E. G A VOY
TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 DISTANCE AND DISCONNECT 16 PETITIONING AND PUSHING BACK FEATURE • BY CLARA DAVIS
6 TROUBLE IN SHU-VILLE
OPINION • BY CONNOLLY FERRARO
8 RALLENTANDO
VOICES • BY LINDA KEBICHI
10 MATERIALS, OBJECTS, AND MEANINGS OF ART ARTS & CULTURE • BY JOY MAINA
CAMPUS • BY SABAH LOKHANDWALA AND GRACIE THEOBALD-WILLIAMS
18 FALSE GODS
POETRY • BY SPENCER VERNIER
19 QUESTIONING CONNECTION CAMPUS • BY CHLOE MALLEY
22 LOVE MEET SYSTEMS COLLAPSE
ARTS AND CULTURE • BY ELOISE VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
13 MAXIM’S I 24 THE SOCIAL DILEMMA CONTINUES
POETRY• BY AKBOTA SAUDABAYEVA
NEWS • BY ELEANOR FUCETOLA
14 CREATIVE INSET
26 VOYAGE INTO THE ABYSS
CREATIVE INSET • BY EVELYN ABRAMOWITZ
VOICES • BY ISABELLE CHARLES
VOYAGE
We journey through frosted glass and foggy warmth. We yearn in our voyages, for missed opportunities, and the reclamation of lost moments. The world doesn’t wait. At the pinnacle point of exploration, we choose to trudge on to our next adventures and meld the memories again.
STAFF EDITOR IN CHIEF: Josie Wagner
POETRY & PROSE EDITOR: Isabelle Charles
MANAGING EDITOR: Amanda Westlake
VOICES EDITORS: Rachel Dong Ryan Kim
EDITOR EMERITUS: Akbota Saudabayeva CREATIVE DIRECTORS: Brenna Trollinger Sofia Pretell FEATURE EDITORS: Aroha Mackay Juanita Asapokhai NEWS EDITORS: Chloe Malley Sabah Lokhandwala
CREATIVE INSET EDITOR: Evelyn Abramowitz ART DIRECTORS: Kate Bowers Kelly Tan LEAD ARTIST: Madeleine Oh LEAD COPY EDITOR: Grace Abe
MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR: ARTS & CULTURE EDITORS: Unnathy Nellutla Melanie Litwin Sabrina Cabarcos PODCAST DIRECTORS: Caitlin Duffy OPINION EDITORS: Suhasini Mehra Claudia Aibel Edith Philip PUBLICITY DIRECTOR: Janie Ingrassia CAMPUS EDITORS: Rabiya Ismail Mira Dwyer
STAFF WRITERS: Lee Romaker Eleanor Fucetola Gracie Theobald-Williams Silvia Wang Anica Zulch Emara Saez Audrey Ledbetter PUBLICITY TEAM: Paola Ruiz Millie Todd Sophie Fishman STAFF ARTISTS: Brigid Cawley Aidan Chang Anna Cornish Christina Ma D Gateño Emmeline Meyers Misha Mehta DESIGNERS: Carina Lo Julia Steiner Kate Bowers Tara Steckler Emma Davis Bao Lu Joanna Kleszczewski
DESIGN BY JOHN BRENNA DOE, TROLLINGER. ART BY JANE FRONT DOE AND BACK COVER DESIGN BY SOFIA PRETELL
COPY EDITORS: Marco Pretell Hannah Schulman Shira Ben-Ami Eden Weissman William Zhuang Meghan Smith MULTIMEDIA TEAM: Linda Kebichi Jasmine Chang PODCAST TEAM: Hanna Bregman Jaden Shemesh Jillian Yum Alexis Enderle Silvia Wang Grace Masiello Browyn Legg Noah DeYoung Gayatri Kalra Julio Dominguez CONTRIBUTORS: Claudia Aranda Joy Maina Spencer Vernier Eloise Vaughan Williams Connolly Ferraro Clara Davis
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D I SS FTINAE ANRTSCSETUDEANTNS EDXPR D I S C O N N E TUFT
ESS CON
CERN A
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B O U T L G B TQ + S U P P O RT By Clara Davis
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his year’s National Coming Out Day on October 11 marked the beginning of Out and Proud Week at Tufts, with events at both the LGBT Center and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Fenway campus. These joint celebrations are an attempt to bridge connections between LGBTQ+ SMFA students and the Medford/Somerville campus. At present, Tufts is listed as one of the most LGBTQ-friendly schools in the country, making it an appealing choice for LGBTQ+ students. In 2016, the university acquired the SMFA, bringing even more LGBTQ+ students into the community. According to joel gutierrez, the program administrator of the Tufts LGBT Center, the rankings are based on the amount of LGBTQ+ support resources the university offers, but can fail to account for whether the programs are actually effective. “Those rankings don’t necessarily mean anything,” gutierrez said. “I think you really have to look at what’s actually happening on the campus.” Despite its high ranking, five years after the merger, SMFA students are saying that more needs to be done to make both the Medford/Somerville and the SMFA campus more supportive of LGBTQ+ art students. Currently, the main avenue of support for LGBTQ+ SMFA students lies in the LGBTQ+ population on the SMFA campus. While Tufts does not collect demographic information on students’ sexual orientation or gender identities, SMFA students say that there is a large community of LGBTQ+ students, faculty, and studio managers. “In my dorm at least, I feel like there’s a lot of LGBTQ+ students. So I immediately felt like I wasn’t gonna stick out,” said first-year Bachelor of Fine Arts student Michael Tsiakalis-Brown, who lives in the SMFA Beacon Street dorms. Tsiakalis-Brown is also enrolled in the SMFA studio class Flora and Fauna, taught by part-time lecturer Ria Brodell, who is nonbinary. “I feel so comfortable in their class which is really nice,” Tsiakalis-Brown said. “[The amount of LGBTQ+ students at SMFA] is really empowering and nice to see. It’s a very safe space, where I feel like I can just have my art and ‘LGBT’ isn’t the first thing that’s thought of it, because there’s so many LGBT people in that space,” said
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SMFA Student Government Association President Kim Tran, who is a third-year in the dual degree program. “I’m in more of a heteronormative space predominantly at Medford, whereas [at] SMFA It’s like, ‘Oh, you just like happen to be LGBT, and you make awesome art,’” said Tran. Ira Craig, a fifth-year combined degree student, said over email, “There [is] something to the fact that there are so many queer artists who came before us, and that art is one of the few places where it is relatively safe to express queerness.” LGBTQ+ issues are also brought into the classroom explicitly in classes like Queer Studies Studio, which is currently being taught virtually by part-time lecturer Betsy Redelman Díaz. According to Díaz, who responded to questions over email, the class begins with an opportunity for students to check in with each other, listen to the class’ collaborative playlist, and respond to art prompts. “One [prompt] from a few weeks ago was ‘draw the Queer Future you want to live in.’ It sounds simple, but these rituals help us to recenter and come into this communal queer space together,” Díaz said. The rest of the class consists of time to discuss readings or videos relating to various intersections with queerness, followed by studio time to process those ideas. Díaz says that sitting with Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and POC-centered queer theory for an extended period of time offers her students the “opportunity to engage in a prolonged practice of self-reflection within
FEATURE
the context of a supportive queer community, which [Díaz thinks] is a special combination for an artist. Making art from that space of supported vulnerability is a powerful thing.” However, not all classes at SMFA allow for this deep discussion of queerness in art. In critique settings—where students show work and get feedback from the class—some students have had mixed experiences. “I have kind of walked away from [some critiques] wishing that I just had opted not
DESIGN BY BAO LU, ART BY MADDIE OH
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FEATURE
to [put the piece up for critique],” Craig said in an interview. “As accepting an environment as Tufts and SMFA report themselves to be, the fact of the matter is that presenting queer work to a roomful of people who are not queer [is] probably not gonna go over well, and they’re not going to get it the way that you hoped.” In addition to their experiences with critiques, both Craig and Tsiakalis-Brown mentioned being misgendered in class, despite the culture around sharing pronouns at the SMFA and Tufts. “I got misgendered by this woman during a [critique]—fine, she’s like 75,” Craig said, “[but] she had us all write our pronouns on our name tags that day, [so] I was wearing my pronouns.” According to Craig, the administration’s response to LGBTQ+ student artwork has not been entirely supportive. Craig worked with the LGBT Center on the Trans Day of Remembrance show in 2018, which was supposed to be exhibited on the SMFA campus as well as on the main Tufts campus. The piece was a memorial to the 24 trans people who were killed that year. “It was up for three days,” Craig said. “[The SMFA administration said] you have to take it down because the sculpture show [was] going up and the sculpture show didn’t open for another week. So it was weird.” In an email to the Tufts Observer, Patrick Collins, the executive director of public relations, wrote that “the re-
