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(11/11/16 3:06am)
Against the backdrop of Mexican folk music, Coltrane Lounge bustled last Saturday with the chatter of community members, Middlebury students and faculty as they celebrated Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. Children focused intensely as they decorated traditional sugar skulls with red, blue and yellow icing, while students helped with facepainting designs on attendees. Still other students and community participants came together in a circle to play lotería, a Mexican party game similar to bingo.
The student organization Juntos, which works to address the social and political injustices faced by the migrant farmworker community in Vermont, hosted the Dia de los Muertos event this past Saturday. The event brought together members of the local Latino community in celebration of the Mexican tradition. Although the event took place on campus, it was mainly intended for the migrant community, rooted in this tradition, to celebrate the connections between life and death.
“The [Dia de los Muertos] event celebrates the dead and brings them back to life, in a sense,” said Robert Zarate-Morales ’17, office manager of Juntos. “This event is aimed for community members rather than for the Middlebury student body as a whole, because [the Latino community members] are the ones who hold on to these traditions. We’d like to provide a space for them to continue these traditions.”
Although the event has occurred at the Vermont Folklife Center in the town of Middlebury in the past, the location has transitioned to the College this year as the Folklife Center was unable to host the event.
“All the arrangements for the Dia de los Muertos were done by students,” said Jessica Gutierrez ’17, compañeros coordinator of Juntos. “Latino community members also collaborated with food prep and altar prep and many of them brought traditional items for the altar.”
Of the pieces incorporated into the celebration, the altar is at the core as a body through which those who have passed may return and partake in the celebration with their loved ones.
Board members and volunteers from Juntos set up the altar in Coltrane with electronic candles, “bread of the dead” and “papel picado,” or paper cutouts, alongside other motifs signifying life and death. Here, community members brought with them photos of those they would like to remember, as well as candy, fruits and other tokens that those who had passed would enjoy.
Although the altar was the centerpiece of the space, attendees wandered around, enjoying each other’s conversation and company. The celebration drew many migrant workers and their families to the College. College students, adults and children alike socialized over face-painting, coloring, lotería, sugar skulls, tamales, churros and arroz con leche that were met with warm reception across all ages.
“My favorite part of the event was the meal, because they serve traditional Hispanic dishes that aren’t typically served here,” said Amy Lorn ’19, a volunteer with Juntos. “I was also looking forward to see how it all comes together, because usually, my experience with day of the dead is people just taking some time to have a shrine rather than a whole celebration around it, so it was an interesting change to see this celebration.”
While the event was significant to many College students, some for a bit of home and others for the window it provided into a different culture, the Juntos board planned the Dia de los Muertos celebration with the larger Latino migrant community in mind.
“Given the multifaceted barriers that the Latino migrant community faces here, there are very few gatherings in which the community is allowed to be just that, a Latino community – not a worker community nor a migrant community, nor a community that is vulnerable to facing threats of deportation on a daily basis,” Gutierrez said.
Although the migrant farmworker population makes up a notable portion of Vermont’s demographics, Zarate-Morales said, as a group they are largely voiceless in discussions of race and immigration. He said members of the community suffer from difficulties with communication, transportation and are even subject to intentional targeting from groups such as the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), which instills a fear that is present in daily actions as simple as visiting a grocery store.
While these issues may seem removed to those within the College community, Zarate-Morales highlights points of intersection between the College and the migrant farmworker community, the most prominent being the dairy industry.
“A lot of (the farmworkers’) professions are milking cows,” he said. “That milk is part of the dairy industry, which we get milk, ice-cream and yogurt from. Because the industry is so prominent in Vermont, we consume a large part of these products and it’s important to acknowledge where that food comes from and who does that labor.”
Part of Juntos’ work as a student organization is to raise awareness of the migrant farmworker community that exists so close to the College and of the issues they face in hopes of creating both solidarity and more resources.
“It’s so easy to ignore that our neighbors are consistently faced with challenges and hold a large amount of fear and limitations on rights every human being is entitled to,” Zarate-Morales said. “With this event, we wanted to create that connection for students to realize that these people are just like us – we all experience life and death, and we all know of people who have these experiences.”
