JusTalks Event Charges Emotions, Seeks to Grow

Late afternoon on Saturday, Wilson Hall erupted in cheers. The 130 students who had just participated in JusTalks, an all-day, student led discussion event that encourages social justice dialogue, were wrapping up a day of heavy exchanges with dancing, loud whoops and even a birthday ballad to one lucky partaker. To an outsider, the crowd’s enthusiasm sounded not unlike the ending ovations to an admired summer camp, an odd comparison for an event one participant described as “emotionally taxing.”

From 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., first- and second-year attendees collaborated with junior and senior facilitators and organizers in a giant think-tank of serious questions. Questions about race relations, gender, class, sexuality, ability and the effects of these influences on their Middlebury experience.

It is difficult to describe all that went on in the auditorium. One could simply say that people talked. Yet the kind of conversations JusTalks encouraged in first-years, at whom the program was primarily aimed, were big group discussions, intimate hour-long conversations one-on-one and open platforms to respond to posed prompts.

For Mandy Kimm ’17, who decided to be a JusTalks facilitator after participating as a freshman last year, the day was about building empathy.

“Confidentiality is really important,” she said. “It’s a safe space for people to open up and share things that they really wouldn’t be able to, or feel comfortable, or have the occasion to share about themselves and their situations in normal everyday life. It definitely gets very personal.”

Kimm led a talk on mental health and emotional and spiritual well-being with a group of freshman, discussing “how Middlebury is or is not a place that supports emotional well being,” she said. She added that some of the questions addressed were, “How acceptable is it to talk to people when you’re struggling? How does it feel to look around and see how everyone seems to be putting on this façade of being totally fine and being on top of it?” She later added, “That discussion was really meaningful.”

According to Kimm, in an activity called Open Spaces, students chose to join facilitated groups focusing on topics ranging from racial profiling, to athlete or non-athlete relations, to LGBTQ life at Midd, to rape culture and sexual assault. Students also got to suggest two categories of their own choosing, which resulted in one group focusing on microaggressions and language communication, and another on body image, one of the most popular groups of the hour.

For Anna Iglitzin ’17.5, Open Spaces captured the spirit of the day.

“For my first section I talked about racial profiling and race relations following Ferguson and Garner and all the judicial cases, and I just thought it was fascinating because it felt like everyone really wanted to be there and to learn something,” she said. “Everyone was sharing from a place they felt comfortable too so a lot of students talked about not knowing how to engage  and a lot of students talked about the ways in which they had been personally affected by racial profiling, and it felt like a really cool balance of people who came from different viewpoints.”

A Feb Orientation leader this upcoming February, Iglitzin is already thinking about the ways Justalks will spill over to reach incoming students.

For the organizers of the event, nine upperclassmen women for whom JusTalks is a personal project, this level of engagement proves that there is a continuous need for such conversations on campus.

“[JusTalks] was basically started by a group of students who felt that our college’s curriculum doesn’t have a space to talk about inequality and power and privilege,” organizer Afi Yellow-Duke ’15 said. “We’re not living up to the mission of the college, which talks about being able to have students lead Middlebury and engage with the world. By not being able to talk about certain inequities, we’re not doing that.”

Fellow organizer Molly McShane ’16.5 added, “I think people genuinely want to have the conversations but just don’t know how, so I think by giving people the outlet, there are a lot of people who wanted to take up that opportunity.”

One of the main long-term goals of JusTalks is to make it a mandatory portion of as many first-year seminars as possible. Peer Institutions like Williams College have already mandated JustTalks-equivalent conversations across all grade levels in an event called Claiming Williams Day.

But for now, they are making strides to integrate JusTalks into classroom curriculum in first-year seminars.

“In the same way you have a discussion section to a class or a screening, that would be a once-a-week meeting, an hour long,” explained organizer Kate McCreary ’15.

So far, Justalks have gotten mostly positive feedback from first year seminar professors; six out of the seven they spoke with are considering experimenting with a Justalks discussion section. Three have already agreed to make it mandatory.

The goal of mandatory participation may sound extreme, and even like a potential dilution of the enthusiasm students like Iglitzin and Kimm enjoyed so much at Saturday’s program. Yet considering that the students who didn’t register for last week’s Justalks are likely those very same students who are less comfortable addressing the issues raised at the event, the organizers’ effort to reach those less willing or shy members of the student body makes some sense.

“I would rather someone be there even if they didn’t want to be there — and sat there the whole day like grouchy and were sitting back with their arms crossed or whatever — I’d rather that person be there to experience something like JusTalks at least once in their lifetime at Middlebury because at least they’ve registered that conversation,” Yellow-Duke said. “You could easily go through four years at Middlebury without talking about these things and that to me is worse than anything else.”

“We’re not trying to teach anyone anything, because we’re still learning,” organizer Jiya Pandya ’17 said. “The reason we keep coming back to this and we keep organizing it is because we see value in it, every time we do this. We just wish more people would be willing to go through the process with us.”

Some participants, like Iglitzin, agree on a more consistent, seminar-like model of JusTalks over a full day of the program, although for a different reason.

“It was charged,” said Iglitzin, reflecting on the atmosphere. “I would say that the problem with anything like that is that the ‘let down’ is hard too; you’re in this environment for a whole day, [it’s] super intense, and then you sort of walk out of it and you walk back into your life. I feel like I’m sort of still today on Monday feeling tired and trying to remember what it was that was so emotionally taxing and what was challenging.”

Iglitzin captures the fatigue of many of the participants of this year’s JusTalks, who tackled some of big questions about social inequality and faced their own conflicts of personal and group identity. For these students, it’s a pleasant weariness, not unlike the ache of sore muscles after an intense workout — satisfying and humming with the anticipation of growth from another day at the gym.