Isabel Tadmiri OC ‘21

Isabel Tadmiri smiling at the camera
 

Keystone Foundation, India (2022-24)

Isabel Tadmiri (she/her) ‘21 was a Neuroscience major with Politics and Environmental Studies minors. At Oberlin, you’d often find Isabel scouring the spice racks of OSCA’s Third World Co-op, affecting campus waste streams with the Office of Environmental Sustainability’s Resource Conservation Team, or hanging out with Students for Energy Justice. As an undergrad, Isabel conducted research on neuroeconomics with NYU’s Center for Neural Science, on environmental justice and repair with Oberlin’s Environmental Studies Department, and on environmental pollutant neurotoxicity through Oberlin’s Neuroscience program. Isabel is originally from New York, NY and currently serves on the Oberlin Board of Trustees (‘21-‘24). Through work with and mentorship from the communities of Africatown, Alabama and the Oberlin Indigenous Peoples’ Day Committee, Isabel gained great appreciation for the power of oral history and intergenerational knowledge-sharing in environmental repair. As Shansi Fellow at Keystone, She is excited to learn more about how we can honor traditional knowledge bases to work towards environmental and public health justice solutions with Adivasi communities and Keystone while in the Nilgiri Hills of South India. She aspires to always work towards sustainable and caring environmental community building at Keystone and beyond!

Featured
Buses Take the Right of Way
Buses Take the Right of Way

By Isabel Tadmiri ‘21, Keystone Foundation Fellow

On the streets of Kotagiri, buses take the right of way. Green, blue, or pink mighty metal, they barrel down the roads. No matter if they’re hairpin or straight, narrow or wide, paved or unpaved: the roads are the bus’s roads. Buses go along, with thankfully and incredibly accurate metal-muscle-memory. A bus comes by, trees sweep their branches aside, and cars pull over to make extra space that you didn’t even know existed on such a narrow road. Their loud honks are loud, so I usually manage not to skim my shoulder on these big buses when I walk down the street to and from work, even though they are so close to me.

Home is Where the Honey Is
Home is Where the Honey Is

By Isabel Tadmiri ‘21, Keystone Foundation Fellow

Did you know that it takes 12 bees their entire lifetime to make one teaspoon of honey? I found this out recently. And maybe it’s because I imagined bees buzzing around for their whole lives together, or because I heard about Madurai fellow Phoebe’s new bottle full of honey shattering! Maybe it is because it seems like there is no end to my learning about new layers of the hard beautiful work behind drops of honey. Or maybe (as my co-fellow Reet makes fun of me, lovingly and in true familiar Obie fashion) it’s because I’m a cancer—but when I learned about the 12 bees, I teared up.