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(05/03/18 1:35am)
On Sunday April 29 Middlebury was one of dozens of schools nationwide to join a University of Chicago live simulcast Q&A session with artist and activist Ai Weiwei. The broadcast, held in Wilson Hall, was followed by a screening of Weiwei’s award-winning and visually stunning documentary about the global refugee crisis, “Human Flow.” The film, which was first released in October at the Venice International Film Festival, tells the stories of some of the world’s 65 million migrants, captured on film by travelling to refugee camps in 23 countries over the course of a year.
“Over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II,” the film’s official website reads “‘Human Flow’, an epic film journey led by the internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei, gives a powerful visual expression to this massive human migration.”
During the Q&A session, Weiwei explained that he was inspired to make the movie in part based on his own experience being forcibly displaced from his home by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution.
“Maybe that’s why I get involved, because I care about people whose lives are changed being in this desperate situation,” Weiwei said. “I am quite identified with those types of people in those conditions.”
Weiwei, in addition to being an artist and filmmaker, is also a renowned political activist and frequently uses his art as social commentary. He meant for “Human Flow” to call attention to the global migrant crisis and rally viewers and their governments to action. During the Q&A he pointed out the role that the U.S. has played in the past in displacing families, as well as the current administration’s lack of responsibility in accepting refugees into the country.
“Iraq war, all those wars always have our shadows in there,” he said. “If we don’t really act on those issues, then we become a part of it. This is more than a joke. It’s so sad and so shameful as a nation, the strongest nation in the world that has all the resources … to not bear any responsibility. This is not asking for mercy, it’s asking for responsibility.”
A poll of the live-stream viewers showed that 97 percent believed the U.S. should let more refugees into its borders, while the other 3 percent “need to watch the movie again,” as Weiwei said.
Indeed, the film’s message is immediately rousing, as it opens with iPhone footage of a raft coming to shore in Lesovo, Greece and dozens of soaking Syrian refugees tumbling onto the rocky beach. It soon cuts to a drone shot of a large camp in Iraq, panning to scenes of destruction that began with the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the caption reads. Throughout the 2 hours and 20 minutes, the film reaches distant corners of the earth and myriad groups of refugees, from Syrians camped outside the barbed-wired Macedonian border to Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh escaping Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing to Palestinians enclosed by tall concrete walls on Gaza’s West Bank.
Much more than a documentary exposé, “Human Flow” is a riveting work of political art. It focuses particularly on holding the West accountable for its part in the migration crisis. Gruesome and raw footage of life at the camps is often overlaid with text, such as quotes from poems or relevant news headlines. One scene shows police burning a camp in Calais, France in order to violently evict the thousands of migrants living there as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union appears in big text on the screen. In another, a hazy vision of black smoke billowing off burning oil fields in Iraq is overlaid with a Newsweek headline: “Oil was Prime Motivator in Iraq War.”
The artistry of ascending drone shots, orchestral music and lines of poetry serve to complement the film’s weighty subject matter. Weiwei insists that the film is still beautiful, though tragic.
“Even in the most suffering moment, there’s a beauty,” he said. “Because where there’s humanity, there’s beauty.”
Jason Vrooman, curator of education and academic outreach at the college and one of the organizers of the event, hopes that the Middlebury community will be inspired to lend their help to the refugee crisis by reaching out to activist groups such as the campus’ Amnesty International chapter and the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. They can also search therefugeecenter.org/human-flow to find more ways to help.
As Weiwei told viewers, “If we can help one person, or one family, or someone in your neighborhood, it helps humanity. It’s all connected. The willingness to act is the most important.”
(01/24/18 10:10pm)
Whether they were math majors or hadn’t taken a class since high school pre-calculus, every member of the audience in Twilight Auditorium was enraptured by Professor of Mathematics David Dorman’s lecture “Right Triangles, Elliptical Curves, and the Conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer.” The lecture was held on Wednesday, January 18 as part of the Carol Rifelj lecture series. The series is named after the late Carol de Dobay Rifelj and aims to showcase faculty research. Dorman’s research involved the history of a conjecture in the field of number theory that defines the set of points that make up an elliptic curve.
The idea for the lecture, Dorman says, came from a dinner-party conversation with a non-mathematician who was curious about his research. Rather than trying to explain the complexities of number theory at the dinner table, Dorman took the conversation to the lecture hall. He prefaced his talk by warning that it can take many years of graduate school to understand the problems he’s trying to solve, let alone solve them.
The Conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer is named after the mathematicians who developed it in the 1960s: Bryan Birch and Peter Swinnerton-Dyer. The conjecture is such a central problem in mathematics that the Clay Mathematics Institute listed it as one of seven Millennium Prize Problems. The Clay Institute has offered $1,000,000 to anyone who can prove the conjecture or any of the other six extraordinarily challenging prize problems.
Dorman’s lecture set out not to solve the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and collect its million-dollar bounty, but merely to explain it.
“It’s actually very difficult to give a mathematics talk to non-mathematicians, because you can’t assume anything,” Dorman said. In order to make the lecture accessible to mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike, Dorman decided to start his explanation of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture at the very beginning: the basics of right triangles, congruent numbers and the Pythagorean theorem. As the talk progressed, it touched on more complex topics such as elliptic curves, ranks of curves, and finally L-functions, all subjects that can take years of study to comprehend.
“You try and layer math talks that way, “ Dorman said. “Make sure everyone understands what’s going on at first, and then you say, ‘How many people am I willing to lose, if any, and when should I lose them?’ I spent weeks trying to figure out how to make that easy.”
To supplement the discrete mathematical aspect of the lecture, Dorman included a rich history of the conjecture that started in 1225 B.C. with the study of congruent numbers, or positive integers that are the areas of right triangles with three rational-number sides. Generating congruent numbers and discovering which numbers are congruent is an arduous process and one for which there exists no natural ordering. It wasn’t until the 1950’s that Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer discovered a connection between elliptic curves and finding congruent numbers, whence their conjecture was born.
This thousand-year process of identifying and solving problems is at the crux of studying mathematics. Mathematicians don’t spend all their time on the “big” problems; rather, they slowly chip away at them while entertaining smaller problems.
“You have a number of things that you’re working on at the same time,” Dorman said to describe how mathematicians approach their research. “It’s like a stove, so you’ve got something simmering on the back burner and it’s gonna be cooking for a long time. Those are the hard projects. And there are the ones in front that you’re working on, that hopefully are easier and that you can make progress on.”
When a theory is finally proven, it can open up the door to an entire new field of mathematics and an infinite number of new problems to solve. Discovering a new problem, like the points that make up elliptic curves, can suddenly become central to solving a potentially centuries-old problem like the congruent number problem. That is how conjectures such as Birch and Swinnterton-Dyer’s become so famous.
“A lot of people are working on this problem, so it became an important problem. It’s not like someone says, ‘OK, this one is important;’ people just realize that it is central to the topic. So if we solved this one, we’d be a lot closer to solving the other problem,” Dorman said.
Though the implications of proven theories may not always reach far beyond the world of mathematics, Dorman believes there can be great beauty in the process itself.
“It’s like poetry. Is the world really better because of this haiku? And the answer is, actually, yes.”
Dorman also fundamentally believes in the beauty of a solving a simpler problem: getting students to understand difficult concepts. When not examining the world’s most challenging math problems, Dorman teaches a number of algebraic geometry and number-theory-related math classes, including “The Magic of Numbers” and “Abstract Algebra.” Some of his most successful math days, he says, are when he is able to boil down complex subjects to make them more accessible.
Dorman’s lecture could certainly be considered a successful math day. The professor said it finally provided an answer to his dinner party guest’s seemingly innocuous question — and they’re still friends, too!
(12/07/17 12:16am)
Sitting in rows of desks in a Hillcrest classroom on Thursday Nov. 30, a group of students watched as sex educator Roan Coughtry demonstrated cutting a condom to make a DIY dental dam. On a table in the corner, stickers, coupons to sex toy stores, smart wallets, and pamphlets proudly displayed the logos of Planned Parenthood and O.School, which is an online pleasure-based sex ed company that was launched earlier this year by a group of sex ed advocates, including Middlebury alumna Kristina Dotter ’14.
Coughtry is a sex educator at O.School, a company that describes their mission as “building a shame-free space by offering pleasure education through live streaming and moderated chat.” Dotter and O.School founder Andrea Barrica visited campus last spring to explain the concept for their new company. This year, Cece Alter ’19.5, an O.School intern, thought many students at Middlebury could benefit from a basic sex-ed class that was more LGBTQ inclusive, consent-based, and pleasure-focused than what many students had received in high school.
