Leia Yen is a fourth-year transfer student in the English major, Digital Humanities minor, and Global Studies minor programs at UCLA. Her own mixed cultural background drew her to transnational literature courses where she was excited to find company in works that negotiated familiar questions of hybridity, religion, race, nationality, and gender. She is also interested in understanding the ways that digital technology allows more narratives to be represented in an increasingly connected world. For her Departmental Honors research, Leia is studying the way digital storytelling methods are influencing our interpretation and perception of the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Her work applies digital media theory and post-colonial theory to the frameworks that surround representations of the Syrian refugee narrative in mainstream digital storytelling projects, web initiatives that are often created by secondary institutions, corporations, or organizations. She is also building a website that traces commentary dialogues, remediations, and circulations of refugee selfies on social media networks to deconstruct the processes that conform self-representative narratives to the Western-dictated Orientalist binary. Her hope is that by interrogating the intersections of technology, globalization, and human narratives, digital platforms and tools can be used to empower the representation of minority communities without violating their autonomy or cultural integrity. After graduating, Leia plans on continuing her research in graduate school with the goal of eventually teaching in higher education.