre event at Prague Pride 2020. There was a palpable energy between actors and audience, and we were immensely proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBTQ community. When I heard people discussing the issues of the play even after they left the event, I knew what we did mattered. We got the conversation started.
Role of migrant women
Migrants – not just women – know about change better than anyone. Our lives are defined by change, adjustment, and reinvention. We may have migrated by choice – as it was for me – or forced by circumstances of war, natural disaster or something else. But we all have one thing in common: perseverance. Change is hard. It is so much easier to keep the status quo. And to create change, perseverance is crucial.
Where do migrant women fit in? They should share their stories. But the stories need listeners! It’s not enough to just invite women to have a seat at the table. It’s what happens after they sit down that matters. Migrant women can engage civically, and politically, working on two fronts – a quiet approach to dialogue, and a noisier civic engagement that fights for broader change on issues that affect them.
What inspires Laura
“Any experience that makes me feel small, that humbles me, is inspiring to me, because these experiences provide me with perspective and remind me to have a servant’s heart. In the work that I do in the theatre it could not work otherwise, because it would only be done for ego. Acts of grace, random acts of kindness inspire me on a daily basis, because they restore my faith in humanity.“
Martina’s Story
When I was in high school I was really good at physics, and was lucky to have had a great teacher, who opened the door to the secrets of physics for me. He told us about Feynman and his research on the atomic bomb, he lined all students in class to explain transverse and longitudinal waves using our bodies, or he climbed the table to explain oscillations. He allowed us to discover the laws of physics in a way that was engaging, fun and interactive. I grew up in a small village in the north of the Czech Republic. There were few kids my age, and no clubs or after-school activities, so I was quite bored at times. I remember having so much fun doing the experiments he assigned as homework – like measuring how much pressure we exert on the floor, or how quickly ice melts in different conditions. He got me completely hooked on physics, and it’s why I chose to pursue this subject at Charles University. I then focused on geophysics during my Master’s, partly because I really liked hiking in the mountains, and I wanted to understand how mountains are formed.
During that time, I got to go to France for a year to study, and then I went back to Prague to finish my studies. From the first moment I came to France I really liked the culture. I didn’t even feel like I had to get used to it much, it just immediately felt right. For the most part, it was thanks to the people I met, who made me feel welcomed. I entered an academic environment where everyone was open and helpful. When I came, I didn’t know the language. Which is a bit of a problem there, because even if they speak English, the French prefer to speak their mother tongue with everyone. But I never had the feeling that someone was judging me for my poor French, or making me feel inferior. I felt, though, that by speaking to me in French, they actually helped me learn faster. It helped me become comfortably bilingual, although I still have a strong Czech accent.
Moving away
At the end of my Master’s I was offered a doctoral scholarship in Lyon in France, which is usually difficult to get. I felt very lucky to get the chance through a unique scholarship. So I moved back to France.
The French culture really appealed to me – love of food, for example. I discovered that desserts and appetizers can be delicious, even at the university canteen. All the French people would say that the food at the canteen was not great, but for me it was like a five-star restaurant, and I was just thinking “if you could only try the ubiquitous ‘brown sauce’ at Prague’s Mathematics-Physics faculty canteen...”
Doing a PhD in France, specifically in exact sciences, it is quite demanding. I did my PhD in geophysics in computational modeling. In my lab, it was no exception that people were working all the time, even on weekends. It was not particularly easy to keep a healthy work-life balance. It was especially tricky for women. We were, for example, discouraged from starting a family during doctorate studies or at all, if we wanted to continue with in an academic career. This view is fortunately slowly changing nowadays in France and there is more and more support for female researchers who decide to have a family. But work-life balance remains a challenge in academia. Top researchers usually work non-stop. But I always tried to find time to do things that I wanted beside my academic career, like sports and traveling, but it was not always easy.
I’ve also come to realize that real friendships are difficult to build in the academic environment, because people are moving from place to place all the time, and when they move that relationship eventually dissipates. These relationships are important, but they will never be as deep as with my childhood friends, with whom I keep in touch to this day.