To that end, Alter organized the event with the support of Chellis House, Queers & Allies, the SGA Sexual Relationship Respect Committee, Feminist Action at Middlebury, and the MCAB Speakers Committee. Coughtry’s two workshops were part of a college tour O.School recently debuted, where sex educators travel to colleges around the country to give sex and relationship workshops.
Coughtry’s visit to campus included a comprehensive sex education workshop on Nov. 30, followed by a more narrowly focused workshop on healing from trauma and sexual liberation on Dec. 1. The idea behind the two workshops was to provide a basis of education for students before diving into more complex topics surrounding sex and relationships.
“We asked ourselves, what is missing here? And it turns out sex ed is missing here,” Alter said. “We have very little sex education in this country, and this world that is available. Maybe some people get here having no sex ed, so you really have to start with safer sex, and the basics of sex education, before you move on to something else, especially because there is no regular sex education [at Middlebury].”
The organizers were attentive to the fact that students, whether coming from a fairly comprehensive sex education, or none at all, likely all had some gaps in their knowledge, and wanted to focus on addressing as many of those topics as possible.
“Some people don’t know what an STI is and how to prevent that,” Alter said, adding that Coughtry’s workshops covered a variety of subjects that most high school programs do not talk about, including consent, pleasure, communication, how to say no, and more queer and trans-inclusive language.
One gap that stood out in many student’s previous sex education was that lack of LGBTQ inclusivity. It was particularly important to Alter and the other event organizers as well as queer groups on campus that the workshop was inclusive of queer and trans experiences, especially considering the lack of queer representation in the speakers who usually come to campus. Part of Coughtry’s sex ed basics workshop was centered on queer-inclusive anatomical terms that avoid the gendered associations of words like “penis,” and “vagina.” Instead, Coughtry used “innie” and “outie,” because, they said, the gendered associations with biological terms make such words less inclusive.
Coughtry began the workshop by announcing that they were going to help students “unlearn all the crap we’ve been taught,” and acknowledged the difficulty of finding comprehensive, pleasure-based sex education in today’s world.
“We live in such a sex-shaming, body-shaming society,” they said. ”Even if we fit the most narrow definition of what is considered normal sexually, we are probably still shamed for something.”
Coughtry also wanted the workshop to focus on safe-sex practices, including preventing unwanted pregnancy and STIs, while avoiding rhetoric that can make STIs seem shameful. They provided as an example the common practice of saying “I’m clean” when you have no STIs, rather than saying that your tests came back negative
“The word clean implies that having STIs are dirty,” they said. “People can be in long, healthy relationships when they have STIs…it needs to be more normalized.”
The last half of the first workshop was dedicated to communication and consent. Coughtry brought up and then broke all the myths surrounding consent, including ideas such as, “consenting once means consenting every time,” or “a lack of a no can be considered a yes.” They wanted to address these myths, because many seem so ingrained in society that they are not always disproven or even talked about in regular high school sex ed classes. Coughtry also challenged prevalent myths about communication, most notably: “the biggest myth about communication is that it’s happening.”
Coughtry’s workshops were a major step towards de-stigmatizing sex ed at a college level, and Alter and other organizers hope to make sex ed more permanently prevalent on campus. The SGA Sexual Relationship and Respect Committee has been working with groups on campus to brainstorm ideas for bringing sex ed to Middlebury, perhaps as part of first year orientation, in the form of a possible new student organization, and more speakers and workshops.
“People can be very uncomfortable in sex ed classes, and talking about sex, and I think we need to normalize it more. There’s a certain group of people who goes, and only a certain number of times per semester, and we need it to become more part of the culture,” said Alter, who is also a member of the Sexual Relationship and Respect Committee.
In the meantime, students seeking more sex education can go to O.School’s website to look at thousands of videos on topics ranging from “How to get the most out of your hookup” to “Sex after giving birth.” Their website is https://www.o.school.
(11/16/17 1:14am)
What do state politics, design, racial identity, and linguistics have to tell us about self-discovery and loss? Six speakers posed—and answered—those questions and many more on Saturday at the eighth annual TEDxMiddlebury conference held in Mahaney Center for the Arts.
With nothing but a projector behind them and a rug under their feet, à la traditional TED, these speakers brought their unique and varied backgrounds to the stage to speak to this year’s theme, “Lost and Found.” The theme centered around the stories and memories that shape each person’s understanding of the world, and the reshaping of those narratives that can occur throughout one’s life.