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quest for the Trans Day of Remembrance show was submitted after the year’s schedule had been set, but [Tufts University Art Galleries] worked to secure time and space to enable the show to proceed. Unfortunately, the show could not run as long as we might have hoped due to the space having been booked previously for another exhibition. According to Collins, the TDOR show, which is an ongoing collaboration between the LGBT Center, Chaplaincy, and SMFA Student Affairs, has since been featured in the Terrace Gallery at the SMFA as well as on the Medford/Somerville campus. This disconnect between Tufts’ reputation as a toptier LGBTQ-friendly campus and the mixed experiences of LGBTQ+ students is even more pronounced on the Medford/Somerville campus. Tsiakalis-Brown, who has no classes on the Medford/Somerville campus this semester, also felt that there was a hostile attitude towards LGBTQ+ artists on the Medford/Somerville campus. “I… overheard some really weird comments,” TsiakalisBrown said, “from [presumably a] Medford student, where they were like, ‘All the guys at SMFA are so well dressed and then the girls aren’t and it just felt so gross to me. It felt homophobic and misogynistic.” “Queer folks are definitely more comfortable at SMFA in terms of visual expression,” Craig noted. They went on to describe a series of eggings at
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the Crafts House, where some SMFA students live on the Medford/Somerville campus. Many residents of the Crafts House at the time were LGBTQ+ students, and several residents were students of color as well. “We wouldn’t go out during homecoming because every year on homecoming, someone from Crafts House got egged,” Craig said. While the Office of Equal Opportunity encourages students to report incidents like this, Craig said that the residents did not bring the matter to the OEO, because it is “notorious for not doing anything on cases that it’s brought regardless of what the paperwork says”. In response to student concerns about inaction preventing them from reaching out to the Office, Executive Director and Title IX Coordinator of the OEO Jill Zelmer, commented over email that “Much of OEO’s work is confidential and actions that it takes often cannot be communicated to the community for privacy reasons, which might lead to erroneous impressions about the office’s activity and impact.” Further, Zelmer said, “We would like to know more about the incidents so we can provide students with support, try to determine who is targeting them, and take appropriate action in response. That’s why it’s important for students to report these incidents.” In addition to the hostile environment, Craig feels that the quality of discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom also varies on the Medford/Somerville campus. Craig mentioned that they have noticed an increase in classes being offered at Tufts that explicitly focus on queerness. However, Craig found the more explicitly queer-focused classes they had taken at the ExCollege to be lacking in depth. For example, in a peer-led class on gender and sexual minority health at the ExCollege, Craig said they were expected to “teach the class about how gay people have sex with each other.” According to Craig, another course failed to take into account the experiences of anyone in the LGBTQ+ community besides cisgender white men. Outside of academic settings, the Tufts administration supports LGBTQ+ students through the LGBT Center. “The Senior Director supports LGBTQ+ students in an outward-facing way by making sure Tufts’ policies and protections trickles down to the practice—practice meaning encounters that LGBTQ+ students face daily with staff, faculty, and other students,” Senior Director of the LGBT Center Hope Freeman said over email. “This looks like common use names being accurately viewed in the electronic systems and on rosters as well as pronouns being prominently displayed and respectfully used.” Despite the administration’s efforts, the physical distance between the two campuses presents a challenge for LGBTQ+ SMFA students. “Especially now, having been back in person, there just needs to be a lot more resources for SMFA students,” gutierrez said. “What I really want to see is more support in general for SMFA students that aren’t [able to] travel all the way to Medford to access those resources, because [the distance] makes it super inaccessible.” Currently, it can be difficult for SMFA students to access the LGBT Center because its office hours occur when many students DESIGN BY BAO LU, ART BY MADDIE OH
have class. In addition, having to commute between the campuses results in a lack of awareness that the Medford-based LGBT Center is a resource for SMFA students as well. “Part of [addressing] that [challenge] is being present on the campus, but also inviting folks here, when they can be here,” gutierrez said. Joint programming appears to be a solution to some of the difficulties and disconnect felt by LGBTQ+ SMFA students. “Some of my favorite programming is for National Coming Out Day,” said Tran, who worked on the event. “It was a really great time to come together as a community, and I really appreciated it.”
“There [is] something to the fact that there are so many queer artists who came before us, and that art is one of the few places where it is relatively safe to express queerness.” As the combined degree program expands, and enrollment at the SMFA increases, more LGBTQ+ SMFA students—and their artwork—will be found on Medford/Somerville campus. “I think that the student body being inundated with more people who are interested in the arts and passionate about making and doing and community… [i]s a wonderful thing,” Craig said. “There’s potential for Tufts culture to change but I think that it’s not going to be fast.” This year’s TDOR show will open at the SMFA on November 18th, two days before TDOR, before traveling to Medford/ Somerville later in the winter. In addition, gutierrez shared that the LGBT Center hopes to bring more artwork from trans students to the campus, perhaps for a Trans Day of Visibility show on a smaller scale than the Trans Day of Remembrance exhibit. Díaz believes that art can be a valuable tool to enact a change in culture. “I think good art queers the world in some way,” Díaz wrote in an email to the Tufts Observer. “The verb “to queer” is a technique used in queer theory to challenge heteronormativity through the troubling of identity binaries [like] gender, sexuality, masculinity, femininity as well as identity politics and systems of oppression more broadly… Queering is a lens that can be used to problematize, to subvert, to push boundaries, which to me is the same thing that good art does.”
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OPINION
TROUBLE IN SHU-VILLE By Connolly Ferraro
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HUs. Love them, hate them, or (most likely) hardly think about them. But for many Tufts students, SHUs have taken on the lurking appearance of a roadblock to graduation. The SHU system at Tufts is not functioning as it should and can be a significant educational and emotional stressor. The metric that Tufts uses to assign SHUs to classes frequently undervalues the time requirement for elective courses, creating a situation where to graduate on time, students in some majors must take upwards of five classes per semester, enroll in 6 TUFTS OBSERVER NOVEMBER 8, 2021
unnecessary seminar or capstone courses, or take summer classes. These options simply might not be on the table for students with internships, non-accredited extracurriculars, or those who need to work to support themselves or their family. In 2018, Tufts transitioned from a one credit per course valuation to a qualified system where each class is weighted differently and “instruction time and homework time are taken into account.” According to the Tufts administration, the change was made to bring the university
more in line with national standards of credit accounting, to simplify the application process to graduate schools for Tufts undergraduates, and to make it easier to understand the time commitment for each class. Tufts defines one SHU as “one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week”. Under the old credit system, Tufts School of Arts and Sciences students were required to complete 34 courses over the course of eight semesters in order to
THE REALITY OF CLASS TIME COMMITMENTS IS SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT ACADEMIC FACULTY IN BALLOU BELIEVE IT TO BE.