Even though I had an easy transition in France, I definitely still miss my family, every day. I’ve been living abroad for almost 15 years, and I am paying a high price for my decision to move. There is definitely some amount of estrangement that I feel from my family and friends back in Czechia. We really love each other, but I’m not there on a daily basis, I am not living with them through the different situations they face every day. But I made this decision, and I accepted it with all of the consequences. And that includes the fact that I now feel uprooted.
I moved to Zurich, Switzerland a few years ago to work on my own grant. It is another new country and I had to get used to a new culture and find out how the local system works (for example insurance or housing) yet again. But even if I stayed in France, I would still feel rootless. Even though I like the culture there, and even have French citizenship, I will never be completely at home. I don’t feel like I have strong ties there. I just didn’t have certain experiences, like going to school there. And at this point, I can’t say that I feel at home in the Czech Republic. A lot of things have changed there in these 15 years, but I also have a different perspective now than people there do. So I don’t have one country that I can call home, I usually say that I am a European.
Gender equality in academia
I decided to try to improve gender equality in academia, because I’m an idealist, and I think that things can change for the better. I also needed to find an outlet for the frustration I felt with the fact that our society is not so inclusive and does not offer equal opportunities to everyone. The higher I got in my academic career, the more I noticed the deeply rooted gender stereotypes, social inequalities, unconscious biases and micro aggressions faced by women and minorities.. And once I became conscious of this, I began noticing it everywhere. Before, I would actively ignore it, actually. I kind of went against the grain in many ways – I studied physics, I was friends with mostly male colleagues, I did male-dominated sports. When I’d go on expeditions to the mountains with my male colleagues, I would ignore the constant sexist jokes. I honestly did not believe that men think less of women. But I started noticing more and more how much these ideas seeped through a lot of the communication around me. Becoming aware of this fact was a really important step towards starting to do something about it. Seeing the problem and naming it. Loads of people don’t see it – a man who makes a sexist joke doesn’t necessarily see that it’s sexist, that it hurts people around him. It’s very deceptive, because sexism is often hard to pinpoint, but you hear it constantly, every day.
So I decided to do something about it and joined a few projects on this issue. Since I am a scientist, these were projects that focused on women in sciences.
I also joined the Swiss branch of the American organization “500 Women Scientists”. Through them I organized events for young female scientists, to encourage them to pursue careers in academia. We would invite five inspirational women, to give short lectures and then hold discussions. We also held a Wikipedia editaton. We invited around 70 people and during two hours, we edited Wikipedia pages and wrote new ones about women who have achieved something, which I also think has an important impact on the community. If you look at Wikipedia, only about 18 percent of the biographies in English are dedicated to women, the rest are about achievements of mostly white men. That‘s why it is crucial to improve the way women and ethnic minorities are recognized on Wikipedia.
One of the more popular projects I was involved in, which now has been unfortunately suspended, was called “Did this really happen?” We collected testimonies of female scientists about their experience with sexism, and then we turned them into comic strips and published them on our web page. We ended up gathering hundreds of testimonies, and about 40 percent of those were turned into a comic strip. We even wrote an article about it in a scientific journal, and there was quite a lot of feedback, so I think it served its purpose.
I have actually been surprised at the amount of positive feedback this kind of work has brought. I would have expected that most scientists would just shrug it off, but usually they recognize that there’s something there. The greatest satisfaction for me is when I hear someone say ‘Hm, I also sometimes say things like that, and I didn’t realize that it’s problematic, I’ll be more careful next time.’ And this comes, of course, mostly from men.
Unfortunately, I think these negative stereotypes about women, like that they are not as good at math and natural sciences as men, begin shaping girls’ ideas about themselves really early on. So, I am now working on a new project of my own, which is almost finished. I found six female illustrators who created artwork of famous female scientists, which will be put on informational posters, which would be placed in schools and on the internet. It’s really important for me to do work that helps the community around me, that has potential to bring about change, to improve things.
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