Wellness Week seeks to improve mental health
By CLAIRE GOUDREAU | April 11, 2019Last week the Student Government Association (SGA) organized their first ever Wellness Week, hosting events aimed at improving students’ mental health and well-being.
Last week the Student Government Association (SGA) organized their first ever Wellness Week, hosting events aimed at improving students’ mental health and well-being.
The Johns Hopkins University Program in Racism, Immigration and Citizenship (RIC) hosted a two-day event called “Eyes on Surveillance: (In)security in Everyday Life” last weekend. This was the RIC’s Eighth Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference and consisted of five panel discussions, followed by a roundtable discussion with speakers from the ACLU of Maryland, Black Lives Matter DC and Open the Government.
The Forums on Race in America series hosted an event called Bridging Political Divides through Civil Discourse on Tuesday in Mason Hall. The event featured Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), and Vilma Martinez, civil rights activist and former ambassador to Argentina, in a talk about the current political landscape in the United States.
The Hopkins Near Eastern Studies Department hosted its 41st lecture in the annual Albright lecture series on Tuesday, April 9.
Real Food Hopkins, a student organization promoting food justice and sustainability, launched the Pour Out Pepsi campaign on March 11. According to Real Food Co-Presidents Katie Smith and Grace Windheim, PepsiCo has a history of violating human rights, labor laws and sustainability regulations. The group aims to convince Hopkins Dining to end the exclusivity contract with PepsiCo. This contract requires that 80 percent of all beverages sold on campus — not just soft drinks — are manufactured by PepsiCo.
The Rosenburg Exhibition made its second stop on its U.S. tour at Hopkins on Thursday, March 28. The exhibit highlighted historians’ findings on Germany’s post-World War II Ministry of Justice. Named “Rosenburg” after the Ministry’s first official residence, the display showcased the many former Nazi party members that served as judges, jurists and lawyers for the Nuremberg trials. The exhibit will be on display until May 1.
Over Alumni Weekend, protestors demonstrated in the Glass Pavilion during the President and Deans’ Breakfast on Saturday to call for an end to the University’s contracts with ICE and for the University to halt its plans to create a private police force. The protestors were a part of a larger sit-in protest of approximately 75 students, members of the Baltimore community and faculty members that began on 1 p.m. on Wednesday, April 3 in Garland Hall.
This fall, the Office of Student Leadership and Involvement (SLI) informed dozens of student groups that they had deficits in their accounts going back several years, sometimes upward of a decade.
The Maryland General Assembly gave a bill that would allow the University to create its own private police force their final approval on Monday. Following this, University President Ronald J. Daniels and Dean of Medical Faculty Paul B. Rothman released a statement commenting on the passage of Senate Bill (SB) 793, titled the Community Safety and Strengthening Act. The Maryland House of Delegates voted 94-42 in favor of the bill, while the Senate voted 42-2 in favor.
Over 200 members of the Hopkins and Baltimore community protested the creation of a Hopkins private police force, as well as the University’s contracts with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), on Wednesday in Wyman Park Dell. Shortly after the rally, demonstrators marched to University President Ronald J. Daniels’ house. They then continued on to Garland Hall, where members of Students Against Private Police (SAPP) and the Hopkins Coalition against ICE were holding a 24-hour sit-in that had begun earlier that afternoon.
University administrators released the 28-page JHU Report on Faculty Composition on March 31 using data collected up until November 2017.
Students hosted the second “Lunchbox Moment” event on Monday night at the Charles Commons Salons. The event, whose title refers to the common experience of shame shared by Asian Americans when they bring cultural food to school, was organized by 10 Asian American students to create a space for both Asians and Asian Americans to discuss interracial dating, a racialized food system, navigating between Asian and Asian American identities, and inequaity within Asian American communities.
The English department hosted a symposium titled “Early Black Utopias” on Friday, March 29. The symposium featured a variety of speakers who analyzed the presentation of black utopias in literature.
European Horizons, an organization that is part of an international, student-run think tank, hosted a discussion called “The Brexit Mess” on Thursday. The group, which started on campus in 2016, organizes discussions and brings in speakers with the aim of broadening student engagement with issues in Europe. The group attempted to sort through issues with Brexit and to reflect on Great Britain’s current status with regards to the European Union.
The Student Government Association (SGA) debated a request from Students Against Private Police (SAPP) about promoting a student protest at their weekly meeting on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Charles Commons. They also discussed a bill to fund Senior Week and an amendment to the SGA Health Accommodations bill.
David Grusky, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, led a discussion about current research on socieoeconomic inequality in the U.S. and moderated a workshop on social policy and inequality on Thursday, March 28. Grusky also serves as the director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Amid calls for her resignation, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh announced that she will be taking an indefinite leave of absence for personal health reasons on Monday.
Eid Suleman, a Palestinian activist, discussed his experiences of life under Israeli occupation in Umm al-Khair, a city in Area C, the part of the West Bank that is under Israeli military and civil control. Suleman addressed the relationship between the Palestinian residents of Area C, the Israeli Civil Administration and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Suleman fights against home demolitions by conducting international speaking tours and creating multimedia artwork. J Street U, a student group advocating for a peaceful two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, hosted the event.
Filmmaker and activist Boots Riley spoke at the Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS) in Shriver Hall on Tuesday. Riley, who directed the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, discussed the intersectionality between poverty, capitalism and racism — stressing the importance of social justice.
Baltimore History and Culture and Underground Railroad Tours co-hosted a walking tour titled, “Slavery, The Underground Railroad and Emancipation in Baltimore,” on Saturday, March 30 at the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park.