The celebration was a success in those respects. The space became a comfortable one in which community members, students and faculty members alike broke out of their prescribed groups and interacted with one another.
“Our hopes for this event were to have a balanced turnout between the Middlebury students, staff and community members,” Gutierrez said. “As we hoped, we were also able to create a genuine, casual setting – even almost a family-like vibe. Everyone had an amazing time.”
Students interested in getting involved in Juntos can email juntos@middlebury.edu for more information and volunteer opportunities.
(10/29/16 2:01am)
Fall break at the College falls right in the midst of midterm season. It would be an understatement to say that it is a stressful time for students. While many opt to relax and unwind or spend their days catching up on piles of readings and papers, a group of students opted instead to immerse themselves in the high school experience in Barre, Vermont.
This fall break, the Middlebury Alternative Trips (MAlt) and Language in Motion (LiM) programs collaborated to organize the second annual LiM Mini-MAlt trip. On this trip, a group of five students traveled to Barre to engage in three days of inter-cultural exchange through in-class presentations and community service work with high school students at Spaulding High School and the Central Vermont Career Center (CVCC), the affiliated technical school.
“Language in Motion works primarily with the local secondary schools, and we try to bring inter-cultural perspective and lens to different classrooms there,” LiM Coordinator Kristen Mullins said. “During the school year, we can’t really go farther out than the local high schools, but we thought, looking at the MAlt model, how wonderful if we could use breaks as an opportunity for students who are interested in doing this but also interested in learning about schools in Vermont that are further away.”
According to Mullins, the cultural exchange flowed both from the college students and from the high school students with whom they worked. While the five students who participated in the trip all had significant international experiences that they hoped to share with the high school students, they did not have much lived experiences of Vermont outside the immediate Middlebury area.
“To go to a part that’s not Middlebury and see what a different part of the state is like was very eye-opening for me,” Co-Leader Michiko Yoshino ’17 said. “Learning about Barre through the eyes of high school students especially helped me realize how much they have to offer and how valuable of a perspective they have.”
The cultural exchange took place both inside and outside the classroom setting. Outside the classroom, the Middlebury group worked with the Congregational Church in the town of Barre and groups of high school students in community service work. In the classrooms, the Middlebury group developed presentations around themes that they found significant to their own international experiences.
Each presenter delivered their themes to a variety of classrooms, from US Government to Human Services to Spanish. In order to engage each classroom, the Middlebury group focused on directly engaging the high school students and letting their interests drive their discussions.
“We were all very free to create our own presentations, and we improved upon them each time we presented them,” Yoshino said. “It was interesting to see the different ways people presented and the different ways they engaged the high school students. We also had a lot of candy,” she added with a laugh.
Shan Zeng ’19 and Kathy He ’19 paired up to develop a presentation around the theme of community involvement and citizenship. To engage the students actively in the presentation, they strayed away from a traditional presentation model. Instead, the pair invited everyone to share their visions through drawings of their own memories and ideal communities.
“The students were actually eager to share their visions once given the opportunity,” Zeng said. “Even though our class had a very dynamic makeup, we shared very similar concepts when asked what our ideal community looked like.”
As the Middlebury group shared the lens they had acquired from abroad, the high school students also shared their own perspectives as high school students and of their town.
“The high school students explained that their town had a perception of being called ‘scary Barre’,” Yoshino said. “They talked about the fights, teenage pregnancy and socioeconomic divides within the town, and it was eye-opening to see how much the [high school] students care and to see them back up the arguments they make.”
It was also interesting to have such open discussions about issues that are seemingly invisible on campus because they are experiences that just aren’t prevalent here, Yoshino said.
This two-directional inter-cultural learning is what Mullins holds to be at the core of the LiM program.
“People are really interested in not only sharing what they’ve been thinking about and who they are but also learning from other people about what they’ve experienced and who they are,” Mullins said. “In my experience, that is one of the most exciting things that there is in the world. There’s this beautiful coming together of experience, excitement and hard work.”
