Jarrard is a Scholar of Biblical Studies with a focus on the Hebrew Bible.  He began the lecture by describing his evolution as a scholar, beginning in his hometown, Richmond, Virginia, which was described as having the “distinct dishonor of being the capital of the confederacy.” The town, which is full of (confederate) monuments, shaped his thinking about the importance and meaning of these structures. His upcoming book is driven by a desire to explore how monuments in the ancient world affected the writers of the Bible, as he explained, “how do monuments affect the way we think about the past and the way we transmit these stories?”

He highlighted how those who study or engage with the Bible often attempt to parse out the history from the law, but he sees them as inseparable elements. He explained that the legal code of the Bible is almost inconceivable without Exodus, which follows a long history of monuments that explicitly link history with law — “laws and decrees tend to be commemorative … and also mark specific events.” Jarrard argued that the Bible mimics the events of the monuments around the writers of time, lacking adequate resources to construct physical monuments of their own, Biblical writers constructed a textual monument. 

The exploration and discussion of these monuments is vital to his book, but many of them are owned by or located in European museums, and to obtain even a photograph for use requires an exorbitant fee. Jarrard noted that his “ability to understand monuments relies on using exploits of colonial activity,” and he wondered how to reckon with this for his book.

“I can’t divorce my project from [its] ethical implications … the objects I study are only available because of exploitation of the Middle East, which was often justified using the Bible [itself],” Jarrard continued, “My work is paradoxically grounded in postcolonial theory … I try to separate the work I’m doing from monetarily incentivizing museums to hold onto objects of contested origin … [I want to] push against what I think of as orientalist impulses which want to cleave the Bible from its context in the Middle East.”

Jarrard and de Veer worked together to develop a new way for these monuments to be presented in the book, and settled on de Veer (who has artistic background and experience) drawing the monuments. De Veer explained in their portion of the lecture that this had the added benefit of increasing legibility, as monuments are often large, damaged and old.

Before coming into this role, de Veer had taken several classes with Jarrard, and the two have developed a close relationship. But de Veer explained that, “this is the first time that I’ve really been able to incorporate my academic interest of religious studies with my art.”

The process of creating the drawings was labor intensive, especially at the beginning as Jarrard and de Veer worked together to craft a unique style, with de Veer sometimes creating as many as ten different versions of a drawing. Although tedious at times, de Veer explains how much they have enjoyed the undertaking. 

“It has been really inspiring, because it just shows that you don’t have to do the predetermined thing. You can go outside of the box and think about reparative and critical thinking that goes beyond the norms of what academia has instilled,” de Veer said. 

The lecture was well received and one of the Student Administrative Assistants for the religion department, Ella Kromm ’24, commented on how much she enjoyed the lecture.

“Both of them did a really great job presenting …and making it so people could understand, even if they weren’t coming from the background of a religion major or Biblical Studies,” continuing, she said, “[de Veer’s] artistic talent, and their ability to recreate these monuments … it was so beautifully intricate, all the details that they were able to incorporate.” 

De Veer also noted how the research process has brought them back to Wellesley, and has encouraged them to think about the College’s place as a community within this scholarship.

“He [Jarrard] did a bunch of research on a piece that the Davis Museum owns. He looked at the provenance of it, because it didn’t have any record … It stirs the thinking process about where, even at [a small institution like] Wellesley, we stand in the colonial ramifications of looting and the diasporic element of what comes after that,” they said, continuing, “ … I think that it’s something that I’ll carry with me, the spirit of pressing back against that convention of what academics and what scholars are supposed to do and what they’re supposed to look like.”

Our Inquiry to Action project “The BIPOC Youth Perspective” intends to contextualize our course contents in the Wellesley College community and demonstrate our individual commitments to making education more equitable. Specifically, we want to contextualize the racial disparities and structural racism found in a schooling system that is built on white supremacy through investigating the education trajectories of Wellesley students that led them here. Although this is only a very limited portrait of the entire BIPOC student population at Wellesley, in conducting these interviews, we endeavored to center voices that are not usually at the center of their own educational experiences. Ultimately, despite the differences in the students we interviewed, there were a few common threads that we found in multiple interviews. While still acknowledging the diversity of experiences that BIPOC youth have in their education, it is important to expand on these commonalities in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges BIPOC students face and how their experiences can be made more equitable in the future.

