Issue 9

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THE AMHERST

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

STUDENT VOLUME CXLVII, ISSUE 9 l WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2017

Football Hands Trinity Its First Loss See Sports, Page 12 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU

‘Being Human in STEM’ Expands Focus Kathleen Maeder ’20 Staff Writer

Photo courtesy of Alura Chung-Mehdi ’18

National Humanities Medal recipient Kwame Anthony Appiah gave a lecture on Thursday, Nov. 2, about frameworks for conceptualizing race, culture and class.

Philosophy Professor Examines Identity in Talk Natalie De Rosa ’21 Staff Writer Award-winning professor and author Kwame Anthony Appiah gave a talk titled “How to Not Think About Race, Culture and Class” on Thursday, Nov. 2, in Stirn Auditorium, during which he discussed the origins of perceptions of race, culture and class and offered an alternative lens. Appiah is a professor of law and philosophy at New York University and has previously taught at institutions such as Cornell, Harvard, Yale and Princeton. He has pub-

lished several books, including “In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture,” “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers” and “The Ethics of Identity.” In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Appiah the National Humanities Medal for “seeking eternal truths in the contemporary world,” according to the official citation for the award. Appiah began his talk by examining the racial constructs of the mid-19th century when the debate on slavery intensified. He presented an initial perspective on race: “That all of us carry within us something that

belongs to the race to which we belong.” According to Appiah, this ideology became the moral justification for slavery. Appiah defined this interpretation of race as racial fixation and compared it to the typological assumption that “everyone was a representative of a racial type.” However, he notes that biological similarities do not fixate things like taste in music or poetry. Building on this premise, Appiah transitioned into discussing the concept of culture, which he said is comprised of ideas that

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The student-led “Being Human in STEM” (HSTEM) program, which was developed to promote discussion and research on inclusiveness as well as the role of personal identities and diversity within the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, will offer a course for students in Spring 2018. The program’s pilot course, held in the spring of 2016, was designed as a special topics course with its roots in the Amherst Uprising movement of November 2015, according to Megan Lyster, the current assistant director of the innovation and experiential learning program in the Center for Community Engagement and a co-facilitator of the course. Amherst Uprising was a student-led sit-in that aimed to raise awareness of and seek action against white supremacy at Amherst and other institutions across the U.S. Iterations of the course have been offered as a Special Topics every semester since spring of 2016. The Spring 2018 course will be the first time it is offered to the larger student body. Lyster said the class began with Sheila Jaswal, the other co-instructor for the course and an associate professor in the chemistry department and the biophysics and biochemistry program. Jaswal had reached out to Amherst Uprising organizers to discuss how staff and faculty members in the STEM departments could better support students, according to Lyster, which led to the first version of “Being Human in STEM.” The original course was relatively small with only nine enrolled students, though it was well-received by those involved, Lyster said. “To this day, I feel like ‘Being Human in STEM’ has been one of the most fulfilling classes I have taken at Amherst,” said Ruth Manzanares ’18, who enrolled in the first itera-

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‘Talk Back’ Series Explores Gender-Related Topics Eddie Rego ’19 Staff Writer The Women’s and Gender Center (WGC) has just implemented its “Talk Back” program after a pilot last year. The program is an informal and student-run series of dialogues focusing on contemporary topics in pop culture and current events that are related to gender. WGC staff host one Talk Back each semester and can co-lead the program with another WGC staffer or with someone from another resource center. The most recent talk, titled “Trans Identity and Recent Events,” was held last Thursday Nov. 2 in the WGC in Keefe Campus Center. The WGC is a resource center under the auspices of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion that creates a space for learning about and exploring gender personally and through community, according to its website. The Talk Back series aims to address prevalent topics pertaining to the needs of the WGC community, again according to the WGC website.

The focus of each talk varies — from President Donald Trump’s recent ban of transgender people from the military to the “#MeToo” social media campaign. Director of the WGC Jesse Beal said the Talk Backs serve “to provide a space for students to engage with what is happening in the world.” The WGC, Beal added, hopes to create an open place in which students can “process their own thoughts or feelings with other students.” During Talk Back events, facilitators ask questions and foster dialogue among students. The structure of the Talk Back changes depending on which staff member is facilitating, according to WGC Program Coordinator SabriAnan Micha ’19. Last week’s dialogue was led by Micha and Theo Peierls ’20E, another program coordinator. Micha and Peierls chose to structure the conversation by handing out two articles that speak about transgender issues and then asking questions based on the articles. Students discussed Trump’s military ban on transgender soldiers serving in the armed forces as well as revisions to Title VII, a federal

law that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin and religion, and job discrimination against trans and non-binary people in the workplace. The first article handed out was “Trans Liberation, Not U.S. Militarism: Selective Outrage Over Trans Military Ban Obscures Larger Failures to Support Trans Communities,” which was published on Medium. Regarding this article, students discussed the job discrimination revision and its effects on trans and non-binary people. The second article, titled “In Shift, Justice Dept. Says Law Doesn’t Bar Transgender Discrimination” and published in The New York Times, sparked conversation on the transgender military ban, the “common sense” or logic which facilitates these policies, trans health care and access to healthcare and the value of trans bodies in the eyes of the state. One particular focus of the discussion concerned comments by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who said Title VII protects against sexual discrimination in the workplace but does

not include discrimination based on gender identity or expression. Conversations also centered around topics such as laws targeting transgender individuals and the unique experiences and issues pertaining to the treatment and worth of transgender lives in the current society. Through the series, Micha added, the WGC hopes to foster “critical conversations about gender and intersectionality.” The WGC website described the talks as “dialogue-based programs that support critical community conversations.” More broadly, the talks serve to help analyze, in a group setting, the broader forces which work to constrain lives based on gender or gender identity, Beal said. The title of the series also serves as a play on words: in the talks, the students and facilitators often “talk back” — at once telling their truth while simultaneously “talking back to” or critiquing systems of oppression, said Beal. Another goal, Beal added, is to provide “an opportunity for student leaders to develop their facilitation skills by leading dialogue-based programs.”


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