“[It] is about the perpetual discovery and rediscovery that is essential to our existence as human beings,” the event organizers wrote. “It calls us to remember people, places, words, and histories we have left behind or taken for granted, but simultaneously invites us to reclaim, reshape, and reconstruct what we know.”
Since the conference was founded in 2010, it has been entirely run by a board of nine students. The students spend from March through November planning everything from recruiting speakers, to choosing a theme, to catering, to tech. According to the board, the conference’s success has only grown in the past few years.
“As a board member for the past three years, it amazes me to see how much our student org has grown and continues to grow. This was the first TEDxMiddlebury event to sell out and it was the first to have ASL interpretation and accessibility copies available to attendees,” said Natalie Figueroa ’18, a board member.
This year’s speakers were Daniel Erker, Lecia Brooks, Michael Jager, Attica Scott, Nia Robinson ’19, and Rana Abdelhamid ’15. Each speaker took the stage for exactly 18 minutes to share their experiences of the feeling of being lost and the beauty of finding purpose once again.
The first speaker of the morning, linguist Daniel Erker, spoke about the power of language as a way to help people find their way in life. Some see language as a barrier between different races and nationalities, but Erker sees language as a bridge to be crossed, and one that can facilitate human connection rather than inhibit it. Language can particularly offer solutions to the 30 million immigrants who live in the U.S., who are often seen as facing an inability to assimilate due to language difficulties, or, “The Hispanic Challenge.”
“What if someone told you that in our country there was a large group of people who lacked the desire to use language this way, or that there were millions of people who willfully ignored the urge to linguistically connect with their fellow Americans? You would likely and this surprising, if not simply difficult to believe. But this is precisely what some very influential and powerful individuals are asking to you believe when it comes to Americans who were born outside of the United States and then at some point later in life, moved to this country,” Erker said.
Erker used data that he and several other linguists collected from Spanish speakers in New York City and Boston to show how “The Hispanic Challenge” is not empirically supported, and immigrants are actually becoming increasingly proficient in English and using it even more than Spanish in some instances.
“The Hispanic Challenge is not real, nor is any other challenge claiming that a particular immigrant group is unwilling, unable, or unmotivated to linguistically connect to the people who live in the communities around them,” he said.
Erker finished by urging students to keep this newfound linguistic discovery close to their hearts: language is a bridge, not a barrier.
Nia Robinson ‘19, the only student speaker and the winner of the 2017 student speaker competition, gave the penultimate TED talk, reminding us “we are not as lost as we think we are.”
Robinson spoke about how being black in predominantly white spaces made her feel out of place growing up, and how she struggled to accept her own identity.
“I knew I wasn’t supposed to like myself, so I didn’t. I remember trying to pour bleach on myself to make me lighter. It didn’t work. I remember scrubbing as hard as I could because people told me I was covered in dirt. As a result, I have very soft skin, but it left me with deep invisible scars,” Robinson said.
Moving forward, Robinson told the audience, took a mix of emotional and generational memory. Emotional memory is a remembrance that triggers deeply felt emotions from the past.
“Each time someone called me the wrong name, sent me death threats, or told me I was pretty for a black girl, it was all familiar, but it would hurt more because I would remember each time it happened before,” Robinson said.
Generational memory, as Robinson defines it, is “how history affects generations…[where] we find solutions to problems that already exist somewhere.” She explained how past generations' wisdom could be applied to today, using education as an example. How can we fix the problems of poverty and segregation facing our education system, except by looking to where those problems originated?
Still, Robinson said, sometimes it seems like we can’t use memory to solve everything. However, she said: “When the two poles are pulling and my memories are at odds, I realize they both are part of me, so I can’t go wrong.”
These and the four other speakers taught the audience about lost and found through the diverse lenses of racism, creativity, politics, and more, helping to realize a wonderful event in the process.
The TEDxMiddlebury board hopes the community takes with them these lessons about what it means to be lost and found:
“[Lost and Found] makes space for both grief and joy, fate and intention, exile and belonging, context and abstraction. Most of all, it asks that we rethink our narratives of time and progress as we navigate our individual and collective past, present, and future.”
(05/11/17 1:56am)
At 8 p.m. on Saturday, May 5, the lights in Wilson Hall dimmed abruptly, leaving only the iridescent light of hundreds of glow sticks and a few phones waving wildly in the air above the crowd. So the much-anticipated inaugural Korean Culture Show, a night of passionate singing and dancing, opened to a full house.