Four Big Themes:

1. Who do you go to class with? Did they grow up with experiences similar to yours? Due to the way school systems are intentionally designed in the US, we often go to school with students in our neighborhood, which are determined by race and socioeconomic class. So more often than not, classrooms were homogenous and this was the first common theme we saw in our interviews and through personal experiences. The system builds upon itself and leads to further homogeneity and clustering of resources.
2. The inaccessibility of opportunities and resources. Many high schools in the United States lack accessible opportunities for academic advancement for students of color. In most high schools, students have access to college preparation programs and enrichment activities, but those programs are usually only available to students that present as high achieving. We can not limit access to college preparation programs and enrichment activities to only students that earn the highest grades or present as intelligent students. We must make these opportunities available to all students in different capacities through diverse college access programs that prioritize exposing students to all access to college life. In the Wellesley College community, marginalized BIPOC students express educational inequity in this community through financial insecurity, less diversity of class offerings and less access to student research positions for students without former research experience. Wellesley must address these disparities by rethinking the financial aid package and expanding access to marginalized students earlier on in early research programs that are available to a larger number of underrepresented students across departments. Also, students are in need of consistent mentorship and support from faculty and many marginalized students in our interviews accredit their academic success to the strong relationships that they have with their professors. Representation, funding and mentorship is essential to education justice, and the College must intentionally develop support networks for marginalized students in order for Wellesley to reckon with the educational disparities that exist on this campus and beyond. 
3. The third common theme is that BIPOC parent involvement faced different barriers: immigrant parents, parents who did not finish school, parents who had to work to put their children through school and others. When asked about parent involvement, all of us and the academic institutions had in our mind a strict view of what this means — participating in meetings, talking with teachers, going to school events and even helping the student with homework. However, we now reject this view and must consider that this behavior is not inclusive for parents who have to work full-time, or single parents, for example. Although our interviews had different reasons to explain why their parents were not “involved” in their academic journey, this common thread of their parents not being able to fully support and participate in their school communities symbolizes the lack of accessibility schools have inside their programs and commitment to cultural exclusion. There needs to be a redefinition of parent’s involvement that includes parents who have significant work responsibilities and whose children attend schools that are far from their neighborhoods. When a parent works full-time to put their child in school, this is parent involvement. When a parent goes to another country to find a better life and, consequently, educational opportunities for this child, this is parent involvement. When a parent encourages a student to go to school when they themselves did not, this is parent involvement. Recognizing those different ways parents are involved at school is important to POC students recognize that school is also a space for their community represented by their parents and that they are valued.
4. Lastly, BIPOC students can encounter unique challenges when faced with dual marginalization. The BIPOC community is not monolithic, and low-income is not synonymous with BIPOC. However, many of the students that we interviewed identify as low-income and BIPOC which directly influences their academic journeys. Prior to attending Wellesley, many students felt like their schools lacked essential resources and could have better equipped them to enter an institution like Wellesley. Many thought that Wellesley would bridge the gaps for them and equalize the disparities that they encountered prior to Wellesley. This has happened for some people, but many BIPOC students continue to feel a sense of otherness at Wellesley because the lack of diversity in some spaces can lead students to question their intelligence and insinuate that they do not belong. These types of racial microaggressions are not unique to Wellelsey, but must be addressed and combatted if we are to create an inclusive learning environment for all students. Financial disparities also exist in the BIPOC community with other BIPOC students amongst themselves and other students which perpetuates sentiments of imposterment.

Education justice looks like …

Increasing teacher diversity and representation. Having role models in classrooms that understand where we come from, what our lives outside of school looks like and the cultural selves that we bring into schools is meaningful for many BIPOC Students.

More wellness programs and accessible college preparation programs. Intentional investment into students that might not otherwise already have access to informal networks of information and know how to access these resources, often BIPOC students. As BIPOC students enter college, the importance of informal and intercommunity networks become obvious. Opportunities are often shared through word of mouth in these social settings where students are comfortable with one another. In order for these types of exchanges to occur, administrators need to invest in BIPOC student organizations and minimize budget cuts to allow students to fully participate and build relationships with their community at both the high school and university level.

More holistic financial support. The privilege of only studying for BIPOC and low-income students is not an option. As they have to support themselves and sometimes their family as well, working becomes essential because the college does not take into consideration emergency funds for surgeries/emergency flights/or other necessities related to health and wellbeing or living expenses. Students need financial security to feel belonging and thrive.

What does education justice look like for you? For a more detailed breakdown of interviews and background information visit: https://bit.ly/b-perspective

 Wellesley College, like many other institutions, has their own chapter of this fellowship, and opens applications for sophomores in their spring semester. Once selected, the fellows begin their research project during the summer before their junior year.  For example, Wellesley Senior Deyra Aguilar’s research project is an analysis on masculinity in rap culture. The analysis will not only look at how portrayals have changed over time but also how to look at the music genre as a form of resistance to white supremacy and social issues. MMUF Faculty Director Professor Irene Mata, and Program Director Teofilo Barbalho, work with these students to make sure they receive the mentorship and scholarly development they need to not only create a presentation for the regional undergraduate conferences, but also prepare for graduate study in their respective fields. 