graduate, equating to 4.25 classes per semester. Under the current SHU system, liberal arts and engineering students are required to complete 120 SHUs to graduate, or 15 SHUs per semester. If one were to take only courses worth three SHUs (which Tufts admits represents the majority of their classes) students would have to take five classes per semester in order to graduate on time. Even if one were to take a course load of two classes worth three SHUs and two classes worth four SHUs every semester (a fairly difficult course load for some majors) they would still fall short of the 15 SHU per semester average needed to graduate on time. The undervaluing of students’ time commitment is evident in the credit awarded for social science classes. Of the economics classes that were offered this semester, only eight were four SHU classes while the other 30 were two or three SHU classes. For political science classes, there were 12 classes worth four SHUs (four of which were intro classes) and 21 classes worth three SHUs. The breakdown in the International Relations Department was nearly the same. Overwhelmingly, the courses offered in these departments are three SHU options, severely limiting many students’ ability to keep their class load below five classes while still taking enough SHUs to graduate. Not only is this requirement difficult to manage, but of the few classes that are worth four SHUs, many tend to be introductory classes—for instance, Introduction to International Relations, Principles of Economics, and Introduction to Western Political Thought—which begs the question: why are these introductory courses worth more SHUs than nearly all the upper level classes for their respective majors? How can it be that my Islam and Modernity Seminar (that includes a 25+ page research paper requirement) somehow, according to the SHU system, requires a smaller time commitment than Principles of Economics? I have no good answer to
DESIGN BY TARA STECKLER, ART BY MADELEINE OH
those questions. Even as I near completing my majors in International Relations and Economics, I still don’t have close to the amount of SHUs I need to graduate. Because of my involvement in extracurriculars—this year in leadership capacities—I’m only able to take four courses both in the fall and spring semesters. I will most likely need to enroll in summer school classes simply for the extra SHUs. Tufts Academic Advising claims that the recitation requirements of these introductory classes play a role in their four SHU classification. But even Tufts recitation logic standing, anyone who has pursued these majors from introductory classes to upper level classes will say the workload only increases as classes become more advanced. The reality of class time commitments is significantly different from what academic faculty in Ballou believe it to be. The disconnect is real, and it is harmful. For students with significant commitments outside of the classroom, such as non-accredited internships, work, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or any other significant non-credit-bearing time commitments, the current SHU system is a major hurdle. Students may find themselves having completed their major but still have a significant credit deficit. To prevent students from taking on a potentially unmanageable five class course load, on top of any other potential commitments, the SHU system must change. Tufts
OPINION
administration must take concrete steps to reexamine and reassign SHU values based on the actual amount of time, including homework time, required for the course. For this to happen correctly, professor and student input must be sought out. Tufts must increase the value of SHUs for upper level classes or lessen the amount of SHUs needed to graduate. The emphasis for classes should be on learning and completing a degree, not filling up schedules with superfluous classes to fulfill opaque credit requirements. Until then, Tufts will continue to operate a system that creates more difficulties than good.
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VOICES
RALLENTANDO
By Linda Kebichi
This hamster is tired. I’ve been running on this wheel for hours now, hacking away at my to-do list, slowly but surely before the day ends. Under the yellow lights of the Tisch Library reading room, the only sound to be heard is a symphony of syncopated typing as it fills the air with its percussive cacophony. I observe the engravings in the wood along the desk, tracing my fingers over messages from students past, as I continue to neglect the work in front of me. The creak of a door draws my head up from the desk towards the source of the sound. I know that I’m not the only one who’s this hopelessly bored because every time that familiar creaking blares a sea of heads rises to look at the new addition to our reading room. We’re all entertained for a second, but each head eventually falls again, resigning itself back to work. I’ve exhausted almost every distraction I can wring out of this room, and now the hamster wants to leave.
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This hamster wants to be somewhere else, even if it’s just for a few minutes. So I put my earbuds in and listen to “Somewhere” by Hauskey, and I get to escape for two minutes and fifty-one seconds. As the music plays, everything slows down. I’m no longer obsessing over tomorrow or next week or wondering what could be coming next. I’m inside the music, entwined in its rhythm. It moves, and I follow. The lyrics float around in my mind, taking me to a fictional land decorated with green skies and oceans made of ice cream where the sun never sets. Sweet melodies take me somewhere in the distance. Thursday morning rolls around and I’m back in the reading room. Today is almost exactly like yesterday, except the to-do list is different, and now tomorrow is Friday; I can almost see the light. As I flip through my assigned reading, my mind wanders, meditating on thoughts of lunch at Dewick, soft serve, and the exten-
VOICES
sive cereal selection at my disposal. Eventually it finds its way back, and I come to the bitter realization that I’ve absorbed nothing from the past three pages. Why is escapism such an indulgent source of entertainment? I ruminate over this question often. I think those of you who are also goal-oriented and obsessed with agendas and calendars and the control that they give you will understand when I say this: it is entirely disorienting when running on the wheel no longer feels fulfilling, even though it is the life we’ve chosen. We so rarely slow down enough to reflect on what we’re doing this all for. We work hard to get the perfect grades to get into the perfect school and get a perfect job so we can make the money to buy the perfect house with the perfect family and one day retire and finally be able to take a deep breath and say Wow, I’ve made it. That’s the dream, and we’re crazy for it.
WE FANTASIZE OVER THE VIEW AT THE TOP, THE FEELING OF OUR ACHING BODY FINALLY RESTING, BUT WE FORGET TO FEEL THE GROUND BENEATH OUR FEET AND THE SUN ON OUR SKIN AS WE MAKE OUR ASCENT. We’re insane to think that the first time we’ll feel happy, the first time we’ll truly feel at ease, is at 65, when we’ve retired. We see life as this great pilgrimage, where happiness is promised at some indiscriminate point in the future after we’ve achieved a certain level of success or whatever else we’re betting our happiness on. We spend nearly our whole lives on the gamble that happiness— that peace—is going to show up eventually, just as long as we keep doing what we’ve always done. We so firmly believe in that future that most of the time, we’re barely experiencing the moments leading up to that point. Rather than experiencing the climb, we’re constantly thinking about what life will be like at the mountain’s peak. We fantasize over the view at the top, the feeling of our aching body finally resting, but we forget to feel the ground beneath our feet and the sun on our skin as we make our ascent. Haven’t we felt it before? We all know what it’s
DESIGN BY JULIA STEINER, ART BY KELLY TAN
like, working hard to get something, and when we finally do, it feels amazing. It feels fantastic—for a second or two. But then it all quickly fizzles away, and we become fixated on the next thing—happiness gets delayed again, placed at another indiscriminate point in the future, and the cycle repeats itself. Everything is a means to an end. The hamster never stops running. Music deconstructs that notion entirely. It has no end goal. Music is not made so you can hear one culminating, final note ring out that somehow makes the whole song worth it. No, music is made to be enjoyed in its entirety. Every note, the ebb and flow of song, even the rests, are all part of a journey made to be cherished as you experience it in the present moment. Music demands nothing from you except that you allow it to take you on a journey for as long as the song lasts. For a few minutes, you surrender yourself to experience something for no reason—no tangible purpose—other than to hear and to feel, to be affected in a way that doesn’t feed into the criteria and expectations on which we desperately stake the rest of our lives. With music, you can let go. There is no need to be constantly thinking of where things are going to lead because the point of music is not how it ends. There is no final destination, no peak, and no pinnacle for which to look. In music, there is only the now. Music is the way life should be. It should be explored and cherished every step along the way; not just at the peaks where the view is perfect and clear, but also along valleys and winding paths and through thick forests where it is hazy and mazelike. Music isn’t concerned with results, ends, or finales. It champions the very act of experiencing a certain moment in time. It values, more than anything else, the fact of our existence in the present. We often find ourselves looking to music as an escape from the monotony of our daily lives. But I look to music as a way to come home. Because isn’t it so easy, getting lost in our work and the madness of the day-today? And isn’t it so difficult, taking the time to reflect on life, to face the truth? Music brings the mind back to the present, a haven from all the distractions that rip us away from the moments we are currently experiencing. Music takes me on a journey, a journey home, so I can finally stop running and start living.