LiM will collaborate with MAlt to organize another LiM Mini-MAlt trip over spring break. Anyone who is interested is encouraged to contact Kristen Mullins at kmullins@middlebury.edu
(09/30/16 1:57am)
Visitors to Brainerd Commons might notice the series of owl door signs for all members of Brainerd’s ResLife staff, one of which hangs proudly on the Dean’s office. Over the summer, interior design work has been done to the office and now, visitors are greeted with a fledging owl collection scattered across the room. Watercolor paintings, owl stamps and even a lavender scented plush owl are among the new décor.
This decoration is the work of Brainerd Commons’ new Dean, AJ Place. Place stepped into the role of commons dean in August and has since hit the ground running not only with administrative duties and meeting the commons staff and students, but also jumping in with CRA and residential life training and Orientation as well.
“I started back in August and transitioned from my other job, so I jumped right in with CRA training, ResLife staff training and then orientation, so it’s been a busy month but it’s been great,” Place said.
Place’s transition from his position as Associate Dean for Judicial Affairs to his new role in Brainerd Commons followed the previous Brainerd Dean Natasha Chang’s announcement that she would be stepping away from her position last January.
The College called for applications not only for the Brainerd Commons Dean position that began this semester, but also for the Ross Commons Dean position, which will begin in January.
“The big thing we ask is, can this person work with our students and the changing needs of our students in an effective way?” said Dean of Students Baishakhi Taylor, who is in charge of hiring new commons deans. “Can this person move difficult conversations forward? Can this person help balance the demands and needs of the rigorous schedule our students face within the residential life system?”
Beyond looking for someone who would effectively play the collaborator role between students and faculty, the administration and other college staff, the selection committee also searched for a candidate that could help bring a more inclusive vision of the College to fruition.
Place’s commitment to social justice issues, among them green-dot bystander training and LGBTQ issues, distinguished him from the candidate pool, according to Dean Taylor.
For Place, a commitment to these social justice topics reflects less the direction he envisions for residential life and more the personality and style he brings to the position.
“All five of us Commons Deans are different. We want that because there is strength in difference and we all bring unique elements to the table,” he said. “There is no master plan for change, but I think in general who I am and what I find important might come through.”
Although Place is only wrapping up his second month as Commons Dean, he has already been bringing his own passions and experiences to the job. He and the new Brainerd CRA, Henrik Gunderson ’16, have worked together to incorporate social justice issues into ResLife training in the hopes of making the commons experience more proactive and to engage with social justice issues of sexuality, class and race that may be difficult to talk about without a specific type of space.
“An important vision we have for Brainerd is to create a safe and productive environment that pushes our students to take chances and grow, but at the same time provide a safety net when they need it,” Gunderson said. “[Place’s] experience from working with residential life for so many years means that he can provide important insight in how we handle different situations.”
Through his position as Commons Dean, Place seeks to bring authenticity both to his role in the ResLife institutional experience and also to everyday interactions with students within the ResLife structure.
“[Working with ResLife] is more home, and so it’s nice,” he said. “I enjoy being in a residence hall, I enjoy seeing students at different times of the day and sometimes in the evening, and I enjoy helping them through difficult situations and being around when they’re celebrating. It’s a different feeling.”
While the Commons office has been kept busy with events concerning the first-year experience throughout August and September, Place has gotten to know not only the new Brainerd students through move-in and orientation but also many returning Brainerd students.
“Meeting with returning students is great because it’s harder to get to know them as they’re not here in the building,” he said. “They know that even though there’s a new dean in this office, they can still come and find me to get some support and some resources.”
As Place moves out of the transition phase of his new position, he continues to meet and work with students to create an inclusive and engaging space within Brainerd Commons.
“All the Brainerd students I’ve met so far have said that Brainerd’s the best, but I think that everybody probably thinks that about their commons,” Place said with a laugh. “So far it’s been a really great group of students and I’m excited to be working with them.”
(04/22/15 10:41pm)
The range and scope of narrative podcasts can make it difficult to go beyond big names like The Moth Radio Hour and Serial. But tonight, Maya Goldberg-Safir ’12 from Third Coast International Audio Festival is bringing the event Podcast Therapy to campus.
