Highlighted 2004 Projects
Megan Gabriel, Natural Sciences
Entitled "Sexual Assault at St. Mary's College: A Campaign to Reform Response and Prevention
Policies," my SMP was devoted to reforming the programs, policies, and resources about sexual
assault at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Sexual assault by an acquaintance is pervasive and
largely ignored problem on many college campuses, including SMCM's, where more than four percent
of students experience attempted or completed sexual penetration against their will in a given
school year. While my project was done in service to St. Mary's and its students, it also offered
me first-hand experience in lobbying and policy change. I produced two significant publications
as a part of my project: a report on the status of sexual assault resources at the college, which
was distributed to concerned students, faculty, and administrators, and a web resource for campus
survivors of sexual assault, their friends, and sexual assault activists.
Because this project was political, rather than strictly academic, another focus of my work was
organizing the college community to respond to the issues that I was concerned about and to effect
the changes that I was working toward. Organizing involved meeting with administrators, students,
sexual assault survivors, and sexual assault activists: writing and responding to articles
published in the school newspaper, The Point News; giving presentations to the Student
Government Association (SGA), the Faculty Senate, my peers and the Sexual Assault Task Force that
was created in response to the work of my SMP; and recommending and pushing forward a resolution
through the SGA.
Susan Weddell, Social Justice (a cross-disciplinary program in philosophy, sociology,
psychology, art, and English)
Entitled "VIGIL/ANTE," my SMP concentrated on the current ethical and personal dilemmas surrounding
sexual assault and rape, and I researched the psychological trauma they cause as well as the social
implications surrounding the notion that we, as Americans, live in a Rape Culture. To support this
theory, I looked specifically at the media through the fashion industry as an example of the prevalence
of violent and/or disturbing images in our lives. My SMP consisted of a 90+-page story, with footnotes
from my research. I reflected upon my own experiences as a survivor of date rape, and the problems my
friends and community have faced as well. My initial goal was to educate myself and others regarding
our current situation within a culture that supports and/or does not condemn the ideologies and beliefs
that lead people to rape and commit sexual crimes, and I attempted this with my presentation, an
"anti-fashion fashion show," called "Sex, Drugs, Fashion, and False Advertising." That Was really fun
because I had 30+ students helping me to put on a multi-media presentation that would use visual language
to support my claims. Over 100 students attended, and several plan to continue the efforts of my friends
to change related policies on our campus.
Highlighted 2000 Projects
Catherine Greene, Chinese Studies
After spending a semester in Yunnan province, China, living and working with the women of the minority
Nakhi culture, Greene researched the ways in which certain women-centered cultures might require a
shift in perspective for aid organizations. Nakhi women run the businesses and control much of the
economic system of their cultural sphere. Examining both the Nakhi culture of China and the Igbo culture
of southeastern Nigeria, Greene argues that rather than thinking of these cultures as matriarchal, we
should re-frame them as women-centered, allowing for the role of both men and women within the various
aspects of the society. Acknowledging the women-centered facets of these societies allows us to see the
ways in which women can play a primary role in development-economic, political, social, and agricultural.
Greene used her own translations of interviews while conducted in China to complete her project.
Dana Greil, Gender Studies
Gender Sexuality Cyberspace
Cyberspace is a unique discursive site, potentially accessible to a diverse population (simultaneously, the
capacity seems unlimited), where desire for recognition and the fulfillment of the dream of subjecthood
are juxtaposed with a unique ability to remain anonymous and private if one so chooses. This space is
inhabited by author-subjects appropriating, reinscribing, and sometimes subverting discourses of power that
surround gender and sexuality by performing textually multiple (created) identities. This vast new virtual
universe is always already defined as new and open-it is our next frontier (to be conquered?)-and yet there
exist pre-codified systems of being and communicating online. I examine this culturally constructed space as
contingent on, and not separate from, our everyday realities and everyday places, taking extra care to
investigate issues of embodiment and identity formation as tied to and affected by the technology that supports
cyberspace from reality. The format of the project, a website, attempts to employ and extend the same randomizing,
webbing, and hypertexting possibilities that inform my consideration of cyber reality as a site imbued with
subversive potential.Sarah Mercure, English
This project evolved out of an interest in women-centered self-identification, and developed into a theoretically
informed examination of issues surrounding identity, text, and authority. Using the writings of unconventional
autobiographers Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and bell hooks as a basis for discussion, Mercure wrote an
essay that challenged traditional definitions of autobiography as a genre, discussing questions such as "who gets
to write (and publish) autobiographies?" "what kinds of lives, and kinds of events, get written about?" "how
important is 'truth' to autobiography" "what form(s) can autobiographical narrative take?" "what is the relationship
between living a life and (re)creating it in textual form?" "why do people write, and read, autobiographies?" and
above all, "what power can the disempowered through gaining control of of their lives on the page?"
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