As part of Diversity Education Week, the University is bringing the national Tunnel of Oppression project to campus for the second time.
The project is presented by Multicultural Student Affairs and the Office for Institutional Equity & Diversity with contributions from the GLBT and the Women’s Center. It aims to bring diversity awareness and education in a more direct and in-your-face way.
“The premise of it is to bring awareness to different types of oppression. We are only able to bring a certain amount of types of oppression because we have limited space, but depending on where you go, it’s a different experience,” Abraham Dones , assistant director for the Office of Hispanic Student Affairs, said.
According to Dones , last year the tunnel decoration was very general, but they plan to make it more personal this year.
“There are some real challenges on our campus, and we don’t always have the opportunity to engage in conversation about those challenges… whether it’s sexual violence, homophobic, racist, discriminatory behavior, harassment… I think that we don’t take the opportunity to really sit down and talk about some of the experiences that some of us have had to endure and go through,” Dones said.
In particular, the GLBT Center’s space, based on heterosexism , is going to be mainly in response to the vandalism in Harrelson Hall last October.
“This year the GLBT Center actually did a video of what people experienced on campus… so it really brought their personal experience versus just a skit,” Rebekah Jaeger , program assistant for the GLBT Center, said.
The exhibit will move from room to room and each segment will contain a skit or a video that expresses a type of oppression. The rooms this year include topics such as body image, disabilities, racism and homophobia.
“I think it helps students who may not see diversity in their everyday. They walk through campus kind of blindly and they see something happen in the tunnel, maybe not, but they don’t really understand what’s going on. So it shows right in their face,” Jaeger said.
The program is made up of volunteers from across campus, but the scripts and skits are prepared ahead of time to remain consistent despite the various guides and performers.
“What we want to do is have a participant’s experience in the tunnel be the same… we want to make sure that our scenes and messages are consistent, and that everyone is able to experience the same Tunnel this year,” Yulisa Lin, assistant director of University Housing-West, said.
However, the tunnel also aims to go beyond just awareness and wants to educate those who participate in how to combat this oppression actively.
“We don’t want to leave anyone feeling bad or negative, so there is an opportunity to empower yourself. It’s our Empowerment Room where you will be able to write different statements that reflect possible stances that you would take if you ever witnessed some of the oppression you experienced in the tunnel,” Dones said.
Students may not even realize that some events have happened on campus, and the tunnel will bring some of these to the forefront, Dones said.
“With such a large campus, you can easily miss an incident that happens and not even realize it… and there is nothing we can do about that. This is an opportunity to really think, ‘I didn’t know that’,” Dones said.
The Tunnel runs Feb. 20-22 at half-hour intervals and students can sign up via a request form (http:// go.ncsu.edu / tunneltourrequest ). However, Dones stated they will try to accommodate walk-ins.
“There is a lot of passion about diversity on campus, especially through our multiple offices, and this is one of ways to pull all of those passions together… to really bring a great opportunity to campus,” Lin said.