A weekly round-up curated by Women’s Center staff member, Michael Jalloh Jamboria

In the spirit of my friend, who gave us the glorious name ‘Slaying on the Weekly’, every week I will be bringing you some interesting, funny or thought-provoking content from the internet! Be sure to join us next week for more and continue to slay!

October 20th was the last of the Presidential Debate series. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, and soon it’ll be time to vote. While it’s too late to register online, you can register in person (if you live in Maryland) on November 3rd.

Critical Social Justice is NEXT WEEK! Be sure to join us, and our campus partners, during the CSJ events happening from October 24th- 28th. Also, check out our series on the Women’s Center Blog on things you need to know about our Keynote Speaker, Disability Justice and Residential Segregation.

Equally important, I want to make sure we are all taking care of ourselves. Engage in whatever self-care practices make you feel the best. Express and allow yourself to feel the emotions you have! The Women’s Center, The Mosaic Center, the Queer Student Lounge and the Counseling Center are campus resources that are here to help with that process.

Until next week!

A blog reflection by Joe Levin-Manning, Graduate Coordinator for LGBTQ Programs

You… yes, YOU are invited to attend Fall Visitation weekend at CMU’s Heinz College! 

We want you to participate in our “Advisor Track” during the weekend of November 11-12, 2016. And we can provide a travel subsidy for you if you are able to attend this event!

The Advisor Track has been designed to provide our colleagues with a deeper understanding of the master’s programs offered by our school and what types of careers our alumni pursue. The Advisor Track welcomes a variety of people including:

·         Undergraduate faculty and advisors

·         Staff/ administrators at colleges and universities  

·         Employees at non-profit orgs and government agencies   

·         Mentors

In essence, those who are working with young people and serve as role models and trusted sources of information for individuals who may be considering the next step in their education and professional journey. We want to help you understand what we do as an educational institution and how our graduate programs can benefit your students in their careers.

You may review the Tentative Agenda (pdf) on our website:

http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/visit-heinz-college/fall-visitation/download.aspx?id=9953

Please note- an “Advisor session” will take place from 9:00am – 10:00am on Saturday, November 12 (it is not listed on the tentative agenda). 

To help reduce the expense for you (and/or a colleague) to travel to our campus in Pittsburgh, PA for the weekend, we are happy to extend a $250.00 travel reimbursement. When you RSVP to attend, we will email specific details about the reimbursement process.

RSVP to attend the event as an Advisor: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2VHWBM9

Visit the Event Page for hotel suggestions, maps and other helpful details: http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/visit-heinz-college/fall-visitation/index.aspx 

Regards,

David

When I was little, I used to draw maps of my neighborhood. Once I was done with my neighborhood, I’d move onto creating maps for make believe neighborhoods including everything I thought a community should have – homes, trees, a playground and hospital, a library.

When the Critical Social Justice planning team picked the theme of Home this year, just a few short weeks later, the City Paper published its “Maps” issue. The front cover immediately caught my attention and took me back to my childhood of my own map making days.

As our intro blog post to this year’s theme states: “In honor of UMBC’s 50th Anniversary, this year’s CSJ theme of Home recognizes UMBC as a home to many of us.  As we celebrate and contemplate UMBC as a home for learning, activism, and social change, we embrace the opportunity to invest ourselves in creating meaningful change here on campus in addition to taking our newly gained insights and knowledge with us back home, wherever that may be.” With this in mind, as we read through the City Paper maps issue, we wondered what it would be like to create our own maps of UMBC.

Since the fall semester began, the Women’s Center Advisory Board and student staff have all made their own campus maps. This week all of the Women’s Center discussion groups will also be creating their campus maps. When creating our maps, we asked each person to consider specific prompts such as: What is your favorite place on campus? Where can you can find others in your community or get your needs met? What is something you want to change? 

It’s been fascinating to see the ways in which home has shown up in each of our maps and the ways in which challenges and complexities of home present themselves as well. Each person’s map tells a different story about who they are and what their experience is like at UMBC. It had allowed for us to have conversations of belonging and mattering, discussions of accessibility, environmental justice, and activism, as well as reflections on ways to bridge our home at UMBC with our other homes to include Baltimore.

What would your campus map look like?

Stop by Main Street this Wednesday, October 19th from 11:30-1:30pm to create your UMBC map and pick up a Critical Social Justice: Home events calendar.

Campus maps will be displayed at the “Who Gets a Home on College” CSJ event on Thursday, October 27th which will take place on Main Street from 11:30-1:30pm.