Goldberg-Safir and producers Alex Kapelman and Whitney Jones from Pitch, a podcast about sound and music, will be at the program tonight at 7:30 p.m. in the Gamut Room to introduce people to podcasts that they can enjoy and might not otherwise discover. The event, Podcast Therapy, provides a space for conversation between the “therapists” and the participants. In these conversations, participants share a problem or a concern they’ve been harboring and are then prescribed podcasts to their problems.
It is part of the Meet the Press series that brings working journalists to the College.
“Historically, Meet the Press has brought working journalists into our community so students and faculty can interact with the people who deliver the news to us,” Sue Halpern, the main organizer of Meet the Press and director of the Narrative Journalism Fellowship, said.
Although the series has mainly brought in traditional journalists, such as New York Times reporters and New Yorker writers, it is expanding to include audio journalism.
“The explosion of audio storytelling is one of the most exciting consequences of the Internet,” Halpern said. “It’s a way for people to connect with one another, and Podcast Therapy is a great way to showcase the range of radio work being done all over the country.”
While the name of the event may bring to mind a doctor’s office, it is far from the atmosphere the event takes on. “It’s like going to the Moth, with a Moth vibe about it,” Goldberg-Safir said. “Any question works, and it’s all about having fun with it.”
There’s no limit to the type of questions that are asked. While the question of going to graduate school has come up at each of Goldberg-Safir’s Podcast Therapy events, a past participant was troubled that his girlfriend’s cat didn’t respect him. In response, Goldberg-Safir pulled out a segment from the podcast WireTap that featured Godzilla’s thought journal when he decided to start losing weight.
Until now, Podcast Therapy has only been done in Chicago bars. As such, it’s structured to be a light-hearted event where conversation is fostered over food and drinks. Bringing the event to Middlebury, Goldberg-Safir hopes to recreate this atmosphere.
“It will be in the Gamut room for a more informal setting,” Goldberg-Safir said. “We will also be serving podcast food, such as cereal for the podcast Serial,” she laughed.
Radio productions and podcasts have come to the forefront recently as a versatile medium through which to communicate and tell stories. Today, there are increasing opportunities to create such audio works and also just to sit back and explore existing podcasts.
(04/08/15 10:12pm)
Have you ever wished your clothes could better express the creative and fun person you are? Have you ever looked at your shirt pocket and thought, “What a complete waste of space!”
Then look no further than the Flippant t-shirt company, founded in part by Middlebury students seeking to do something new and different with clothing. The students involved in this company are Logan Miller ’15, Mike Peters ’15, and Brent Nixon ’15.
Flippant produces shirts with upside down (or “flipped”) pockets. The pockets are usually a different fabric from the rest of the shirt, drawing attention to its impractical design. “The shirt pocket isn’t used anyways, so we thought we might as well have some fun with it,” said Miller.
Although Miller founded Flippant on the idea of doing something different with clothing, he realized after discussing with others that “it was really about making a different kind of company, not just clothing, that’s totally focused on having fun and being creative.”
And this fun attitude is reflected not only in their shirt designs, but also in the way Miller runs his company and advertises their products. Flippant’s core values include a good sense of humor and a light-hearted attitude towards work, school, and life. The company has an Instagram account (@flippant_life) that focuses on re-enacting both serious or mundane moments with a funny or unexpected twist. For example, there is a photo of a model in Flippant gear crawling towards a flock of sheep, a parody of the haute couture modeling scene.
“It’s like an imitation of the media industry,” Miller laughed.
Flippant’s mantra of not taking things too seriously is also evident in Flippant’s work environment.
“We put on some electric swing when we’re sewing,” said Milo Stanley ’17.5 who hand-sews Flippant pockets onto the shirts. “When you listen to electric swing, you start working like mad.”
Although Flippant prides itself on keeping things casual and fun, it has the potential to be a seriously ludicrous endeavor. Miller started Flippant last summer and has worked on it ever since, stabilizing his company with the guidance of the Midd Entrepreneurs class he took last J-Term.
The Flippant team worked with visiting professors Andrew Stickney and David Bradbury from the Vermont Center of Emerging Technologies, who helped them focus and fine-tune the business aspects of Flippant, especially the handling of customer feedback.