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ARTS & CULTURE
MATERIALS, OBJECTS, AND MEANINGS OF ART By Joy Maina
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ARTS & CULTURE
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elfie museums are allowing for a deeper experience of truth that is not the museum’s truth, or even the artist’s truth, but your own. Selfie-takers in a museum open up an intimacy with the art, placing themselves as attractive enough to take its center and participate in its esteem. The current generation of youth bravely takes on the museum’s paradox of display through inclination towards witnessing. Dreaming of participation in the large white archive of art, these photos show that art can be what the maker makes it, for better or worse. As culture producers, museums tend to push largely white communities to an engagement that expands both their boundaries of knowledge and their pockets. Junior Ameya Okamoto, a sociology major, said in a recorded message, “Art collecting and curation is honestly gambling where rich people can sit on a lot of fastincreasing money.” For junior Zoe McKeown, a School of the Museum of Fine Arts student turned philosophy major, museums have had a minimal impact on her as a person. Because of her Vietnamese ethnic identity, her existence is not welcome in museums. McKeown said that museums often pose Vietnamese art as if it “used to exist,” communicating that it’s in the past and has no place in the contemporary. Many non-white artists feel, as McKeown describes, that they “don’t exist in the museum space.” Histories of kinships with the photo, the camera, and other mediums have led to the social transformations that leave nonwhite populations in cycles of dependency. In the age of discovery, arguments for the immorality of natives of non-European origin were due to their kinships with the material world. In some cases, this determination provided a basis for the commodification of natural resources and in specific cases, bodies. Although William Pietz, an intellectual historian and political activist, mentions that Europeans saw objects as little more than trifles, and thus not worthy of theological meanings, European travelers
DESIGN BY EMMA DAVIS, ART BY AIDAN CHANG
took hundreds of thousands of pictures of native people between 1885 and 1960 in central Africa alone. These photographs became glorified objects when used as evidence for the rational knowledge and moral power of Europeans. In her critique of African exhibitions, Ruth B. Phillips argues that up until the third-world liberation front, people of color were represented as “distant from and prior to the space and time of Western modernity.”
SUBVERSION AND MASTERY OF THE ART LANDSCAPE EXISTS WITHIN MARGINAL HISTORIES OF INCLUSIVE ART.
Therefore, objects are not merely trifles; rather, they appear as conduits of invasion. Paloma Velasco, a junior film and media studies major, said people of color rarely “get to invade their space back, and I think that’s something that’s always bothered me a lot about photography.” Contemporary artists don’t deny that objects carry meaning or imbue emotional responses. McKeown has a very personal connection with the ceramic pieces that she makes. This ritual of community grows between her and the everyday cups or plates that she forms on the pottery wheel. McKeown said, “In a lot of ways, art is my way of showing love and being one with love.” After pieces go through the intense heat of the kiln, receivers get glimpses of her
physical and artistic self that survive through particles of her skin or hair. Even more of a contradiction is the nonconsensual removal of everyday objects and tools from native communities to exhibition boxes in museums. How can museum-goers have transactional experiences with stolen objects that in their everyday use are seen as unethical? Is art only art due to the spiritual effect it sparks in white populations? Dependency on white patrons gives off vibes of forwardness, progress, and the feeling of finally reaching Oz—whether in a museum structure or outside of it. Even still, subversion and mastery of the art landscape exists within marginal histories of inclusive art. Right across from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston stands a brown structure that housed the Allied Arts Center from 1927 to 1930. The Allied Arts Players were the most influential small Black theatre group in New England during the 1920s. While some activists thought of white-controlled institutions as exclusionary and segregationist, others thought forming relationships with esteemed institutions would help legitimize Black organizations. What made the Allied Arts Players unique was their critique of and refusal to work with white institutions, instead making art that inspired their own communities. Thirdyear Freya Gupta, a psychology and studio art major in the combined degree program, spoke about her own reluctance to appeal to white communities. When her professor insinuated that her work would be hard to understand, Gupta wondered, “For you or for me?” What’s even more complicated is the survivor’s guilt that comes along with what McKeown refers to as being “the artist you never saw.” In fact, Okamoto said a type of payoff matrix presents itself at the intersections of abnormality and progress. With respect to the latter, artists like Audre Lorde and Jean-Michel Basquiat attribute the fruitful start of their careers to artist residencies like The MacDowell Colony and Green-Wood. However, inso-
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ARTS & CULTURE
far as it shows up in their art, readers and audiences rarely get an idea of the trauma and racism that these artists experienced during their stays. In a world where white people are holders of capital and seen as judges of value and normality, the Black Bostonians played a large part in living out the fruits of self-preservation for so many contemporary artists. For some artists, the gallery and institution space allows them to be the best artist they can be. In recent years, creators have even carved out their own spaces, complementing legacies of art as activism even further. Velasco shared that Tschabalala Self ’s 2020 showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art made Black and Brown women seem “larger than life,” without the spectre of the male gaze. By starting with her own perspective, Self offers art as learning with and for freedom and liberation that starts with the self. Although the internet in many ways can still be classified as a white institution, its entry points can be more open and welcoming than what Gupta describes as the “hustle of going to different galleries to share your work.” The realm of social media, not without its own identity crisis, has played a large part in allowing artists of color to receive attention for their work in an attention-driven society. McKeown said she was so happy to see Quinn, a well-known Vietnamese artist and friend, receive praise for her work through Instagram. This is seen across mediums. The television show Insecure was discovered as a web-series on Youtube. Visual artists like Toyin Ojih Odutola and Shepard Fairey attest to Instagram springing their careers. Dan Lam, a Texas-based artist, left Fort Works Art, a gallery, cultural center, and museum, to leverage her popular social media and have greater autonomy over the sales process. How and where to create from are questions that most artists grapple with and ones that leave even more questions about who to garner support from. Bridging the gap of net exposure, social media becomes a tool to grab recognition from patrons in ways that are separate from the typical white academy. “It’s not that you have to receive validation from a museum, to be an artist,” said McKeown. 12 TUFTS OBSERVER NOVEMBER 8, 2021
However much older generations want to scorn Gen Z and millennials for the amount of selfies they take, the selfie is a natural progression of objectification. This time, the holder of the camera is subject and object. To work with an object is to witness Aristotle’s concept of kairos. Chronos is an idea of time that relates to the location of the sun, but kairos is an idea of temporality as an opening of humanity and of readiness to participate. According to Velasco, selfie museums are a form of resistance in their “deconstructing of classism and art, into who can make art, and how we see ourselves in art and photography, too.”
BRIDGING THE GAP OF NET EXPOSURE, SOCIAL MEDIA BECOMES A TOOL TO GRAB RECOGNITION FROM PATRONS IN WAYS THAT ARE SEPARATE FROM THE TYPICAL WHITE ACADEMY.
It’s easy to critique makers that are in art residencies. However, it is worthy of attention to consider the gravity of their acceptance; artists of color don’t receive much funding, and their work is rarely accepted by galleries. It’s much more complex than “selling out.” At the end of the day, what’s key is what artists chose to do with the level of prestige they have acquired. Do they bring the art back to the communities where they come from? Or do they continue to create in white spaces alone and frame white people as harbingers of power?
POETRY
maxim’s I by Akbota Saudabayeva The room I am borne into is one of fairytales and frost-covered clouds, and the sky points to something that isn’t there. Sleep arrives like a blindfold and salt. The strange cymbals of sound and of hearts and diamonds; the turbulence of all things unsaid, the seas unstill.
The wind whistles past until everything is a river. It rains here even on a cloudless day. Let me start again— I miss the thoughts that I don’t have. But winter shall run off and good weather come again. Every day I sew more thread onto the tapestry of our life. For me, red. For you, the color of Friday. I want my love to stretch past the corner of your ear, where it can live
As they sing—
in your hair forever and ever until you wake to the smell of
The hero slays the chimera. She splits the set of two, she swallows
my homecoming. A light flickers on and off. I follow you until my teeth find tail.
the sword, and success, and success, and nothing. She stares towards the horizon,
When you see me tonight, please know that I look away.
blue and black and barely brown in rising, and swears she smells that same beast.
