Reflections on our intersectional event

I’ve been thinking a lot about our intersectional event. I’m glad we were able to showcase some of what we’ve been doing this semester, and I think it was a really good idea to have the portrait gallery leading up to our event because it drew a lot of people in and it sparked conversations between people who were unable to attend our event. It’s unfortunate that putting the zine together produced so much stress and anxiety for so many people, but the end result was really amazing. I’m so glad we have it to remember each other and this semester by.

One thing that’s been on my mind since Friday relates to a frustration some of us have had for a while. We spoke in class a few weeks ago about feeling like no one outside of our cluster has the skills or has developed the patience to listen in the way we’ve been practicing. We voiced concerns that the conversations we would have at the event wouldn’t be as generative as we would like them to be. I think our predictions were right in some ways. We didn’t have the time we needed to really get to the meat of the subjects we were dealing with. In my group it felt like people were just getting comfortable with each other when it was time to stop. That was disappointing. But something happened that I didn’t expect. Two young women in my group (first years) said they didn’t want to leave. They said they felt they had really been listened to and they didn’t want to let our conversation stop. That’s how I feel about our semester ending. The last few times we’ve been together I’ve felt the intense desire to stay. To keep you all of you around me. To keep talking. To keep listening. We made people outside of our cluster aware of a different way of interacting. We made them want to be part of what we’ve created. I think we’ve really accomplished our goal here.