“Flippant developed their concept for their customers successfully on their own,” said Professor Stickney. “[Midd Entrepreneurs] was about engaging with students to help them test their idea in a real way.”
Currently, Flippant’s target market is college students attracted to the idea of a “non-chalant and genuine” lifestyle. Shirts are available for sale through their online website (www.flippant.life). Most shirts are made to order and involve working with local seamstresses and skilled Middlebury students.
The company has recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund their company’s future growth and production on a larger scale. Upon graduation this May, Miller said he plans to move Flippant headquarters from Middlebury to Detroit, “a blank canvas and space.”
(03/18/15 5:36pm)
Images have largely replaced sound in today’s media. In fact, we are so used to pictures accompanying sound that it’s strange just to listen to a story and to let our imaginations take over in creating mental pictures. It’s even stranger when we consider this within an academic context.
Yet, that is what the Sociology Department is doing. Working with Erin Davis, a documentary filmmaker and radio producer, a group of senior sociology majors are translating their 80-page senior theses into five-minute podcasts.
Davis previously taught the J-term course “Sound and Story,” where students learned the techniques of radio production and produced their own stories through sound. The J-term course offered students an alternative to academic writing. The class generated student interest in translating senior work into more accessible forms. After conversations between interested students, Davis, and the sociology department, the project was conceived in the fall of this academic year.
It’s the marrying of two seemingly disparate concepts: mass journalism and academia, but a development that Sociology Department Chair Linus Owens sees to be important. Although a journalist and a sociologist may approach events differently, with the sociologist asking questions about the underlying socioeconomic structures at the root of events that the journalist may oversee, the relationship between the two is not too far removed.
“Both sociology and journalism are getting at a similar question, which is how to explain the world and how to put it in a meaningful context that people can understand and do something with,” Owens said. By putting sociological research into journalism, in-depth research on a social phenomenon can be conveyed to a much wider audience.
Unlike sociological research, journalism is not comprised of pages of research, analysis, and graphs. Rather, journalism appeals to the short attention span of most readers.
“When you do research, it only matters that you care,” Davis said. “When you’re working on the podcasts, you have to ask yourself why anyone else cares about it, or figure out how to make them care.”
In a departure from the academic mindset, students have to think about translating their work into a story that listeners will be able to connect with on a much more personal level.
“Because who’s going to read your 50-page essay, right?” Owens chuckled.
Because the five-minute podcasts cannot cover the entirety of the research and writing that has gone into a student’s senior work, students have to think about smaller things to extract. These things might be a point of interest that came up at some point during research but that the student didn’t have the time to pursue. Or the student might look for a smaller story that will point to the research as a larger whole.
One of the students involved in the project, Rosalie Wright-Lapin ’15, is still looking for the perfect way to translate her research into a podcast.
Wright-Lapin’s thesis is about how socioeconomic status, family background, and notions of academic achievement play into social groups and identities at Middlebury Union High School. In piecing together her senior thesis, Wright-Lapin conducted and recorded one-on-one interviews with teachers, administrators, counselors, and students. In addition, she conducted semi-structured class discussion that varied in academic level to look at student participation, which she noted with observations.
Due to the type of research Wright-Lapin conducted and the nature of her study, Davis recommended that she pursue the narrative approach.
“It would be a more vivid image rather than just analytical research,” Wright-Lapin said of focusing on one story in her podcast. “It’s an opportunity to portray my work in a different medium and a push to think of my work in a different way.”
Narrative is not the only approach to creating podcasts. According to Davis, another common, more traditional approach is having the student act as the host and presents his or her story. However, she also stressed that there were more than these two options available to students.
The students involved in this project are working closely with Davis to put their podcasts together. At this point in the semester, the projects are still in early production stages but scheduled to be completed in May.
Although the major aim of this project is to make sociological research more accessible to the larger public, the department hopes this pilot project will also open up fresh alternatives to traditional senior work. The sociology department is the first to have embarked on any such project at the College and has raised some important questions on the accessibility and applicability of academic research to the general public.
In the academic grindstone that is Middlebury, it could be worthwhile to take the time to stop and think about why others should care about our work as much as we do.