DESIGN BY JOANNA KLESZCZEWSKI, ART BY MADELEINE OH
NOVEMBER 8, 2021 TUFTS OBSERVER 13
FEATURE
b
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O e r O Yo e h s n
o y v r u age
ur voyage b
StayThe Course 16 TUFTS OBSERVER SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
FEATURE
DESIGN BY EVELYN ABRAMOWITZ 1. EMMA DAVIS, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY 2. EVELYN ABRAMOWITZ, GRAPHIC ART DESIGN BY JOHN DOE, ART BY JANE DOE
SEPTEMBER 28, 2020 TUFTS OBSERVER 17
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PETITIONING AND PUSHING BACK: TUFTS COMMUNITY REACTS TO PORTUGUESE PROGRAM CUTS
By Sabah Lokhandwala & Gracie Theobald-Williams
I
n early October 2021, students were made aware of immediate cuts to Tufts’ Portuguese program. These cuts, students alleged, include a reduction in the number of Portuguese courses offered and the elimination of the minor. Within days, social media posts circulated on Facebook and Instagram to “Save Portuguese at Tufts.” Students in the department immediately created an online petition that now has over 1,100 signatures and 42 pages of testimonials from students, alumni, and community members. In the petition, Portuguese program students and native Portuguese speakers outlined their three asks of the administration: 1) guaranteeing a Portuguese minor at Tufts, 2) keeping the Portuguese fulltime program coordinator position, and 3) keeping the part-time lecturer position. The petition includes testimonials and letters of support from undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, faculty, and community organizations. While students and faculty became aware of cuts to the Portuguese program in October, the administration said they had already decided on these reductions this past spring. In an email to the Tufts Observer, James Glaser, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, wrote, “When the fulltime lecturer in charge of the Portuguese language program resigned last spring, the A&S deans decided to phase out the program and use the program elsewhere.” Maria Champlin, who took over as interim Portuguese program coordinator, was unaware of the school’s decision when 16 TUFTS OBSERVER NOVEMBER 8, 2021
she took over the program. “I asked for a meeting [this month] because I had heard that the minor was being cut. I did not know anything about it and that [meeting] is when I learned about their decision,” Champlin said. According to Glaser, Tufts’ decision to downsize the Portuguese department stems from enrollment size concerns and the departure of a full-time faculty member in Spring 2021. He wrote, “For some time now, it’s been evident that Portuguese courses have lower than optimal enrollments, often near the threshold of 6 that leads the School of Arts & Sciences to cancel courses.” However, Sophia Costa, a junior leading the push to keep the Portuguese minor along with two other students, said that enrollment for the Portuguese department has not fluctuated as much as the administration is claiming. Costa stated that participating in the Tufts 1+4 Brazil program, which allows admitted students to spend a year abroad before matriculating to Tufts, has led many students to the Portuguese department. Though fewer students are participating in Tufts 1+4 due to COVID-19, she believes the department has maintained its average of students in on-campus classes per semester. “It’s not a decrease in enrollment as the institution is painting it to be,” she said. Whether the administration’s fears are unfounded or not, they have resulted in drastic changes to the department. Portuguese classes will still be offered at Tufts, but only a limited number and for
“I WAS ABLE TO FIND
A PIECE OF HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NEARLY A DECADE THROUGH THIS DEPARTMENT.”
a limited amount of time. For the 2022 –2023 academic year, Portuguese language classes will still be offered. However, after this time, Tufts will offer only Portuguese for Spanish Speakers, which, according to Glaser, “generates stronger student interest,” as well as “a culture course each semester relevant to this area.” Professors, however, are concerned about the potential limitations of only offering the Portuguese for Spanish Speakers course. This decision, according to Champlin, “cut[s] out anybody that does not speak Spanish to take Portuguese.” Some students come to Tufts to connect to Portuguese itself. In a testimonial, Leticia Priebe Rocha (A’20) described her experience of initially losing her Portuguese fluency when she immigrated to the United States. “Something integral to my identity… was just disappearing day after day,” she wrote. Rocha regained her fluency when she took classes at Tufts: “I was able to find a
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piece of home for the first time in nearly a decade through this department.” Furthermore, students said that the decision to cut language courses and offer only one culture class per semester proves consequential to those who desire to achieve fluency in the language as a means of connecting to their culture. In his written testimonial, Jimmy Parker (A’21) stated, “After taking nine courses in the Portuguese department, I unlocked a level of proficiency in the language that allowed me to reconnect with my Portuguese heritage and engage with the various lusophone cultures present in the greater Boston area.” Champlin also discussed the importance of language in learning about a culture: “Language is the gateway to culture. If we speak a language, [students] are better equipped to understand and meet the needs of local communities [and] stakeholders,” she said. This semester, Roger Burtonpatel, a sophomore and organizer of the “Save Portuguese at Tufts” petition, is in an upper-level Portuguese culture class that is entirely taught in Portuguese. He explained that by cutting upper-level Portuguese language classes, the culture classes they offered would have to be in English. “I’m really reading hard documents [in my Portuguese culture class]. I’m prepared very well for it, but I could
DESIGN BY KATE BOWERS, ART BY CLAUDIA ARANDA
not have done this if I hadn’t taken [Portuguese] 21 and [Portuguese] 22,” he said. The petition’s organizers believe the Portuguese language has particular value in local areas. In Massachusetts, Portuguese is the third most widely spoken language, spoken by 2.6 percent of the population. Massachusetts has the secondlargest Brazilian population in the United States; 18 percent of Brazilians in the United States live in the state. BR Rose, a junior minoring in Portuguese and an organizer of “Save Portuguese at Tufts,” described how her study of Portuguese led to her finding opportunities to engage with the surrounding community. These opportunities have included community health research in Medford and Somerville, working with a local mutual aid network that assists Brazilian community members, and working for local organizations that help non-English speaking individuals get vaccine appointments. To many students, the measures to phase out Tufts’ Portuguese program contradict Tufts’ commitment to becoming an anti-racist institution. According to the petition, “Eradication of minority languages and attempts at the imposition of master languages are inextricably related to racial inequality.” Costa reflected this sentiment and said, “It feels like actions like this one show how much [Tufts] devalues different ethnic and racial groups and their respec-
“... THEY’RE UNABLE TO SEE THAT CUTTING AND, IN THE NEAR FUTURE, POSSIBLY EVEN ELIMINATING, SUCH PROGRAMS, IS IN DIRECT OPPOSITION WITH THEIR DEIJ COMMITMENT.” tive cultures. That includes languages, and how they’re unable to see that cutting and, in the near future, possibly even eliminating, such programs, is in direct opposition with their [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice] commitment.” On October 31, Glaser said, “No students have contacted [the] A&S administration, to my knowledge, expressing their concerns.” According to Burtonpatel, organizers of the “Save Portuguese at Tufts” movement hope to meet with the administration to present their petition signatories and letter of support to communicate their disappointment with Tufts. Champlin said, “I think this is a program worth keeping [at] the university. I would love to see [Tufts] revisit its decision.”
NOVEMBER 8, 2021 TUFTS OBSERVER 17
POETRY
false gods by Spencer Vernier desperately foraging for a winding hickory grove, curls of auburn running like waterfalls, morning mist, we uncover no answer among the heavenly spires. with our belief that we have replaced the gods, we discover the world holds impossible multiplicity and we are terribly disappointed to face our addiction to oneness. where the human mass seeks to be chided by its asking, we are instead told of the fullness in white walls, told that our attempted self-conquest died upon its birth. writing in stone, we lament, for this creature cannot transcend, and these slabs are our sole sense of permanence; humanity will leave nothing to be held, for no child rests in their cradle eternally. we will always float between ourselves: the version crowned with wholeness and that which is void of anything at all, terrified of the darkness in the mirror as we stand before it in an attempt to conquer crashing tides, and beauty is never true only fleeting like the sand in our cracked hands and the stars in our dying eyes.
