THE AMHERST
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVI, ISSUE 7 l WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2016
Women’s Soccer Hopes to Ride Momentum Into Playoffs See Sports, Page 11 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU
Journalist Speaks on Rural Inequality in India Kathleen Maeder ’20 Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of Takudzwa Tapfuma‘17
Students decorate mason jars as part of a self-care and contraceptive awareness crafts event in the Women’s and Gender Center on Friday, Oct. 21.
WGC Holds Reproductive Justice Week Jingwen Zhang ’18 Managing News Editor The Women’s and Gender Center is holding “Reproductive Justice Week,” a series of events aimed toward raising awareness on campus about women’s reproductive health issues, from Thursday, Oct. 20 to Wednesday, Oct. 26. Samantha O’Brien ’18, a student staff member at the WGC and one of the event series’ coordinators, said that the week’s focus was on educating students about subjects such as abortion and exploring the intersectionality of women’s rights with other forms of social justice. “Reproductive justice is the concept of the intersectional framework for all forms of social justice needs being met,” O’Brien said, citing economic, LGBT, racial, criminal reform and immigration justice as necessary for increasing access to reproductive care. The idea to have a week of events focused on reproductive justice came from Jesse Beal, the director of the WGC, according to O’Brien. “Within my first two weeks here, there were a group of women in the WGC talking about
how they did not know what they would do if they got pregnant,” Beal said, adding that these students were unaware of resources offered by the college or by their health insurance plans. “I’ve worked in other women’s centers, and that has always been a key part of women’s center programming.” Beal also emphasized that “Reproductive Justice Week” was largely driven by students such as O’Brien, Carolina Vergara ’18 and Jessica Maposa ’17. The week began with a screening of “Trapped,” a documentary about ways in which states’ laws that regulate abortion clinics affect abortion providers. The next day, the center held a crafts event for students to decorate mason jars and learn about self-care. On Monday, Naomi Aberly ’85 gave a talk about reproductive justice on a policymaking level as part of the “AmHERst Alumnae Series.” Aberly, an activist focusing on women’s health policy, spoke about her work in gaining political support for such policies. The Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning and Alumni and Parent Programs co-sponsored the event.
The WGC partnered with La Causa, a student organization focused on raising awareness of Latinx issues, and student-run public health group Project Salud for a talk on Tuesday by Lynn Morgan, a professor of anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. The event, titled “Health Disparities: Access and Women’s Health in Latinx Communities,” followed the theme of intersectionality and centered on the barriers to healthcare access, particularly reproductive health, that women in Latinx communities have traditionally faced. The final event, “Grab and Don’t Go: Reproductive Justice is Racial Justice,” will focus on the ways in which racial and reproductive justice intersect, including topics such as the prison-industrial complex and child welfare. It will be held in the Multicultural Resource Center on Wednesday. In an email interview, Chelsea Pan ’18 said that the events in “Reproductive Justice Week” were starting conversations that have rarely taken place previously and are “especially important,” given the upcoming elections in No-
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Award-winning Indian journalist Palagummi Sainath gave a talk titled “Inequality and the Rise of Rural Distress” on Oct. 19. The event, held in Fayerweather Hall, focused on the growth of economic inequality in rural areas of India, as well as the social implications of these trends. The talk was free and open to the public. Sainath was introduced by Professor of Political Science Amrita Basu, who mentioned Sainath’s 40 national and international awards and his professorship at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, India. Sainath first spoke about his early work in journalism. Prior to focusing on rural inequality, Sainath worked to uncover the trend of suicides among farmers in the countryside in India. According to Sainath, over 300,000 Indian farmers died by suicide between 1995 and 2014. During the investigation, Sainath began to note the increase in inequality throughout rural India, particularly in relation to the use of water. He discussed several examples of this unequal water distribution, showing images of the luxurious apartment buildings in Mumbai and Chennai, including one that featured personal balcony pools for each resident. “Not very far from all these buildings are how ordinary Indians actually get their water,” said Sainath, referencing the routines of much of the rural poor, who often devote hours of their day to obtaining water from various public wells. Sainath went on to discuss statistics on economic inequality in India. According to Sainath, the top 1 percent of Indians own 53 percent of the wealth, compared to 37 percent in the United States. While Sainath acknowledged that India is not the most unequal country in the world and that “South Africa is far more unequal,” he said it is important to look at trends in context. “Brazil is more unequal, [but] it has been improving its condition,” Sainath said. “In India, it is the other way around — inequality has grown. Between 2000 and 2015 … in no country in the world did inequality grow faster than it did in India.”
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AAS Partners with TurboVote to Help Register Voters Shawna Chen ’20 Managing News Editor The Amherst Association of Students partnered with TurboVote this year to help students register to vote in the general election, holding a “Get Out the Vote” drive spanning from the last two weeks of September to the third week of October. TurboVote is a nonprofit startup company that facilitates the registration and voting process for U.S. citizens. The TurboVote drive was inspired by a similar AAS-sponsored voter registration drive in 2012, said AAS Chief of Staff Paul Gramieri ’17. Over the summer, AAS President Karen Blake ’17 proposed the option of working with TurboVote again to the senate.
“After some discussion, we were able to partner with [President Biddy Martin’s] office and Student Activities,” Gramieri said in an email interview. “This was also a good opportunity for the AAS to provide an important service to students, as opposed to the college offering this service, since we were all elected to represent the students and their interests as it pertains to being a citizen of this college and a resident of our democracy.” According to Blake, working with TurboVote was “fairly simple.” Through the partnership, TurboVote provided a personalized collegiate link as well as access to data analytics collected by the site. “The service is comprehensive and streamlined, which made the registration process for students quick and easy,” Blake said in an
email interview. “The mission of TurboVote is general voter education. Therefore, even those who are not eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election can sign up for email or text alerts on [local or state] voting laws and elections in which they are eligible. In this way, the service is more inclusive than other providers.” To promote this service, AAS tabled in Valentine Hall during dinner every Monday, Wednesday and Friday over the four weeks of the drive. Gramieri said that members of the Amherst Political Union, Amherst College Republicans, Amherst College Democrats and other affinity groups were also invited to table with senators. Both Gramieri and Blake called the event a success. According to Blake, the drive enabled
AAS to help 258 students — nearly 16 percent of the student body — either register to vote or request an absentee ballot. “Even those students who did not utilize TurboVote informed us that the tabling reminded them to take the necessary steps to [ensure] that they were eligible to vote,” Blake said. “Additionally, it was successful in that we were able to partner with other campus offices and student organizations, which is a huge goal this year for the AAS.” Though Gramieri acknowledged that AAS could have publicized the event by organizing more activities around the election, “Even registering one more person to vote would have been a success, since that’s one more person whose voice would have been heard during our elections,” he said.