Starting off at MS Swim, I genuinely did not think of it as a form of activism. I have volunteered routinely at various organizations since I was 14, and it has just become a way of life for me. However after going through this course, Studies in Feminist Activism, I have come to understand the true activism that takes place through volunteer work.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) offers various different meal plans for students to purchase throughout the entire semester. These meal plans come with their own individual perks and benefits, as some meal plans are catered more towards certain students than others. However, these meal plans are not free, and range any where from a few hundred dollars for commuter-only plans to a few thousand dollars for full-time on-campus students. Because meal plans are relatively expensive and require students to use these plans only for on-campus food suppliers, the goals of this project were to bring awareness to the “real-cost” of a meal and if the cost of these meal plans provided by UMBC accurately reflect on the quality of food that is provided.
When we first started this project, we knew very little about UMBC’s Gender Inclusive housing option. The information available on it was scarce and outdated. In addition, both our individual experiences and the experiences we’d heard about from others who had applied for Gender Inclusive Housing (GIH) in the past made us concerned for the situation. We’d heard that RAs and those in Living Learning Communities were not allowed to participate in Gender Inclusive Housing. We experienced being assigned an apartment instead of getting to choose where we live like those in standard housing. We were told that someone’s Gender Inclusive Housing application was denied. It seemed to us as though many aspects of the Gender Inclusive housing process were at best, inconvenient, and at worst, outright discriminatory. Continue reading
Upon the one year anniversary of the Baltimore Uprising and the murder of Freddie Gray, I noticed something very big missing from activism in the city, something that was there and prominent this time last year— Continue reading
Studies in Feminist Activism 