“One of the things that makes our program especially effective is the role that mentoring plays. So, our fellows work with a faculty mentor in our department, that helps guide their research and help as they begin going into academia. They get mentoring and advice on graduate school and potential graduate programs. In addition, they get mentoring by myself and the director, Teofilo Barbalho … That is the horizontal mentoring, but there is also the vertical mentoring. [Where] the seniors mentor the juniors because they are in the program together. The senior [fellows] not only mentor the juniors but they also mentor each other,” Mata said.

With help from mentors, fellows are able to design a presentation which they display at the “MMUF Northeast Regional Undergraduate Conference”, in front of other MMUF fellows. Recently, the Wellesley Mellon Mays fellows attended the regional conference at Yale University on Oct. 5. While their research is important for understanding disparities and social issues, as students it is important for them to experience speaking in an academic space about these problems. 

“I think what is most important about the conferences is that they allow students to engage with their peers in an intellectual community that is solely focused on supporting their research, and their identities as young scholars,” Mata said. 

Mata reflected on the past conference as not only the faculty director but also as a first-gen professor that cares deeply about her students. She hopes that her fellows will take something from this experience and that it helped strengthen their confidence. 

“I hope [what] they take away from the conference is a sense of confidence in their ability to be themselves as scholars… The other thing that’s really important for students to take away is that they’re part of a community of supportive scholars, being in academia can be very isolating. Actually feeling like you’re part of a community, that helps that sense of seclusion that one can feel,” Mata said.

“The way the class has worked in the past, and [the way it works] currently, is that the class takes on a project to try to address some environmental issue on Wellesley’s campus,” George said. “In the past, we had one focus on recycling at Wellesley and one focus on composting, and the one this year … is focusing on waste reduction and waste diversion more generally on campus.”

The waste audit is one of the ways ES 300 can collect data to show what waste on campus is generally composed of. To get a diversity of waste, the class selected Bates and Green Halls to audit; Bates Hall has both dining and residential waste, while Green Hall has administrative and academic waste, which they could then use to extrapolate information about overall trends. Using a week’s worth of waste, groups of students in the class sorted through to broadly group items, such as compostables, recyclables and trash, with the help of a few volunteers. These groups were then further organized to get specific insights on what kind of waste was most prevalent. Luka Pearson ’23, the overall data manager of the project, broke down the actual data in an email correspondence.

“We found that of all waste placed in the trash, approximately 27% is plastics, 19% is food scraps, 18% is disposable dishware and food packaging, 6% is paper, 6% is glass, 1% is metals, 1% is durable goods, 1% is textiles and 21% is other miscellaneous waste,” they wrote. “Out of all waste placed in the trash, we believe 42% is correctly placed, 36% could be recycled and 22% could be composted.”

Pearson explained that these are only the preliminary calculations from the waste audit. For more in depth information, the class will be authoring a final report that is posted on the College’s website under Environmental Studies, Greening Wellesley, on the page ES 300. They also performed a recycling audit, and the results from that will also be included in the final report. 

While the students in the class were prepared with the general scope of the project and data from previous classes, the audit was open to volunteers due to the scope of work required. Plank found out about the opportunity through their friend, Maddie Speagle ’24, who was taking the class and invited them to join. Having helped to found a club about environmental science in high school, Plank was interested in helping and seeing some of the more unique things that can be found discarded on-campus.

“I actually have a succulent right now that I’m trying to nurse to life that I found in one of the trash bags. It’s not going great, but she’s still alive and I am doing everything I can to keep her that way,” Plank said. “Otherwise there was just a lot of papers, a lot of weird food … Wellesley’s got weird waste, and I’m proud to say that.”

  Chemistry major Mary Martinez Nunez ’23 first learned of the Science Summer Research Program through posters displayed on the college campus. In regards to conducting research focused on antimicrobial peptides as a means to treat infections, Martinez Nunez mentioned having access to a wide range of resources and support throughout the duration of the program.

 “We had Dr. Don Elmore and Dr. Louise Darling [available] to answer any questions at any moment when we felt like we needed something,” Martinez Nunez said. “We also had people that were running the Science Center Program. We could go to them anytime.”

  Martinez Nunez commented on the diverse pool of students who she worked with and the opportunities to interact with students and professionals outside of Wellesley that helped deepen her understanding of the work she was involved in.