Lydia Kim ’17, one of the leaders of the show, was inspired particularly by a K-pop performance in last semester’s International Students’ Organization (ISO) yearly global culture show. After seeing the popularity of the K-pop act in the ISO show, she decided she wanted to create a show that focused solely on Korean Culture.
“I was both surprised and amazed to find out that 1) not a single dancer was Korean, 2) there were so many non-Koreans who knew about K-pop and 3) such a wild crowd reaction was given to a cultural experience that I thought was so distant from Middlebury,” Kim said.
Indeed, Middlebury students appear to be extremely excited about Korean culture. As early as half an hour before the show began, a line already formed outside the doors of Wilson Social Space. Once the show started, the auditorium rang with near constant screams of approval from the audience.
The show featured more than 60 singers and dancers, 15 percent of whom are ethnically Korean, performing instrumental, K-pop and norebang (a type of Korean karaoke) songs. It was important to the show’s leaders that the show present a range of different aspects of Korean culture.
“There was traditional music, we had a bunch of norebang pieces (which don’t categorize as K-pop), the MCs dressed up in hanbok (traditional dress)," Kim said.
There was also a speech about the Sewol ferry incident, in which high school students passed away in the sinking of the Sewol ferry due to the corruption of the South Korean government. According to Kim, understanding this incident is crucial to understanding contemporary South Korean society and culture.
“We all came up with a list of songs together, choosing the most iconic dances and the most fun songs, and we tried to keep in mind the different eras of Korean pop music,” Shannia Fu ’17, another leader of the show, said.
“Honestly, we started with a list of maybe 30 songs or bands, and we tried to narrow it down to around 10, on top of the traditional instrumental music and the noraebang style singing.”
Some highlights included a dance to the newly-debuted K-pop girl group BLACKPINK’s Boombayah with Carissa Lee ’19, Nathan Nguyen ’19, Emily Han ’20 and Lia Yeh ’20; “Unconditional,” a norebang love song performed by Michelle Hwang ’19; and “Lovers,” performed instrumentally by Fu on piano, Jingchen Jiang ’18 on guzheng and Subin Cho ’19 on haegeum.
The show was wildly successful, opening to a full house, and received “a ton of positive feedback,” Kim said. But she stressed that it was not at all easy to organize.
“We literally put on the show without having had any affiliation to an official organization. None of us had much of any experience putting on a show, and we didn’t even know where to begin,” she said. “We had to persuade our sponsors to trust us. We had to put in an insane amount of time and effort to organize 20 acts and 60+ people for an event we didn’t even know was going to attract attention. We had to put our faith in something that had no precedence at this school, and just go for it.”
The leadership board also had difficulty finding support for the show because there is currently no Korean department at Middlebury. Kim hopes that will change in the near future.
“There is no undergraduate Korean department at Middlebury, there are no faculty who teach Korea-related topics, we don’t have much student organization support and we only have a nascent Korean alumni community,” she said. “This event, and the people who organized it, literally had to spring out of nowhere.”
The show received support from the Middlebury School of Korean, the Department of Chinese, the Department of Japanese, the Department of Music and the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs.
Kim and the rest of the show’s leadership board are very invested in widening the scope of influence of Korean culture on campus. The board is among those who recently initiated Korean language tables in Proctor, and they are hoping the college will start offering Korean classes. Fu hopes that the show has helped those efforts to bring more Korean influence onto campus.
“We want the Middlebury community to be aware of this culture that might not be as prevalent around campus,” Fu said. “A small but loud group has also been trying to get a Korean department installed here at Middlebury, so by having so many people show up and display interest in any kind of Korean culture, we wanted to show the administration that there is a genuine desire for a Korean language program.”
Though most of the leadership board for this year’s show will have graduated or will be abroad next year, Kim and Fu are confident the show will continue in the future, and perhaps become an annual event. Given the great success the show has enjoyed this year, it seems likely that interest for Korean culture will only continue to increase on campus.
Correction: an earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to the Sewol ferry incident as a Korean drama reference.
(04/21/17 3:49am)
The Latinx Project (www.thelatinxproject.com), an interactive website created by Robert Zarate-Morales ’17, was recently launched as a part of the Middlebury Fellowship for Thought Leadership.
The website aims to explore the diversity of Latinx experiences on campus, and features writing and art pieces submitted by members of the Middlebury College community.
