By Logan Monteleone
Elm Staff Writer
As part of a creative assignment by political science professor Dr. Christine Wade for her Human Rights and Social Justice course, students worked in groups to research a global issue, making connections to local concerns. Each of the projects produced by the three student groups in the course included an interactive, demonstrative element that engaged the broader campus community.
One group focused on highlighting the harm of media censorship; another brought awareness to acts of violence against women; and the third group advocated for children’s rights in Palestine.
On Tuesday, April 16 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Martha Washington Square, senior Esmeralda Chavez Jimenez and juniors Selena Francese and Hunter Frederick displayed their platform, “Empowering Voices: Raising Awareness on Violence Against Women.”
In her campus wide email informing the community of the demonstration, Chavez Jimenez stated the project’s intention.
Chavez Jimenez said, “The platform aims to shed light on the prevalence of violence against women on college campuses and around the world, while providing survivors an opportunity to have their stories heard.”
After listening to facts and receiving instruction, WC community members who participated placed a handprint of either purple or orange paint on the four-sided wooden structure to show solidarity with victims — including participants themselves — and resistance against perpetrators of violence against women. Purple paint represented domestic abuse, while orange represented all types of abuse.
“On the platform, we invite you to place your handprint and share messages you have seen or received, whether on social media or in person, related to violence against women,” Chavez Jimenez writes.
After the demonstration period, the platform was carried from the Square to the Dorchester Firepit, where the structure — containing reports of hateful messages, language, and experiences with violence and misogyny — was burnt.
The next group’s project was titled “Stand Up to Censorship.”
Recognizing a need for addressing the subject both on campus and in the broader world, junior Miranda Parrish and her group partners for the project chose to research censorship in the media. During the planning stages of their assignment, the group discussed putting an advertisement in The Elm with facts about media censorship.
Parrish’s group decided that a more provocative and effective way to bring awareness to censorship, however, was to create their own model of a censored newspaper.
“I thought censorship would be interesting to cover, as [WC students] published The Elm and censorship affects people all across the world” she said. “We thought to put an advertisement in The Elm originally, but we concluded that creating our own newspaper and writing our own articles to then censor would be more effective and stand out more.”
Titled “The Truth,” the mock newspaper was distributed to common spaces across campus. Attention grabbing, the headline story features the fall semester protests Dr. Robert George’s presence on campus as a proponent of anti-LGBTQ+ thought and rhetoric, as detailed in previous Elm coverage.
The story is printed with mock track-changes, which indicate sections that would be altered in a censored article. These changes highlight how different rhetoric affects the perception of an event, and how the language used in censored media often differs from the truth of the journalist or the real feelings of people involved in the story.
The two other articles in “The Truth” address issues surrounding restrictions on individuals showing open support for Palestine, also with track-changes. The back of the newspaper features a section of facts and explanation, titled “About Censorship” and “About the Project.”
Parrish hopes that the message conveyed by her group’s project inspires lasting awareness and change despite the assignments being graded and finished, and the semester reaching its fast-approaching end.
“I hope that people are better able to see the subtle and dramatic examples of censorship. Censorship can affect all topics and news from locally to globally, and it can impact perception of the truth,” Parrish said.
For their project, freshman Hector A. Delgado Alfaro’s group focused on children’s rights in Palestine in their demonstration titled “Stand Up for Children’s Rights in Palestine.”
“We are advocating for four main rights: the right to life, the right to education, the right to healthcare, and the right to policy,” Delgado Alfaro said. “We are basically collecting stories from students here at WC about their childhood…like how was your school, how was your home, to compare it to the reality of children’ [s lives] in Palestine.”
Their platform was displayed in Hodson throughout the day on Thursday, April 25. Passerby were invited to reflect on their own childhood experience to compare, and highlighting the contrasts with those of children suffering in Palestine.
The campus wide email announcing the demonstration encouraged participants to add their signatures to the platform to show support, as well as to scan the QR code to learn about the challenges faced by Palestinian children, and the importance of speaking up.
Photo by Logan Monteleone
Photo Caption: Delgado Alfaro and Kaufmann’s project stood on the first floor of Hodson Hall for students to sign and read.