  “In my lab, there were two people that have never done research before. And then it was me and another person who had done research before. So, it was a good balance and we made sure we helped each other,” Martinez Nunez said. “Every Wednesday, we had seminars from experienced scientists from different fields. It could be in biochemistry, psychology…They would come in and give us a lecture on the work they do. And we also had a panel of people who went into the industry and didn’t specifically [attend] graduate school. So that was really helpful.”

  For economics and women and gender studies student Andrea Romero ’24, the Social Science Summer Research Program was helpful in connecting participating students to the program director and professors, who served as important resources.

  “We learned a lot more from professors on campus who were in the middle of their own research. We learned more about the practices of how to present,” Romero said. “There were also check-ins with one of the directors and we were able to ask questions to get a feel of how the rest of the program would play out.”

  Romero expressed her thoughts on the social environment of campus over the summer. “Wellesley is a bit isolating. It was nice to connect with other people who were doing the program to get that sort of stress relief. But, at the same time, I wish there were more resources for keeping up with students’ mental health,” she said. “However, I was able to work on my public speaking and it felt like a really comfortable space to do that.”

  Participating students expressed their key learnings from the research program and its role in helping them refine crucial skills.

  “I think my biggest takeaway from doing research was that now I feel confident to explore fields that are research intensive or go into academia after Wellesley, so I really appreciate that about the program,” Romero said.

  The programs concluded with a presentation by the students accompanied by posters displaying students’ research and its probable future applications. Some students, like Martinez Nunez, who are part of the McNair Scholars Program, received the opportunity to present their research at the prestigious McNair UMBC 30th Annual Conference held in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Wellesley News (TWN): What is the title and main topic of your thesis?

Troccoli: “When Democracy Bites: Violent Repression in Colombia and Venezuela.” I discussed two cases where I argue that the same phenomenon was ongoing, that this strategic calculation allowed for states to feel comfortable employing repression.

Martinez-Lopez: “Characterization of Meningeal B Cells in a Murine Model of Multiple Sclerosis.” My thesis is focused on characterizing immune cell clusters. And by characterizing, I mean trying to determine when they’re most optimal during the disease progression of our mice, seeing how they’re correlated to other features of multiple sclerosis, like demyelination and ultimately all to better model multiple sclerosis and mice and hopefully use them for the development of therapeutics.

TWN: What was the most interesting finding or application of your thesis?

Troccoli:  One thing that I found during my research was that a lot of the explanations for why violent repression happened were systematic. There’s a lot of impunity, or that there is criminal violence in general, or that there’s a culture that gives a lot of weight or importance to the military. And all of those things are absolutely true about Venezuela, Colombia, and many of the cases that I looked at, […] but they didn’t explain the timing, or the intensity of the repression. I thought to myself, why do these incidents happen? Why do governments sometimes decide to repress so violently? Why do they employ certain tactics in some situations?

I tried to look at the incentives for [violence], if you would be penalized in some ways, electorally if actually there was greater danger that somebody would step in and take power if you did that or how much of a threat the protesters are considered to be. I analyzed all those factors and came up with an explanation that I think can, in some ways, predict when repression is going to be violent.

Martinez-Lopez: My thesis was a characterization project, so [it] wasn’t necessarily hypothesis-driven. But we can model features of multiple sclerosis in mice, and that these models may be similar to what we actually see in humans. It’s a one-of-a-kind model. One of the key biological or physiological features of a specific type of multiple sclerosis [MS]. MS is the aggregation of immune cells in the meninges, which is this tissue that encapsulates the brain and the spinal cord. So typically, in healthy patients, you don’t see that, but in some multiple sclerosis patients, you see that, so my lab was able to model these lymphocyte aggregates, these immune cell aggregates in the meninges of mice.

TWN: What academic experience has working on your thesis given you?

Troccoli: I had an opportunity to examine a lot of historical documents, but also just theorize and see where they fit. I interviewed a lot of people. And I think interviewing is way harder than it seems, especially because you’re speaking to people who have a government position or you’re trying really hard not to offend them by saying, ‘Oh, you made a bad decision’ or ‘you did something that put a lot of people in danger.’

Martinez-Lopez: I joined the lab [at Washington University] the summer after my sophomore year, right at the peak of COVID. So I joined the lab virtually, and I spent a lot of time reading literature, analyzing data and just getting to know the type of work that the lab was doing. And then I continued to do a bit of work that I could do virtually during my junior year. Towards the end of my junior year, I thought, okay, if I get to be in person in St. Louis this summer, I think I could use a lot of that data for a future thesis.I went to St. Louis this past summer, and I was there for 10 weeks, and I got to collect a lot of data. Since I was already familiar with so many things, it was great, because I just got there and it was time to be hands on.”