The fellowship was sent out in the fall as an opportunity for juniors and seniors to delve into conversations that were often uncomfortable and taboo — things like diversity, inclusivity, identity, and privilege — and to use those to inspire change on campus.
The fellowship is “a semester-long experience where juniors and seniors convene three times over the course of the year to develop the skills to emerge as a thought leader and public voice,” according to Dr. Dena Simmons ’05, the director of education at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and the leader of the fellowship.
Thought leadership is about “being conscientious about the way you lead, and not just taking the reigns but also trying to use the voices of many to guide the direction in which you go,” ZarateMorales said.
After the semester is over, the fellows culminate their experience in a final project. The 15 fellows have chosen to present through a diverse array of mediums, such as speeches, op-eds and performances.
As his final project, Zarate-Morales launched the Latinx Project website to explore the topics he studied throughout the fellowship through the lens of Latinx voices on campus.
Zarate-Morales got the idea of a website because Latinx voices are historically underrepresented in the digital world, and the Latinx Project is a platform he hopes Latinx students will feel comfortable using to share their experiences.
“I thought that creating a virtual platform would allow these voices to be heard a little more, and be more visible in the digital world,” Zarate-Morales said. “The fellowship explored many different ways the fellows could make their voices and experiences heard, and the Internet is, especially today, a major factor in social visibility.”
Simmons agreed on the importance of focusing on social media platforms.
“Social media platforms are important today because, in many ways, it is how many communicate, stay in touch and learn what is happening in the world,” she said. “We saw from the Black Lives Matter movement, Arab Spring and the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline the power of social media. Yes, there are ways these platforms could be abused, but they can also do good — and we will focus on that!”
The website launched on April 15, Easter Sunday, in conjunction with the final day of the holy week that many Spanishspeaking countries celebrate. Zarate-Morales chose this date, which he believed would allow Latinx students of many different backgrounds to feel included.
For Zarate-Morales, inclusivity was a major goal throughout the process.
“I want [the website] to be used to connect Latinx and Hispanic voices within the Middlebury community, and outside Middlebury,” he said. “It’s also for people who don’t identify with that social group to learn more about it. It’s really for everyone”
Zarate-Morales plans on updating his website regularly with new articles and images from campus contributors, and resources like names of books and movies for people to learn more about Latinx and Hispanic culture both at the College and in the world at large.
One entry featured right now, written by Ricardo Rosales-Mesta ’19, tells the story of a young Colombian boy, Moctezuma, making the difficult journey to the U.S. alone to live with his aunt.
Zarate-Morales said that he encourages people to read and try to relate to, or challenge, these stories.
“It’s all about connection, and engagement,” he said.
Connection and engagement with challenging topics is a major goal of the fellowship as a whole. Simmons described how the projects can help the campus broach sometimes uncomfortable topics.
“Oftentimes, we end up living in the culture of nice instead of the culture of authenticity,” she said. “When we live in the space of just being nice, we fear pushing others to grow or to question problematic actions and statements because we fear unsettling the niceness. I think the projects have the potential to push people to the space of authentic and empathetic expression, conversations and actions.”
Such an idea comes at a pertinent time on campus.
“After the Charles Murray event, so many of my fellows wanted to act right away to combat the single narrative of the event and the us/them dichotomy that the media — on and off campus — perpetuated,” Simmons said. “The fellowship, in many ways, created space for students not only to discuss power and privilege and the problematic and assaultive events on campus and beyond, but also to act to combat them.”
Simmons believes Zarate-Morales’ website addresses the fellowship’s goals of fostering inclusivity and diversity by giving voice to often silenced groups on campus.
“[Zarate-Morales]’s website aims to provide a space and platform for the Latinx community to share their lives and experiences and to connect with each other,” Simmons said. “There is power in sharing out stories; stories connect and humanize us, and this website has that potential.”
The fellowship may be coming to a close, but Simmons hopes the fellows will carry their projects beyond the scope of the fellowship and continue to affect change on and off campus.
“[Zarate-Morales]’s website will first start with the voices of other Latinx students on campus but his hope is for it to live beyond Middlebury — and beyond the fellowship,” Simmons said. “His website amplifies voices that are often silenced and reduced to stereotypical depictions. It gives power to people by having them tell their own stories, disrupting the many single narratives that exist about groups of people.”
Zarate-Morales hopes the Middlebury community will use www.thelatinxproject.com to learn about the diverse array of Latinx experiences on campus, and encourages anybody to share their own stories.