18 TUFTS OBSERVER NOVENBER 8, 2021
DESIGN BY JOANNA KLESZCZEWSKI, PHOTO BY MISHA MEHTA
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QUESTIONING CONNECTION: EXAMINING THE FUTURE OF TELEHEALTH
By Chloe Malley
A
s a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth has become a staple of US healthcare. Telehealth visits increased significantly as a response to global stayat-home orders; between June and November 2020, around 30 percent of all weekly American health center visits were done through telehealth services. The concept behind telehealth is simple: patients schedule a phone or video appointment through an online portal or with a primary care provider, bypassing the need for in-person appointments. Popularized in the 1960s, telemedicine DESIGN BY KATE BOWERS, ART BY MADELEINE OH
services have been used more recently to help bridge the gap in quality healthcare in rural and impoverished communities where access to healthcare is often limited by the number of doctors who practice in the immediate area. Today, the use of telemedicine has become especially commonplace as a direct result of the overcrowding in hospitals and the national shortage of physicians/doctors facilitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Tufts Counseling and Mental Health Services has offered telehealth services through external websites NOVEMBER 8, 2021 TUFTS OBSERVER 19
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“ SO [TELEHEALTH] WAS GIVEN TO [DISABLED PEOPLE], AND NOW IT’S BEING TAKEN AWAY [NATIONALLY] BECAUSE IT’S STILL NOT BENEFITING THE MAINSTREAM POPULATION OF ABLE-BODIED PEOPLE. ”
such as Betterhelp since 2018, it was not until Fall 2020 that Tufts Health Service established an internal system for telehealth appointments in response to the pandemic. This process requires students to schedule appointments via the online Health and Wellness patient portal or by phone with the front desk. Medical Director of Health Service Marie Caggiano wrote in an email to the Tufts Observer that telehealth appointments are meant to be “convenient” for students and “[offer] an option to receive the health advice they are looking for.” As in-person services begin to open back up, considering the future of telehealth—both its benefits and its limitations—could illuminate how best to see it implemented, even beyond the pandemic. Within Health Service, telehealth appointments are created and accessed through the Health and Wellness portal. Caggiano explained that providers at Health Service set up meeting rooms on “a HIPAA compliant Zoom platform.” If Zoom is not an option for the student, providers may offer a phone call visit. During appointments, providers “interview the student to learn more about their concern and will collect objective data based on what they can see or hear,” then provide
20 TUFTS OBSERVER NOVEMBER 8, 2021
recommendations for further care. If the provider deems an in-person follow-up or testing necessary, the provider will then schedule an appointment. In many ways, telehealth has been convenient for both patients and providers throughout the past year and a half. While working around the need for social distancing during the first stages of the pandemic, the widespread adoption of online healthcare meant that people were not spreading diseases in crowded doctor’s offices. Brandy Rasche, a junior treated for pneumonia at Health Service in 2019, spoke on the state of Health Service before the pandemic: “It was super crowded when I went… I was concerned about getting sick or getting others sick, and [Health Service] just didn’t really seem like they knew how to handle it. There were just way too many students coming in at once.” Caggiano stated that the switch to telehealth helped Health Service mitigate the spread of disease. She wrote, “[It’s] allowed Health Service to avoid having large numbers of students in the waiting room and exposing students to others who may be sick with a contagious illness.” The switch to virtual care has not only reduced the spread of disease, but also increased accessibility for many students by reducing the mental and physical toll of travel. Al Bolton, a junior and co-head of Access Betters the Lives of Everyone, Tufts’ disability advocacy group, explained that people with disabilities have a different re-
lationship with the time and energy that is required to access most healthcare. “[For] somebody with a chronic illness or chronic pain… every day is going to be different in terms of what their pain level is, what kind of energy they have, [and] what they have the capacity to do,” they said, “but having doctor’s offices be online and being able to just open it up from your bed and access a really essential health care service from the safety of your own home… has been… a really great option.” Despite the accessibility benefits, telehealth would have limited effectiveness if used as someone’s primary source for care. In an email, community health professor Amy Lischko described telehealth as useful for “triaging, to see who really needs an in-person visit.” Rasche echoed this sentiment, saying, “There are some things you can really only check in person… You’re expecting people to keep track of their symptoms more than if they were to just go in person. What if someone… can’t interpret their symptoms in the way a doctor can, can’t figure out what’s important and what isn’t?” Caggiano recognized that telehealth is not always the best way to assess someone’s needs “when a more detailed physical exam is required.” She noted that “students who prefer an in-person visit for other reasons… may request that when scheduling their appointment.” Additionally, if physicians cannot accurately assess an issue through telehealth, the student will be directed to schedule an in-person appoint-
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ment. “Every telehealth visit is an individualized encounter between the student and the healthcare provider,” she wrote. The necessity to supplement telehealth with in-person visits goes beyond the unreliability of a telehealth setting. Junior Shariqa Rahman had a prescription delayed for several days this semester, leading her to question the connection between providers and their virtual patients. She said, “I think in hindsight now I would have preferred [to go in person] so maybe they would have remembered me or could have taken me more seriously. I think part of that telehealth distance is you have a certain barrier that keeps [providers] less accountable, [and] that’s frustrating.” Bolton attributes this disconnect to an overworked staff. As a result, “[doctors] are having to cut down the amount of time that they spend with patients… which makes it harder for them to do their job well. It makes patients become these faceless, disembodied things that they are just kind of there to fix but not spend any time with.” Caggiano acknowledged that “Health Service is well utilized by students,” meaning it requires “a careful coordination and deployment of our staff to cover all these different areas [of care].” Due to these limitations, both students and staff are examining how an accessible telehealth service could be implemented post-pandemic. As businesses begin to open and inperson events are starting up again, some are concerned that health care appointments may also return to a solely in-person service. Bolton explained the worry she has about such valuable access to care being stripped from disabled people. They said, “The trend seems to be pushing people back into an office setting, face-toface healthcare provision. So [telehealth] was given to [disabled people], and now it’s being taken away because it’s still not benefiting the mainstream population of able-bodied people… The medical system has seen the benefits, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily enough to make it continue.”
Caggiano said that at Tufts, “[Health Service] will continue to offer telehealth for students who wish to receive care this way.” She explained how Health Service has been listening to feedback from students and continually trying to adapt the telehealth service to the shifting needs of the campus. “Based on feedback from providers and students, we have implemented online scheduling which allows students to use the Health and Wellness portal to schedule their visits online. We have also… implemented remote work options for many of our clinical staff, since providers can conduct telehealth visits from home,” she wrote. The biggest concern for many is the universal application of telehealth in all parts of the country. Lischko talked about barriers to general quality of care in how different telehealth technologies are used in other states. “Providers use different systems in different areas, so patients seeking care from multiple providers may have these barriers each time they use a new system,” she wrote. “Providers also did not want to purchase or learn to use the technology… I think this is one of the biggest problems even if the patient prefers telehealth.”
Bolton also expressed concern about universal access in different areas, wherein doctors can only practice in states where they are licensed, blocking access to care for people in different states. “That doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “Why can’t we have access via telehealth? We have all of this technological advancement [so] why can’t somebody in Massachusetts see somebody in California that is a specialist on what they think they might have?” When considering the future of telehealth, students stress the importance of drastic changes to accessibility within the medical industry. “[The future of telehealth] is difficult, but it also conveys what a larger issue this brings up in the medical system… The system that we have in the U.S. needs an overhaul,” Bolton said. In response to questions about how to make telehealth more accessible, they responded, “we should be making healthcare in general… more accessible.”
