On April 18th 2019, the Women’s Center hosted the seventh annual Take Back the Night at UMBC. The night began with an introduction by the emcees Autumn, Calista and Women’s Center staff members, Samiksha and Morgan.

Photo credit: Samiksha Manjani

After the introduction was the survivor speak-out. The speak-out is the heart and soul of Take Back the Night. Survivors are encouraged to come up and share their story with the crowd before the march throughout campus. As a survivor, sharing your story at TBTN allows you to acknowledge your experience with others who believe and support you.

We then moved on to the march portion of the night, where we got loud and chanted in support of victims of sexual violence. We Believe You, an activist group dedicated to ending sexual violence, led the march, the survivor circle of care, and a private discussion in the Women’s Center following the march.

The survivor circle is a new addition to Take Back the Night. At the peak of the march, everyone formed a circle around True Grit. Survivors were invited to the middle of the circle, while supporters chanted the refrain, “We see you. We believe you. You matter.” After the survival circle, the march back to Main Street commenced.

After the march, community members got back together for some craftivism! This part of the night is intended to provide space for reflection, creative expression, and community-building between survivors and supporters alike.

Thank you so much to everyone for a powerful and moving evening. Thank you to every survivor for sharing their story, to every ally who supported the survivors, and a special thank you to all the volunteers and We Believe You members who made TBTN possible!

If you’ve joined us this Thursday and you haven’t already, please fill out the survey by April 26, 2019.

If you weren’t able to make it, here are some resources:

• Women’s Center at UMBC
• UMBC Counseling Center
• Title IX and UMBC’s Interim Policy on Prohibited Sexual Misconduct and Other Related Misconduct

The Center for Social Science Scholarship invites applications for Faculty Working Groups to promote intellectual exchange in the social sciences and across campus. These collaborative scholarly learning communities will meet regularly to engage in such activities as: working on research projects, reading key literature, exploring new methodological approaches, and/or engaging in matters of public interest related to the social sciences.

Up to four Faculty Working Groups will be selected by the center director and advisory board members. Groups should be faculty-led and must include at least one faculty member from a social science department at UMBC. Additional priority will be given to groups whose members and/or areas of interest are multi- or interdisciplinary. Advanced graduate students may participate as Faculty Working Group members but may not serve as leaders.

Faculty Working Groups can apply for up to $1,000 in annual support ($500 per semester); groups will also be able to apply for continuation funding. Groups may use funds for such items as: supporting regular group meetings; purchasing software, books, or other materials; hosting external speakers; creating scholarly resources; traveling to external sites for research or public engagement purposes; and other similar activities. A brief report of the group’s activities will be due at the end of the funding period.

Apply by May 30, 2019, for groups to begin in Fall 2019.

Click on the attached file to download the application form. 

Applications should be submitted via email to socialscience@umbc.edu. Questions may be directed to Christine Mallinson, Director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship.

The Women's Center will be closing early (at 4:30 pm) on April 18th for Take Back The Night!!! 

If you need to use the lactation room after 4:30 pm, please email Jess Myers at womenscenter@umbc.edu.

Join the Women's Center on Commons Main Street on Thursday, April 18th at 6:15 pm and let's take back the night!!

Events and activities include: 

-Community Resource Fair and Craftivism (including the opportunity to make Clothesline Project t-shirts, lavender sachets, and Dear Survivor letters) and We Believe You discussion group hosted in the Women's Center post-march. 

There is limited seating for the speak-out. We recommend you arrive early. As seating fill up, we encourage you to make your way up to the balcony area on the 2nd floor of The Commons.

Stay tuned by liking the Women's Center on Facebook and following us on Instagram and Twitter. #UMBCtbtn is the official hashtag, so follow us there, too! You can see pictures from past years Take Back the Night on our blog.

For more information about UMBC's Take Back the Night, you can visit our What You Need to Know about TBTN blog series. Posts include more information about the survivor speak-out, the march, Greek Week involvement, and the post-march craftivism. More posts will be shared and/or updated leading up to 2019's event.  

Want learn more about what Take Back The Night is? Visit www.takebackthenight.org for more information.

Congratulations to Evan Avila (Economics, Political Science, 2020), winner of the prestigious Truman Scholarship for 2019!

Established in 1975, the Truman Foundation is the nation’s official living memorial to our thirty-third president and The Presidential Memorial to Public Service. The Truman Scholarship is the premier graduate fellowship in the United States for those pursuing careers as public service leaders. Truman Scholars receive up to $30,000 for graduate or professional school, participate in leadership development activities, and have special opportunities for internships and employment with the federal government.

Evan is a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar and member of the Honors College, studying economics and political science at UMBC. He is passionate about solving the structural disadvantages that marginalized populations face when trying to achieve long-term financial security. “Evan has taken on what other students might consider “boring” endeavors- income tax preparation, working for the U.S. Census Bureau- and turned them into deeply meaningful experiences, ones that he sees as inextricably linked to empowering people. He cares about people who are invisible to many- immigrants, retirees, the poor,” observes April Householder, Director of Undergraduate Research and Prestigious Scholarships.

In 2018, Evan won a national research competition, the iOme Challenge, with policy solutions for gig workers who lack access to qualified retirement plans. He has since been invited to speak on the subject at several policy conferences, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As President and Site Manager of UMBC’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program (VITA), Evan deters predatory tax preparers by training students to prepare free income taxes for over 500 low-income households in the Baltimore area. Evan is has also interned at the U.S. Census Bureau and Treasury Department. After graduation, Evan intends to earn a dual JD/LLM in Taxation and pursue a public service career in tax and social insurance policy.

According to Arthur Johnson, former UMBC Provost and Director of the Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program, “Evan’s selection is a reflection of the significance and relevance of the service activities that UMBC students are providing through programs such as theSondheim Scholars, Shriver Center, Honors College, and many others.  It also is further evidence that UMBC’s commitment to civic engagement is alive and well among our students. Among many other expectations, TrumanScholars are expected to become leaders of our nation and communities and we are confident that Evan will fulfill those expectations.”

For more information about Truman and other UMBC past prestigious scholarships winners, please visit: https://ur.umbc.edu/prestigious-scholarships/.

Please see below for a curated list of upcoming funding opportunities. The Center for Social Science Scholarship and the Maryland Institute for Policy, Analysis, and Research (MIPAR) assist faculty members and departments in finding funding opportunities and in providing researchers with pre-award and post-grant management assistance. To set up an appointment, email socialscience@umbc.edu.

Program: Grant

Congratulations to Susan Sterett for her recent award from the National Science Foundation. Professor Sterett intends to use the award to hold  a workshop to be held at the beginning of the 2019 WPSA conference. A key component will be a session on managing conflict and improving our lives in the academy, facilitated by a professional from a university office on diversity and inclusion.  The workshop will close with brainstorming some of the challenges people find in the profession, including managing rejection, and brainstorming what gatekeepers can do.  

Amelia Meman, ’15, is the program coordinator in the Women’s Center. She has worked in the Women’s Center as an intern, a student staff member, a volunteer, a part-time coordinator, and now as a full-time staff member. Throughout this tenure, Amelia has attended every Take Back the Night (and is looking forward to attending many more).

Among the fraught ethical tensions that anyone negotiates in their lives, there is one that the Women’s Center constantly must work through:

Are we honoring stories of trauma or are we passively consuming tragedy?

This is a conflict that comes up most often when we begin planning and setting up for our sexual violence-related events. We have to ask ourselves during Take Back the Night (TBTN): is this an event that is empowering for survivors and victims? Or is it spotlighting stories that are shocking and uncomfortable for an eager audience? Are we listeners observing moments of healing or are we spectators in awe of what trauma can be?

Now, we realize that we can’t control how participants are taking in the material we offer, but we can try like hell to build a context to our event that encourages folks to act as witnesses to a difficult and powerful process. Hence this blogpost.

Take Back the Night is an emotional and incredible event. As a staff member and an alumna, I have been to every TBTN since it was renewed in 2014, and every year, I am aware of the way the survivor speak out shifts the gravity in the room. I know there are tears and tense muscles and people holding one another–partially because I’ve been in that same position. I know that in the march that follows the speak out, I yell so so loud with this big chorus of powerful people and it is the closest I come to righteousness. The catharsis of shifting the emotional weight in my heart to my lungs and into the night air, it’s a feeling that you don’t soon forget.

That said, I’ve also been behind the camera for many of my TBTN’s and I know, as an artist, what lengths we can go to in order to get that shot that distills the moment as if the chant could echo through whatever gelatin or pixel displaying utility you’re using. Get that shot. Capture that moment. Frame it. Click. Shutter. Stop.

I get it.

But just as the Women’s Center frets about building a moment of witnessing rather than consumption, we must also ask our photographers and our artists to consider how they’re documenting this world.

As we get ready for another Take Back the Night, we meet and Jess is beleaguered: “Just please don’t be that guy running and hanging off of light posts with a camera in my face,” referring to the antics of some eager photojournalists who took the 2018 Take Back the Night march by storm. People with cameras ran in and out and through and about the march, and it led us as organizers to question whether or not this was the sort of event we wanted to organize.

Were we getting people together simply for the right Instagram grid?

Were those who were brave enough to tell their stories being minimized to the portrait of tears and traumatization?

Did these folks weaving and mending their way through the march even know what it was that brought us all together and why our voices were high with urgency?

Are we staging tragedy for people to consume? Are survivor stories a tragic movie montage–to feel things that we aren’t typically used to feeling?

There’s a responsibility here, as a narrator or a creator, to honor the folks whose stories we are trying to enliven. We teeter on that tension I spoke of earlier, between exploitation and empowerment. So as we move into another TBTN and another year of difficult publicly told truths, I hope that we can learn how to honor and respect the stories that are shared among us.

Some simple questions for all of the photographers out there, looking to document things like Take Back the Night and other important movements in our world:

Why are you taking pictures?

Where are you posting them?

If you had to write a caption, what would it say?

Who are you taking a picture of? Are they in a state you would want to be captured in?

Do you understand what this event is about and the goals?

How can you ensure that your creative work builds off of organizer goals?

Did you ask to take the picture? If you didn’t, should you?

Ultimately, this issue is one of exploitative objectification versus humanizing empowerment/embodiment. Viewing real human conflict, sadness, trauma does things to us. It might help us through our own shit. It might provoke a piece of ourselves we’ve never been in touch with. Either way, let’s make sure that in our reception, we are viewing, listening, etc. from a place of equal footing, rather than from the top down. Reach out, not down to the folks who have different experiences from you, and if you plan on taking their picture–hold up your mirror first.

This year, for Take Back the Night, the Women’s Center is assigning press passes to photographers. We hope this is a way to hold artists and journalists accountable to our mission, and create a firmer understanding of the context that brings us all together. If you’re interested in acquiring a press pass, email us at womenscenter@umbc.edu.

Further reading/viewing/listening:

7 with VII: Ethics in Photojournalism, Q&A with photojournalists Ron Haviv, Maciek Nabrdalik, Stefano De Luigi, Davide Monteleone, Ashley Gilbertson, Ed Kashi and Arthur Bondar

A Thousand Stakes: Photojournalism and Exploitation, Teresa Mathew

The Colonialism of Photojournalism, Clary Estes

Inspiration porn and the objectification of disability, Stella Young at TEDxSydney 2014