This week students in the first-year seminar “Representing Equality” will be presenting a variety of events addressing the issue of sexual assault. Each of the 15 students in the class will put on a different event as part of the class project titled “Race, Relationships and Respect.” The events will run Thursday, Dec. 4 through Saturday, Dec. 6, and will be diverse, featuring board games, movie screenings and interactive plays.

Taught by Black Studies, History and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies Professor Martha Saxon and Visiting Artist-In-Residence Wendy Ewald, this first-year seminar engages students through a variety of art works and texts “that touch on a variety of aspects of inequality in our larger society, including educational disparities as well as racial, ethnic, gender and economic inequality,” according to the Amherst website.

The seminar has mainly focused on sexual assault, but has also touched on issues such as Greek life, the college admissions process and Title IX at Amherst.

Teaching this seminar for the second year, Saxon and Ewald are still in the process of making slight changes to the course. “[We] moved from a big global view of sexual assault and a historical view to a much more tight focus on campus life,” Saxon said. “Not just sexual assault, but also inequality.”

In addition, Ewald wants the students to incorporate artistic creativity into their work. She said she got a clearer sense of direction for the final project after inviting Harrell Fletcher, an associate professor of art and social practice at Portland State University, to talk to her students about inequality on campus and using collaborative art to express controversial issues.

This class project is centered around sexual assault, but will use collaborative art, “a way of looking at a social situation and also making changes, but doing it from an artistic perspective … rather than sociology or social work,” Ewald said.

Saxon and Ewald both said that they hope these projects will foster a lasting dialogue about sexual assault on campus in a way that is more comfortable, but powerfully engaging.

“When we thought about this course three years ago, the sexual assault crisis was very dramatic on campus and so we wanted to think about how we could make some sort of intervention in a course that would help students grow themselves,” Saxon said.

Amari Barrett ’18, one of the students in the class, said that his event is called “Project Malone” after Trey Malone, a former student who committed suicide in June 2012, less than a year after he reported being sexually assaulted by another Amherst student.

“My project is just trying to figure out how this could have happened in our day and age, especially [at] a liberal college such as Amherst,” Barnett said.

Barnett will be putting on an interactive five-person play about sexual assault.

“Instead of having a play in which the audience just sits and watches … we are going to an engaged audience,” Barnett said. “[It] is like the audience almost becomes part of the play and they laugh with the actors and cry with the actors and yell at the actors when they say something outlandish.”

Barnett said that he hopes his project will encourage people to question their assumptions about sexual assault.

“The goal of this project is to engage, to engage everyone whether it be professors, student or faculty about the idea what sexual assault is and what it can do.” Barnett said. “A lot of people think that sexual assault has to be male-female. Wrong. It can be male-male or female-female.”

Krista Goebel ’18, another student in the seminar, planned a project called “Listen Up!”, a presentation that features her and eight other people giving three-minute monologues about their experiences with sexual assault related to drinking on campus.

Goebel said that originally, she had trouble finding a group of people who would collaborate with her on the project. She was thinking about turning to her a cappella group or a drama class to find interested members until she decided to ask around on Facebook.

“I had a great response,” Goebel said. “I couldn’t believe it. I had about 15 people just saying they were interested in learning more about it and interested in partaking.”

Goebel said that she hopes that the monologues will jar the audience emotionally.

“Even during rehearsals and meetings that we have had thus far, when people recount their experiences, they just start crying and it is a little support group that we formed,” Goebel said. “Already you can see the results of this project at work among our first-year class. It is making everyone more open, and that’s the overall goal.”