NOVEMBER 8, 2021 TUFTS OBSERVER 21
ARTS & CULTURE
LOVE MEETS SYSTEMS COLLAPSE:
COMMENTARY ON SALLY ROONEY
By Eloise Vaughan Williams
W
hy has Sally Rooney, hailed the Salinger of the Snapchat generation, become the voice for a generation of depressed and indebted college students? What is the draw, and what is her readers’ place in such an elitist literary scene? Rooney is a young Irish writer who leveled the contemporary fiction scene after her 2007 debut novel Conversations with Friends. Since then, she has written two more novels: Normal People, which went on to become adapted into a popular TV series, and her newly released Beautiful World, Where Are You?, one of the most reviewed books of all time. Her work generally tracks the lives of college students, and most recently those in their late 20s. Within this, her focus is on the characters’ relationships: where they fail, how they communicate, and why they love the way they do. Considering Rooney as a specific type of figure might allow us to track why youth flock to her novels. Rooney, a self-declared Marxist, frequently critiques Western literature’s immoral basis: its relationship to the commodification of culture and elitist cultural capital. In high school, many students may have only been exposed to novelists who often left systems of power unacknowledged and unmentioned in both their writings and personal lives. These students might finally find some accountability and mirrored issues of concern not only in Rooney’s writing, but in the way she navigates the world. Rooney is noticeably absent from all social media platforms, meaning she takes few public stances on prominent issues. However, on October 12, 2021, she announced her decision to withhold translation rights of Beautiful World, Where are You? from her previous Israeli publisher in order to stand with the Palestinian people and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. She released a statement that explained, “I simply do not feel it
22 TUFTS OBSERVER NOVEMBER 8, 2021
would be right for me under the present circumstances to accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.” Rooney also made clear that she would be happy to sell the Hebrew translation rights to a publishing house that is compliant with the BDS movement’s guidelines. With this decision, Rooney is wielding her power and platform as an author to advocate for change according to her values—something many fans of pop culture figures have been calling for. The desire to respond to the effects of systems of power is something Rooney’s characters also deal with on a personal level. Although Rooney is often quoted saying that she does not write specifically Marxist books, her characters show how concerns over socio-political and cultural systems are dealt with in daily experience, specifically through love, sex, mental health, personhood, and relationships. Rooney’s characters address these concerns through their own complex emotional worlds. Her characters generally fear intimacy, avoid processing their emotions, and feel utterly stagnant and lost in both their relationships and the world. So is it really surprising that an entire generation of college students— constantly questioning their selfhood, identity, and placement in communities and relationships—are drawn to characters that not only mimic that experience back to them, but love and are loved
ARTS & CULTURE
despite it? People feel that this idea is presented in Rooney’s new novel, which details the relationships between four characters and focuses on two best friends, Alice and Eileen. Alice is a famous novelist who has retired to the Irish countryside post-breakdown following the release of her novel. Eileen works at a small literary magazine and is confronting the state of her life and a past relationship. Sophomore Maddy Porter spoke on the novel, saying, “I related a lot to the part where both Alice and Eileen were saying to each other, ‘I care more about you than you care about me,’ because I feel like it’s easy for a lot of people to feel that way.” Rooney’s characters address the turbulent experience of youth and burgeoning adulthood when the idea of the self is ever-fluctuating, when perceiving and knowing love becomes ungrounded, and where finding footholds in interpersonal relationships becomes incredibly difficult. Communication becomes a road-block when being perceived and letting yourself be known is so painful. Sophomore Caitlin Walsh noted the contentious experience of communicating desires and needs when you fail to even understand yourself. She said, “Eileen was drawn to people that can’t communicate what they want from her and tell her how they feel about her. And that’s what she wants from them. But she knows she can’t get it.” The characters involved in these relationships, and the experiences and realities they confront, are definitively limited. Rooney’s characters are nearly always white, always thin, and always conventionally attractive. Despite at times engaging with queerness through her main characters, she still has a tendency to uphold some stereotypes that are hurtful to members of the queer community. “I didn’t enjoy how she played into the trope of ‘bi person wants threeway,’” said Walsh in reference to the character Felix from Rooney’s new novel. “It’s like oh, that’s really the trope we’re going for? Do we really need to be perpetuating that?” The main powers that shape Rooney’s writings are class and capitalism. She centers capitalism as the integral external power structure her characters interact with and must orient themselves in. Many of today’s youth and college students on the precipice of entering the workforce—dealing with exploitative unpaid internships and a lack of job opportunities—are reckoning with capitalism’s effects on individual and interpersonal relationships. This reckoning is also an emotional one. In a particularly moving letter, one of the protagonists in Beautiful World, Where are You? delivers a poignant message on what the current state of capitalism means for how we experience
DESIGN BY EMMA DAVIS, ART BY ANNA CORNISH
happiness. In the letter, Alice explains that she, as someone with access to the products and labor of exploited people across the globe, is still barely living a life she finds worth living. Access to developed technologies and cheap materials is only increasing, and the gap between global consumers and institutionally abused workers is growing. However, the general happiness quotient of individuals with such access and privilege—many Tufts students, for instance—has probably only decreased. Our lives are sustained by others who are systematically taken advantage of and used by systems of power like capitalism and those who benefit from them, but the life we are left with can still be incredibly difficult to live. However, as Rooney makes clear, we return to love, sex, and relationships despite everyday anxieties and horror at our social and political systems. Yes, a student can come back agitated from an Eco-Rep meeting that just caused them a bout of anxiety about the state of near complete collapse the environment is in, but they can also sit in Dewick and listen to their friend tell them about their chemistry set that’s due, and maybe finally respond to their mom’s texts, or mentally construct their outfit for the Pub that night. Students often feel paralyzed over their impotency in changing the horror of the world and its social and economic systems, and can only attempt to affect meaningful change and uplift their communities where they can—but they also nearly always resort to loving in the face of systems collapse anyway. That is what Sally Rooney writes about in her new novel, and that is where perhaps this generation can find not hope, but a meditation on some of the realities that college students, Tufts students, face everyday.
NOVEMBER 8, 2021 TUFTS OBSERVER 23
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n October 5, 2021, former Facebook data scientist and whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before a US Senate subcommittee on Commerce, giving the world a detailed glimpse into Facebook’s ethics and profit motives. The documents revealed in the hearing illustrate the ways in which Facebook’s algorithms ignore user wellbeing and safety. Haugen stated that her intention for revealing the Facebook documents, testifying in Congress, and appearing on the cover of magazines is to let it be known that Facebook cares more about profits than public safety. “Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume,” she said in an interview with 60 Minutes. The revelations in Haugen’s testimony renewed public concern about the role social media plays in the lives of 24 TUFTS OBSERVER NOVEMBER 8, 2021
THE SOCIAL DILEMMA CONTINUES:
By Eleanor Fucetola
STUDENTS REFLECT ON FACEBOOK WHISTLEBLOWER teens and young adults. Facebook’s own research found that Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook acquired in 2012, contribute to mental health and body image issues in young people around the world. Tufts students who grew up with social media and engage with these platforms daily feel the impacts of these harmful cycles and are taking their own measures to mitigate the effects. Facebook has intentionally covered up research that shows a clear link between the use of their products and negative self-image in young people, according to Haugen. This has cast Facebook’s business and platform models in a new light. Facebook and Instagram have increasingly shifted their designs over the years to promote passive content, such as autoplay videos and reels of viral content, without the consideration of the impact that high consumption rates of this content have on one’s mental health. Junior El Kocay expressed concern with the ways in which these types of content streams help harmful content go viral. “I think the speed at which things go viral on, say, Facebook, is one of the most negative aspects of it in that there’s no time to fact check or think critically before information is disseminated to millions and millions of people,” they said. Kocay actively stays off Facebook and limits their Instagram usage to avoid the negativity they
believe these platforms create. To them, social media is meant to be relaxing, but political polarization and hate speech in these spaces takes that away from them. “To have polarized debate and… hate speech on something that’s meant to be fun and relaxing [takes a] toll on [one’s] mental health,” they said. When they do engage with social media platforms, they make conscious choices about what they want to see on their feed. “For Instagram my tactic is, I just use real media outlets for my news. I keep Instagram what I feel like it should be: a way to keep in contact with friends. And I keep it personal,” they continued. Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, professor of psychiatry at the Tufts University School of Medicine, expressed concerns about higher depression rates among young people than in past generations. He said, “This high rate of depression has no biological explanation. Instead, it appears to be caused by engagement with social media on smartphones.” Of all social media platforms teens and young adults engage with, Ghaemi reports that Snapchat and Instagram are the social media platforms most associated with higher rates of anxiety. Mi’lexus Milton, a graduate student at Tufts, believes the mental exhaustion created by social media is linked to their algorithms, the way these platforms decide which
