The Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) is holding a new series titled “AmherstChatBack: Dialoguing Across Difference” to provide a space for students to talk about differences and intersections in their lives. Co-facilitated by Dialogue Coordinator Ismaris K. Ocasio and Race, Gender and Sexuality Education Specialist Babyface Card in Keefe Campus Center, the first dialogue took place on Sept. 29 while the most recent dialogue on Friday, Oct. 27 — the fifth of seven — addressed nationality. Past topics have included class, gender, ability and sexuality.
Loretta Ross, a human and women’s rights activist who helped coin the term “reproductive justice,” spoke about the origins of the reproductive justice movement and how it can be used to dismantle white supremacy on Tuesday, Oct. 24. Her talk was part of Reproductive Justice Week, which was hosted by the Women and Gender Center and the student-run Reproductive Justice Alliance.
Award-winning photojournalist and activist Boniface Mwangi gave a talk titled “How I Found My Voice” on Wednesday, Oct. 25, in Stirn Auditorium about his experience photographing the 2007 Kenyan election, being an activist and running for a seat in Kenyan Parliament this past year. The event, which was free and open to the public, was sponsored by the Lamont Fund, the dean of the faculty and the college’s political science department.
The college held an event called “Decolonization in Comparative Context,” which took place in in the Center for Humanistic Inquiry on Oct. 27 and 28 and featured a variety of panels with guest speakers.
Panel participants attempted to define decolonization and discuss “its origins and its connection to the histories and memories of a given geographical space,” as well as the “legacies [that] decolonial thinking pass[es] on to contemporary thought,” according to the event’s official description.
Renowned poet and former John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer Richard Wilbur ’42 died on Oct. 14 after a lifetime of writing, reading and teaching. In a community-wide email, President Biddy Martin and Dean of Faculty Catherine Epstein wrote that Wilbur, a two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient and U.S. Poet Laureate, was “a remarkable man whose decency and humanity are as memorable as his verse.”
Direct Action Coordinating Committee (DACC), a student-run group that aims to promote student rights and social justice on campus, hosted a three-day event called Climate Camp on Oct. 11-13. The event, intended to raise campus-wide awareness and support for divestment of the college’s endowment from fossil fuels and indirect investments in private prisons, took place as a camp-out on the First-Year Quad.
After 35 years in higher education, 12 of which she spent at Amherst College, Chief Student Affairs Officer Suzanne Coffey will retire at the end of this year. President Biddy Martin announced her retirement and the start of the search for a replacement in an email to the college community on Oct. 17. The college aims to secure a new chief student affairs officer by July 1, 2018, according to Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein.
