Community

Alvina is a U.S. citizen who is preparing for her first trip abroad. She will be traveling to Indonesia and the Philippines for work and has decided to extend her time away by a week to continue to travel in the region.

Alvina has been busy reading about the region, drafting travel plans and making lists of places she wants to visit and sights she wants to see. Alvina has been talking to her friends with more travel experience for advice and guidance for her time abroad.

Steven attended a community event hosted by the university to listen to a talk by a popular writer whose scholarship considers the interactions between technology and society. The speaker focused the discussion on how the algorithms that underpin social media platforms create and sustain political and ideological echo chambers, where social media users are often unconsciously sorted into invisible online communities where they more often interact with ideas and people that confirm their current thinking and worldview.

Frank has enjoyed learning about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion for many years. He is an avid reader, attends workshops and talks at the local university, and readily engages in dialogue and discussion when opportunities are presented.

Delilah has lived in her community for more than 15 years. While she has been aware of immigration as a heated political issue at a national level, rarely have conversations about immigration been broached among her friends and colleagues in town. In recent months, the discourse has changed dramatically. Delilah finds herself in multiple conversations a week where her colleagues, friends and acquaintances are openly discussing the impacts of national immigration policy on their lives and in the happenings of their town.

Anthony, Lane and Rashawn are close friends and roommates who all identify as men. Increasingly, discussions amongst themselves engage issues of sex and gender in the context of sexism, and they are sharing more vulnerably with one another about their thoughts and questions related to the epidemic of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the community.

Rajit has been contemplating for some time how he wants to become more congruent in his commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Rajit believes deeply in his commitments and wants to ensure that his behaviors align with his values. Rajit decides his next step is to communicate his commitments more openly to the people around him so he can receive more feedback on the congruence of his behaviors.

Jesse is passionate about issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, and prides himself on his engagement with people and communities different than him. Jesse identifies as a white man and is personally committed to immersing himself in spaces where he can connect with women and people of color, in particular, spaces where women and people of color are discussing and organizing for social change.

For decades, faculty and staff on campus and across Oregon have discussed informally how institutional space is allocated, lamenting that premium spaces are reserved for personnel in the highest echelons of the university. It is generally understood that classified staff, entry level positions and programs that are not regarded as “high profile” are located in less-desirable buildings.

The local college town has a community tradition at nearly all of its outdoor sporting events (including secondary, post-secondary and minor league) of firing rifles during to signal when the home team scores a point or wins a game.

A team of community volunteers has assembled to coordinate their local community’s annual women’s film festival. The women’s film festival recruits and selects short films from women in the community and screens their productions each week throughout the summer. The film festival is a local tradition, spanning three decades, with an explicit mission of highlighting filmmakers from the organizers’ town and surrounding rural region.