The Library has two types of study rooms available for student use:

● Reservable Study Rooms:

These 20 rooms can be reserved up to five days in advance. Reservations are limited to 3 hours per person or group each day. Book yours today!

● Open Study Rooms:

These 12 rooms are left open for students to use on a first-come, first-served basis. Each room has four seats.  They are located on the Quiet Floors: rooms 553-558 and 653-658.

Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Ignite with our What You Need to Know series. Written by Alexia Petasis.

Activism can be defined as a “practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.” This can come in many forms and finding your own voice as an activist can be challenging. Something I’ve realized is that activism can meet you where you are at, and there is beauty in combining your passions with your role as an activist. The arts, whether that is performing arts (dance or theatre), visual arts (painting, photography, etc), or fine arts (poetry, music, etc) have the ability to convey complex stories, perspectives, and emotions and creates space to understand the experiences of others. As a powerful medium of communication, the arts can lend themselves well to activism and advocacy work.

As an introduction to Critical Social Justice week, the Women’s Center will be hosting Art as Feeling, Art as Knowledge: A Conversation, from 6:30 to 8 pm on Wednesday, October 17th in the Fine Arts Recital Hall. This event will demonstrate ways in which both the performing and visual arts can be used for social justice activism. In recognition of Relationship Violence Awareness Month, the dance, choreographed by Alexia Petasis, will reflect the development and progression of relationship violence. Alexia collaborated with the We Believe You student group and the Women’s Center to share her choreographed piece in April 2018 for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The dance provoked conversation and experiences that many found unable to understand before witnessing this dance piece. Read more on this Retriever review here. Jen White-Johnson, Visual Arts ’08, will be sharing the ways she uses visual art, specifically graphic design, to empower individuals with autism. Inspired by her son Knox and the intersectional identities he has, Jen’s photography, design, and writing celebrate the joy of being a child on the spectrum. See more of her work here.

Another event the Women’s Center will be hosting as part of CSJ:Ignite is our Community Art Project on October 23, from 11:30 am to 2:30 pm on Academic Row. This event aims to engage and create space for individuals to imagine what a social justice future looks like. Join us to come together as a community and use art as a way of expressing our own visions of a socially just future. There will be popcorn and lots of art supplies! If you are an artist and want to learn how to use your talents to speak out, if you are an activist and haven’t quite considered how art can be integrated within social justice movements, or if you are generally curious about all the knowledge that will be shared throughout this event, everyone is welcome!

Harini Narayan is a Student Staff member at the Women’s Center. She is an MLLI major and is currently a co-facilitator of the Women’s Center’s discussion groups, Between Women. 

The lyrics, “I am woman, hear me roar!,” made history thanks to singer Helen Reddy, lending an amazingly catchy slogan to the movement of women’s rights. The phrase itself is innocuous, associating strength with femininity. Girl Power and the Future is Female are other popular slogans adopted by modern-day feminists (these examples are literally lifted from shirts that I own) with the goal of empowering their users.

Empowerment is like a haircut: the styles that suit people largely vary, and not everyone prefers what looks conventionally attractive.

A huge issue with modern-day feminism, or the Second Wave, is the Westernized perversion of what liberation looks like. This concept is commonly dubbed, “white feminism,” and usually consists of white women enforcing standards of equality centered solely around their status while simultaneously disregarding the privilege afforded to them by their race. This type of indirect discrimination is often not purposeful, but can be a product of ignorance. When people do not consider the varied lens through which others experience the world, they do not consider the effects of multifaceted identities on marginalized people’s perspectives. Intersectional identities overlap like different colors, creating new ones through these combinations. If sexual identity and ethnicity are the colors red and blue, respectively, then the intersectional identity they create would be purple. However, when those representative colors are not alike between individuals, confusion arises: one person’s purple identity can be misidentified by someone who does not see both blue and red; to someone who cannot see blue, red is the only identity that is recognized. Building bridges toward intersectionality begins with understanding this concept of different lenses. No two people have identical sets of lenses, but that does not invalidate the existence of lenses unlike our own. I may not have a blue lens to mix with my red, but perhaps my intersectional identity is represented by orange, made by the same red with my unique yellow. What makes an inclusive feminist is a person’s ability to recognize and validate the identities that are unlike their own and respect cultures to which they might not belong or even understand.

Upon reading the phrase, “Forcing opinions about religious head coverings on female and nonbinary Muslims,” what do you imagine? Is it a man forcing his wife or daughter to wear a hijab, or is it a “free the nipple” Westerner telling her/them to take it off and conform to their idea of freedom? White feminism is very exclusionary and, more often than not, is also subtly cissexist and racist. It’s what decrees that all Muslims that choose to wear head coverings must be oppressed, because why else would they do that? It can’t possibly be their own choice. An intersectional feminist, Muslim or not, would be able to understand that freedom from oppression lies in the ability to make decisions for oneself.  

Exclusionary logic undermines women under the guise of liberation: it implicitly creates a preconception of what freedom looks like. Objectively, housewives that choose their own lifestyle are every bit as empowered as a female CEO. The power lies in the freedom to make such decisions for oneself. Making the assumption that a woman can’t be free unless she emulates men in mannerisms, occupation, or lifestyle perpetuates misogynistic stereotypes that only further the stigmatization of feminism. The concept of “white feminism” is overtaking a movement that is supposed to represent equity over equality.

The concept of equity vs. equality is pictured above. Equality is everyone receiving the same exact bike, even though only one person of the four can ride it comfortably. Equity, on the other hand, is everyone receiving something catered to their individual needs for a result of all four people being able to comfortably ride their own bikes.

Perception of women is an equity vs. equality issue, as well. Empowerment is not a one-size-fits all concept, but rather it is the readily available option to live on one’s own terms, without answering to stereotypes or discrimination. Empowerment should mean nobody looks down on nurses, teachers, or homemakers, as if their occupations are unworthy of respect because they are female-dominated fields. For some women, empowerment is Helen Reddy’s, “I am woman, hear me roar!” but for some, empowerment is quiet and unassuming. Power comes from the ability to make a choice, and to have that choice be respected.

For more information on the concepts discussed, here are some resources!

• Harvard International Review, The Struggle of the Veiled Woman
• TEDTalk, Is Equality Enough?
• Bustle, What is White Feminism? Here Are 7 Sneaky Ways It Shows Up Into Your Life

Wednesday, October 10, 2018
12-12:50pm
101 Sondheim

I Think I Have Developed Something With Commercial Potential, 
What Do I Do Now?

Wendy Martin, Director, Office of Technology Development will discuss inventing, patents, intellectual property, transfer technologies, copyrights, and more!

On Saturday, the Meyerhoff Parents Association helped organize a food collection for Retriever Essentials at their Fall Family Luncheon.

The caring and thoughtful attendees filled up FOUR donation bins! This food will help stock our shelves for the coming weeks as the semester gets busier and students continue to be in need of free healthy food.

We are so thankful for the Meyerhoff Parents Association's thoughtfulness in organizing this collection. If your student group or department would like to host a food collection at an upcoming event or meeting, please email retrieveressentials@umbc.edu so we can help with the setup process.

We are always in need of the following, which can be brought to donation bins in the Administration Building, Commons, or the AOK atrium: