News & Events Freshman Seminar Generates Conversations and Photographs about Community, Diversity and Equality

When professors Martha Saxton and Wendy Ewald developed the first-year seminar “Representing Equality,” their goal was to generate productive discussions about community and diversity at Amherst. This year, students in the course have put together an exhibition and symposium to share their ideas with the campus community.

Since its inception in 2013, the seminar has encouraged first-year students to think about ways to build community on campus and consider how issues of inequality—racial, ethnic, gender and socioeconomic—affect that goal.

“We initially proposed to teach the course for four years to see the effect it could have on a generation of students,” Ewald says. “Overall we wanted to broaden campus conversations and encourage more openness between students and faculty when talking about these issues.”

Saxton (now an emeritus professor of history and sexuality, women’s and gender studies) and Ewald (visiting artist-in-residence in the department of art and the history of art) offered the seminar together three times. This past fall, Ewald taught the course with Rhonda Cobham-Sander, professor of black studies and English.

Each year, students study a variety of materials—books, news articles, films and artworks—and interview their peers, professors and staff members to deepen their understanding of representations of inequality in campus life. 

The seminar culminates in collaborative final projects, in which students create photographic illustrations of social issues related to the Amherst campus. In previous iterations of the seminar, students have created newspapers and exhibitions, and held conferences to showcase their work and ideas from the course.

Throughout fall 2016, the students worked with visiting artist Zanele Muholi, whose work as a photographer and visual activist highlights challenges facing the LGBT community in South Africa.  Under her guidance, the seminar students created visual representations of themselves and members of the Amherst community.

On Friday, Feb. 10, these students will present their projects in a Student Art Exhibition and Reception in the Keefe Campus Center from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a day-long symposium, “Queering Identity” on Saturday, Feb. 11, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Queer Resource Center. The symposium brings together artists, activists, scholars, students and educators from all over the world to discuss and highlight the intersections of identity and art. The symposium is free and open to the public.