Inside Westlands Gate

Funky Visions
Earlier this year three visual arts students locked themselves in a windowless basement room in Bates with foodstuffs and sleeping bags. They didn’t emerge for a week. No, it wasn’t a protest. It was art... | full story

Rehearsing Reality
A young couple sits side by side in a cramped room, the husband’s arm around his wife’s shoulders. Across from them, so close that her knees almost touch theirs, a counselor gently explains the biology behind a dreaded disease that has taken root in their family. Through quiet tears, the wife asks what the future holds for their baby daughter... | full story

Theatre Outreach Program and Writer Santiago Honored
In April, the Westchester Arts Council—the largest private nonprofit arts council in New York State—recognized the Sarah Lawrence Theatre Outreach Program with a prestigious 2003 Arts Award. Another award went to writer Esmeralda Santiago MFA ’92, an alumna of the College’s Graduate Program in Writing... | full story

Spring Break in Havana
Fourteen students and three members of the College’s faculty and staff spent part of Spring Break in Cuba, attending (and, in some cases, participating in) the Neoliberal Globalization and Workers’ Rights International Conference in Havana. The students were classmates in “Labor Law and Transnational Solidarity in an Era of Globalization,” taught by Dean Hubbard... | full story

The Sisters of the Civil Rights Movement
The participants in this year’s annual women’s history month conference—“Sisters in Struggle: Honoring the Women Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement”—remember and revere these women, even if history tends to forget them. “The Civil Rights movement is often perceived as masculine. We need to correct that,” said Tara James MA ’00... | full story

Dialectic
“European modernism is very difficult for students—it’s jumpy, scattered and fragmented,” says Melissa Frazier, a member of the Russian faculty since 1995. That’s part of the reason she enjoys teaching it. “In Russian, you have shorter texts that you have to read incredibly intensively, word for word, like poetry; it’s a very dense, rewarding experience...” | full story

Prerequisite: Social Responsibility
In Karen Rader’s class, “Genetics, Biotechnology and Society,” students study political and ethical issues in genetics, and debate such issues as prenatal testing, cloning and funding the human genome project. Rader, holder of the Marilyn Simpson Chair in Science and Society, wants students to develop their own attitudes toward these topics... | full story