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content to share with users. “The system is now set up to reward and even exploit negative triggers. They don’t care how divisive the content is as long as it’s driving engagement. In that regard it is mentally exhausting because hate is constantly amplified on social media,” she wrote in an email to the Tufts Observer. For senior Victoria DeJoy, scrolling through Instagram is a way to pass the time. However, she doesn’t realize how much time passes by on these platforms. “Before I know it, I’ve spent an hour absorbing even more boring, empty clickbait content, which always leaves me feeling more empty than before I picked up my phone,” she said. However, DeJoy tries to monitor herself, “If I notice that I’ve been sucked in, I sometimes change the settings on my phone to limit my app use and screen time,” she added. Milton tries to mitigate social media’s negative impacts by utilizing existing features on social media platforms. “I have also made the decision to have two different profiles on Instagram, one for my personal friends and the others to follow celebrities or brands I like. I also have taken advantage of the new feature where you can hide the number of likes your photos get. On Facebook, I unfollowed a lot of the pages I liked when I was younger,” she said. Instagram’s internal research found the platform most notably affects young women and girls’ perceptions of themselves and their bodies. With the rise of the “influencer,” students expressed their discomfort with the unrealistic body standards perpetuated by social media. “You also have influencers and celebrities who naturally have a lot of engagement and they are constantly posting about brand deals, like teas that are supposed to make you lose weight, and they are selling these unrealistic body types and having every day people aspire to unrealistic goals,” said Milton. However, this content is optimized by Instagram’s algorithm. Content by influencers is prioritized, without consider-
DESIGN BY CARINA LO, ART BY BRIGID CAWLEY
ation of the messages it sends to their au- docket of complaints after another, with no dience. “When all you see of someone’s life meaningful change in legislation.” is their most perfect, overly edited version For some students, a commitment to of themselves, it becomes hard not to com- public safety outweighs freedom of speech. pare it to your own,” said DeJoy. “And so- “We really pride ourselves on being able to cial media platforms seem to be rewarding voice our opinions in this country, but it influencers for their inauthenticity. I have gets to a dangerous point when you think to remind myself and my friends that most about the impacts on mental health or the of it isn’t real.” effects of misinformation. At what point is Instagram’s algorithm prioritizing the government constitutionally allowed more curated content creates more pres- to step in? I don’t know, but that definitely sure for young adults when posting on- needs to be explored,” said Kocay. line. “I feel like over the past few years it National policy changes might be the has become more and more of a big deal only avenue to formally regulate compawhen posting. People care way too much nies such as Facebook. Haugen said in her now about posting times, filters, and congressional testimony, “We need to have curating this image of what they want more transparency. If we want to have a to show people, seeking external valida- system that is coherent with democracy, tion,” said Milton. we must have public oversight from ConWorries about disinformation and so- gress.” Until then, students will have to cial media have also resurfaced after Hau- continue to craft their own relationship gen’s testimony. “Another downside is the with social media and its omnipresence disinformation that is shared, which has in society. become a huge problem over the last few years especially. Whether it is the election, or COVID, these algorithms have definitely exacerbated the current tension Anonymous we see in America today 2 minutes ago and across the world,” said Milton. She believes there needs to be a greater push for efficient content moderation from these platforms. The government has heard testimonies beyond Haugen’s against Facebook; however, there has not been concrete policy actions as a result. AccordLike Comment Share ing to Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at the Fletcher School, “These hearings have devolved into becoming platforms for politicians to feature on Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network or in headlines on the business pages of newspapers. They lose their value if they keep occurring on a regular basis with one
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VOYAGE INTO THE ABYSS By Isabelle Charles
The smoke detector incessantly beeps to the patterns of my REM cycle—sporadic and offbeat. For the first few nights my nerves were frayed from the jolts. It was right next to my bed christening my new room, making its stake on the territory. The only one out of the three in the apartment. Unscrew. Still beeping. Turning off all electricity in my room for a night or two turned out to be the solution. While the smoke detector resulted in a few nights of sleeplessness, it was by no means the worst thing to happen. The next morning I chugged my overly strong coffee and reminded myself that this was part of the process of growing up and living in an apartment—a mini-voyage, if you will. My college experience has, in essence, been boiled down to a series of voyages. There is the voyage of the menial, yet important stuff that you have to eventually figure out in college. Grocery shopping, for instance. Can I survive off of the three eggs, frozen fruit, and oat milk in my fridge until Friday, when the midterms have passed and some stress has washed over for a moment? Turns out I can. Then, there is the academicand-career-questioning-voyage. Will I make money as an English major? Am I really into my social sciences major or would I be happier in the humanities? Is economics something I ought to take? Should I have been pre-med? (No. This one only lasted about a few days—I am far too squeamish). Is consulting going to be my default option post-grad? There are no clear answers. It lies within the murkiness of my future. We are expected to get it together. “So what do you want to do after graduation?” I was asked as a bright-eyed first year. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” A professor asked more recently. The answer is consistently ambiguous. A slim, diplomatic dance of “well, we shall see… not sure,” or even better, “hmm good question…” has slipped out of my mouth a few times. But the issue I have is that we are never given the possibility to not know. It is either you know
or you are lost. Why do we have to know everything right now? That’s why we are here and nestled on this hill. How do you know the answers when you are the only one who can provide them? Is it an inkling in the dark pits of the abdomen, a nudge at the gut, a squeaking voice that pries at the prefrontal cortex? How do we know that we have made the right decisions, or do we only know when it is too late to turn back? When we are locked into lives we no longer want and yearn for the years of unbridled choice. When we are so young but have so many opinions, ideas, and thoughts. When we are partially molded but still have an axe for chiseling left. A few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts with a friend and gazed at the marble figurines: poised and polished. To be frank, I couldn’t tell you the artist or the historical context, but anything sculpted with that much detail evidently takes time. A finished product of beauty is a voyage. While humans are far more complex than slabs of marble, it is indicative of the time we ought to invest in ourselves, our wants, and our needs. It was in my full year of remote learning where I forced myself to ask, reflect, and interrogate my thoughts on what I wanted out of this college experience. This was not easy. It meant being honest with myself. Tricking myself was easier than facing facts or reckoning with my future. In our lives, we have some answers but we don’t have them all—how can we? We need the freedom for exploration and breathing space to fall. We need to understand our mistakes and be able to pivot, backtrack, and reflect on how we are going to realign our focus, aspirations, and expectations for ourselves. College can feel like a bubble of construction. There are moments when I feel like a sham of an adult—not yet immersed in the full fabrics of “the real world” but also living in an apartment secured by negotiations with my landlord. These four years can feel like a
I HAVE A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS VOYAGE. IT IS A SOLITARY CHARADE. A PASSING MOMENT OF STILLNESS WITH THE FLASH OF FACES.
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limbo, an intermediary, or a bridge, but still a balance and calm before the full throttle storm come graduation. I would be remiss if I didn’t say I was a bit scared of what this storm will look like. In college, and most of life, my biggest moments of growth have hurt the worst. The severing of unhealthy relationships. The loss of a friend. Harsh love. The kind that rips out the arteries and ties them into a thousand knots. I have a love/hate relationship with this voyage. It is a solitary charade. A passing moment of stillness with the flash of faces. A hi and a bye from those on crossroads. The thing about voyages is that they can be exciting, but they are also no stranger to loneliness. You don’t see land until you are close to a dock—I hesitate to say “a destination.” We oftentimes end up in places we never expected to be. In the end we can’t control our destiny, though it may be a comfort to create mood boards and career collages of cut magazine pages.
DESIGN BY JULIA STEINER, ART BY KELLY TAN
But the truth is, I don’t know where I’ll be, who I’ll be with, and how. None of us do. This is scary. I’m a serial planner. Color-coded, detail-oriented, a sticky note-user. So one thing that awakens my anxiety is the prospect of anything unknown, anything out of my hands. But maybe we have to move forth through the abyss, the snow, sleet, and storm of our many individual voyages in confidence. Maybe there is never a destination on our voyages. Rather, our voyages are a search for space and place in the world, a way to sail our own ships while knowing that oftentimes the wind gust is out of our hands. A space where we can lay the mat of our labors and sit on the mount of our accomplishments. So we drift. Drifting is not laziness, but sometimes it’s all that there is to do. Sometimes we need to let go of the ship’s wheel because even if we try to wane and wrangle, gravity and buoyancy never stops. The waves will lead us homeward bound.
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