screenwriter | scholar | rebel buddhist

Elaine Lai 賴靜誼

Cha-Tea Circle: A Podcast Series on Asian American Spiritualities

CHA-TEA CIRCLE Webpage (2024)

We feature in-depth conversations with inspiring artists, educators, healers, and superheroes (anti-heroes too!), and also soundscapes from places of spiritual refuge.

Join us with with your favorite cup of tea, we've got ours ready. :)

Generously funded by the Asian Pacific American Religious Research Initiative (APARRI). Hosted by Chanhee Heo, Chenxing Han, Elaine Lai, and Xianfeng Shi. Advised by Dr. Kathryn Gin Lum. Sound design by Cahron Cross and Destiny Cunningham.

Queer joy and community resilience: Voices from Stanford

Part 1: Conversation with members of REFUGE: Queerness, Spirituality, and Religion (2022)

Elaine Lai (she/they), who was in the first cohort of Stanford University’s Office for Religious and Spiritual Life’s Meeting the Moment program, visits us again to present a two-part podcast titled “Queer Joy and Community Resilience: Voices from Stanford.”

Part one features five members of the student group REFUGE: Queerness, Spirituality, and Religion, founded by Matta Zheng (’22). As a former member of REFUGE, Elaine wanted to create a time capsule for this community to remember the work, conversations, and aspirations created together, and to offer a source of refuge for other queer folks trying to cultivate joy, and a deepening relationship to spirituality and/or religion. The conversation today considers what it means to create safe community, everyday rituals of joy, and the constraints and possibilities to queering institutional and religious spaces. This podcast is made possible by Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis program hosted by the Office of Inclusion, Community, and Integrative Learning at Stanford.

Featuring:
Elaine Lai (PhD Candidate)
Matta Zheng (’22)
Sequoiah Blaire Hippolyte (’22)
Three other anonymous members of REFUGE

Podcast edited by Cahron Cross (’23) and Destiny Cunningham (’23)

Queer joy and community resilience: Voices from Stanford

Part 2: Conversation with Vivek Tanna on queer mania, and queering academia (2022)

Part two features a conversation with Vivek Tanna (’22), leader of the student group Stanford Queer & Asian, who also serves as an LGBTQ+ health trainer. In this podcast, Vivek talks about his undergraduate thesis which is a creative auto-ethnography on queer mania, where he weaves uncertainty as an analytical thread between Religious Studies, psychology and sanity. Questions considered include: How do we queer the space of academia, and collapse disciplinary boundaries? What would it be to imagine a world in which coming out of the closet no longer needs to be actively disclosed to others? This podcast is made possible by Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis program hosted by the Office of Inclusion, Community, and Integrative Learning at Stanford.

Featuring:
Elaine Lai (PhD Candidate)
Vivek Tanna (’22)

Podcast edited by Cahron Cross (’23) and Destiny Cunningham (’23)

Anger & Justice: stolen swastikas and pet pistols

Stolen Swastikas and Pet Pistols (2021)

Two stories: in light of bigotry and racism, especially from those we least expect, what does true justice mean and why?

For Stanford University's Office for Religious and Spiritual Life's Meeting's the Moment program, this story showcases our January '21 theme, ANGER & JUSTICE. Told by Meeting the Moment Fellow Elaine Lai, PhD Candidate and Cahron Cross '22.

Stories by Elaine Lai and Cahron Cross, Audio produced by Allie Wollner