“Stories matter. Stories are a reflection of power.” When Alicia Garza, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, said this during her keynote address at the close of the 2018 Race & Pedagogy National Conference held on campus last September, it struck me that this was the crux of the conference. Its title,“Radically Re-Imagining the Project of Justice: Narratives of Rupture, Resilience, and Liberation,” was a call for participants to share their stories and to speak into the spaces that have rendered them invisible.
Siddharth Ramakrishnan, associate professor of biology and the Jennie M. Caruthers Chair in Neuroscience, has a weird brain. He is a master of the microscopic details and concepts of neuroscience—while a research scientist at Columbia University, he designed microchips to record from brain cells, and in his lab at Puget Sound, he studies the development and physiology of reproductive neurons in zebrafish—but he is also a creative visionary, capable of a more spatial, fluid way of seeing the world.
Mauricio Mendez ’20 was 3 years old when he first experienced otherness, being pushed to the margins of a world that he had believed to be his own. Another child at daycare had spit in his face, and though he spoke no English, having recently moved to the United States from Mexico, Mauricio was determined to tell the teacher. “The lady didn’t understand,” he says. “The only other way to explain it was by demonstrating.”
The clock is ticking. Only one hour remains before the winning team is chosen—and a trip to New York City and $500 are on the line. Kala`i Beck ’20 and his three teammates are huddled around a table in the student center’s Murray Boardroom, brainstorming ways to repurpose coconut husks and shells left over from the production of coconut water.
Twenty years ago, Tanya Saine Durand ’93 and her colleagues at the nonprofit Children’s Museum of Tacoma found themselves wondering if their jobs—their mission—should continue to exist. After an unsuccessful fundraising campaign and a steep rent hike, the museum was facing substantial debt. “We were in this very humble place of asking the community, ‘Should we shut our doors?’ And resoundingly, folks said, ‘No. This is a valuable asset. We need to strengthen it.’”
