Structures without strictures in the liberated classroom

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By Anu Sachdev with Dr. Lucía Durá

EL PASO –“It is like therapy,” said Marlene, who found herself acknowledged in a university class. Another student, Karla, said, “I have changed!” And many more continued to chime in during casual conversation before the Tuesday evening class. So what was happening in this class? I thought about my own experience as a student for over twenty years spending a good deal of time looking for the right opportunities to make myself heard. Sometimes I was successful, but most of the time my thoughts found comfort internalized within me.

A moment from my interview with Dr. Josefina Tinajero (right) on October 12, 2012, at Education Building, UTEP. (Herman Delgado/Social Justice Initiative)

Building Bridges: Internship at Media Changemakers shows me a way to connect the academy and the community

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Just change: media, stories, and actions

By Moushumi Biswas

EL PASO – As a journalist-turned-academic, I was at a vantage point last fall when I decided to intern with the Media Changemakers (MCM) as its Media and Communication Specialist. On the one hand I was an outsider, a media professional who had years of experience in communicating with the community as a reporter and photojournalist; on the other, I was looking at the community from the point of view of the academy. Thus, I was able to straddle both sides as I worked with the MCM, an interventional platform of the Social Justice Initiative (SJI) of the University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Communication. Dr. Lucia Durá was my mentor and Dr. Arvind Singhal and Bobby Gutierrez, my co-mentors. This internship was part of my Community Literacy Internship service-learning class, which I took in the fall as part of my doctoral coursework in Rhetoric and Composition.

Lucia Durá speaks about nurturing habits of the eye to see the beauty of the pigeon. (Moushumi Biswas/Social Justice Initiative)

Just Story Hour features creative deviance

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Just change: media, stories, and actions

By Moushumi Biswas

EL PASO – It was a celebration of innovative minds at Just Story Hour at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, UTEP, on October 15. The theme for the bright and sunny early fall afternoon was “thinking to make a difference.” It was the signature bi-annual event of the Social Justice Initiative (SJI), which is housed in UTEP’s Department of Communication, held in conjunction with the YWCA’s Week without Violence and the Rubin Center’s exhibit, Shifting Sands: Recent Videos from the Middle East. The SJI’s motto is “cultivating the habits of the heart” instead of the “habits of the mind” to break the status quo in conversations and actions about issues of justice, equity and peace. In accordance with its motto, the SJI invited guests who have created new approaches to tackle existing challenges. For instance, there was “mathemusician” Larry Lesser who composed songs to increase awareness and motivation in mathematics.