It may be cold comfort in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but within disasters there are ultimately lessons that benefit humanity.

At �ֲ���ý, in fact, the name of an environmental studies course reflects this reality. Taught by Jane Costlow, Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, “Catastrophes and Hope” scrutinizes how disaster narratives can serve us.

Including, in a way, lessons about our expectations from narrative itself. Costlow led the course this winter as the catastrophe of COVID-19 tightened its grip — a catastrophe that, as Costlow and her students discussed one day, is all the more disturbing because we have little idea of how it will ultimately play out.

In other words, unlike hurricanes or earthquakes, COVID-19 thus far is defying our sense that many disasters, like novels or films, have a plot arc.

In that way, the pandemic reminded Costlow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which was a topic of that class discussion. In the midst of the pandemic, she said, we’re “far away from having a sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Costlow is not the only member of the �ֲ���ý faculty who is watching COVID-19 and wondering what it has to teach us in terms of what we believe, how we feel and respond, and how we get along. Meet a few more:

Stephanie Kelley-Romano, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies

For Kelley-Romano, a rhetoric scholar known for her research into conspiracy theories, the noise around COVID-19 may be too much of a professional opportunity.

Conspiracy theorizing is as old as humanity, but “what’s most different about COVID-19 is the audience,” Kelley-Romano says. “We’re all stuck at home, all on lockdown, and that’s around the world. And we have this ‘infodemic,’ this glut of information about the virus.

“Of course, people want to know what causes it, what could potentially prevent or cure it, where did it start, why is it here?” — questions that are like an open cash register to the conspiracy spinners. “And what’s different is that we’re all just available to look on our phones for obscene amounts of time.”

Another difference is the universal reach of the virus. “When we have something that so broadly affects all members of our community in such dramatic ways, it really shakes people up and makes the grasping for information to anchor ourselves more desperate,” Kelley-Romano says.

Which primes people to believe things that, in normal times, they would reject as ridiculous. “And the degree to which people stay engaged on the internet with news seems to me to be inversely proportionate to their actual emotional health,” she adds. In short, she advises, limit your screen time and don’t share conspiracy theories, even just for laughs.

From a Chinese lab being the origin of the virus, to 5G cell phone technology being a vector for it, to cow urine as a cure for it, the pandemic has produced a bumper crop of conspiracy theorizing. Unless she’s working and deliberately thinking about politics and rhetoric, Kelley-Romano finds it helpful to filter her consumption of mainstream news. “I do that only when I cook meals and I’m semi-distracted. I just trust that what I get will be enough.”

Lillian Nayder, Professor of English

“Like so many of the people around us, writers and artists are responding to the pandemic with creativity and with compassion,” Nayder says. “Literary representations will no doubt help us to understand the inequities and injustices underscored by the pandemic, as well as the connections that it has fostered and exposed.”

Looking ahead, she continues, “scholars who study ‘the literature of COVID-19’ will help us grasp the meanings of the disease in cultural, social, and artistic terms — meanings which are already emerging in the medical context of the disease and our efforts to contain it.”

Nayder’s own teaching models that scholarly imperative. Her two courses that examine relationships among literature, empathy, and medicine, she says, are “closely tied to our current crisis and our ways of responding to it — not only in terms of the panic and anxiety generated by the pandemic, but also in terms of the creativity, narrative and otherwise, that it is inspiring.

“In particular, the humanity — and the vulnerability — of medical practitioners who have stories to tell about their patients, themselves, and their families have really come to the forefront.

“These stories of loss, of suffering, of sacrifice, recovery, and love foreground the power and value of what we are calling ‘the medical humanities,’ and our understanding of our own corporeality more generally as well.”

Nayder follows The New York Times’ continuing portraits of people touched by COVID-19, “as well as the political dimensions of the pandemic,” she says.

“And, of course, I’m learning from the stories and experiences that my students are relaying as we’ve been meeting remotely” for her course “The Arctic Sublime,” which looks at 19th-century perceptions of the Arctic — a literature “with its own representations of fear, physical duress, and feelings of awe.”

As events unfold, Nayder continues, “my questions involve the ideas of ‘normalcy’ that the pandemic has raised: What is ‘normal’? When and how — and should — we return to it?”

Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana

“My research is on disaster,” Shepard says bluntly. Specifically, this New Orleans native examines the impact of settler colonialism — the systematic replacement of an existing population with settlers from away — on the rebuilding of her home town after Hurricane Katrina.

(Long after the 2005 storm and subsequent flooding, many longtime NOLA residents were stranded in cities where they’d taken refuge, clearing the way for a variety of new people — colonizers, really — to take their places.)

“I think about settler colonialism as a disaster,” Shepard explains. “And as a matter of fact, I consider it the disaster that creates more disaster.”

In August 2005, New Orleans residents, hauling what belongings they can, line up to enter the Superdome in advance of Hurricane Katrina. (Marty Bahamonde/FEMA)

In other words, the legacies of racial, economic, and civic injustice left by settler colonialism constitute a slow-motion, mundane kind of misery that gets noticed only when a more-newsy catastrophe comes to call.

Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana. (Marshanda Smith)

“The things that we think are disastrous are really just an additional cataclysm,” she says. “We’re already existing in a state of disaster — I would consider it perpetual disaster. Then we get a spike, an unusual cataclysm — that could be a hurricane, that could be coronavirus, it could be different things….These spikes really reveal what was already there.”

Shepard sees strong parallels between a phenomenon like COVID-19 and the dominance in recent decades of so-called neoliberalism, the privileging of private-sector over public interests in government activity.

COVID-19, similarly to neoliberalism, “perpetuates inequality,” Shepard says.

“We see how hard it’s hitting communities of color,” as well as unemployed, precariously employed, and undocumented workers — people ineligible for stimulus funds even though they may be doing work that’s now considered essential. “The people who were the most vulnerable are still the most vulnerable.”

In New Orleans’ 9th Ward, houses and automobiles are in piles after Hurricane Katrina. (Photograph by Infrogmation)

A disaster like the coronavirus places a certain obligation on scholars like Shepard. “One of the ways that we can show people that what we’re doing is valuable to their reality today is by engaging with disaster and showing what people don’t know,” she says — “helping people to make sense of what’s happening around them.”

Justine Wiesinger, Assistant Professor of Japanese

Wiesinger has conducted extensive research into the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan’s Tōhoku region. Specifically, she studies how that catastrophe and others are represented in film and theater (indirectly inspired by the Tōhoku events, her play Waters Rise premiered in 2019).

Members of a fire and rescue team from the U.S. head into downtown Ofunato, Japan, to search for survivors following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. (Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Matthew Bradley)

She had planned to bring a Short Term class to Japan this year, so Wiesinger has followed the progress of the outbreak there since early February.

Yet, she says, “in some ways, I’ve almost been resisting tying COVID-19 too closely to my research, because I think it’s important to maintain a consciousness that this is an extremely different event” from the 2011 tragedy. “I want to maintain a commitment to keeping the memory of that disaster alive and a consciousness of its specifics.”

Assistant Professor of Japanese Justine Wiesinger. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Still, Wiesinger notes, there are parallels that are hard to miss. “We continue to see, in my opinion, a tendency toward slow and ineffective responses from the central government.” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s “rhetoric has been critiqued as frequently meaningless, impenetrable, and avoidant of responsibility,” she says — a “tone-deafness that’s being widely criticized in social media.”

For instance, “his policy of providing two protective masks per household has been mocked in memes on Twitter using iconic pop-cultural families trying to decide how to divide up two masks among multiple people.”

“In some senses I think people throughout Japan are coming into contact with the absurdities of a leadership that is often more concerned with economics than human life — whereas after 2011 it was mostly just people in the rural Tōhoku region who had to contend directly with similar approaches.”

Wiesinger adds, “Many of us are encountering similar problems in our own countries and these tendencies will have to be confronted worldwide. Sometimes disasters give us the opportunity to clearly see where the cracks in our value systems lie.”

High standards are something that �ֲ���ý Film Festival audiences can brag about.

For example, the folks who viewed the 2018 short comedy Nefta Football Club at last November’s festival gave the film the Audience Award for Narrative Short, one of eight festival awards. And then, just a couple of months later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences affirmed that judgement by nominating Yves Piat’s film for an Oscar.

The 2019 �ֲ���ý Film Festival presented jury and audience awards in each of four categories.

Yes, it’s true that the BFF is not Sundance or Cannes. But it’s also true that there’s real value in the awards program, which was inaugurated with last year’s festival and comprises an audience award and a jury award in each of four categories.

Value for whom? Well, for the festival itself, for starters. As an ongoing enterprise of the Department of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, the festival over time will see its reputation grow through the awareness-raising effect of the awards.

As for the honorees, those filmmakers benefit from a cash award —funded by BFF supporters — that, especially in the case of emerging auteurs, helps pay down debt or finance the next production. Perhaps more important, an award provides film artists with valuable moral support and validation.

A festival laurel tells “these artists that they’re making a difference in the world,” says Steven Brookman, a �ֲ���ý parent and co-head of motion picture business affairs for Los Angeles-based Creative Artists Agency. Brookman also leads the �ֲ���ý Entertainment, Arts, and Media networking group, or BEAM — and with his wife, Michelle Brookman, made the BFF Awards possible.

+�ֲ���ý Film Festival 2019 Awards

Yet, as befits a college-produced festival, the biggest beneficiaries of the BFF Awards are likely the students who organize the festival — that is, the students in professor Jon Cavallero’s “Film Festival Studies,” a course that puts current theory about the industry into play through the production of a real-world festival.

Those students take on virtually all aspects of organizing this public event that includes screenings, public discussions of the films and the medium itself, and visits from filmmakers, other participants in the featured productions, and scholars.

A scene from �ֲ���ý Film Festival Audience Award winner Woman at War.

While film festival audiences, obviously, vote on Audience Award recipients, the festival’s student producers select the Jury awardees. And, as it turned out last fall, that process resembled a kind of capstone project for majors in rhetoric, film, and screen studies.

“The Jury awards place the students, who have seen all the films, in the position of an expert, somebody who understands various theoretical approaches to cinema,” Cavallero says.

Shown during a “Film Festival Studies” class session last fall, Jon Cavallero holds the rubric class members used to select �ֲ���ý Film Festival Jury Award winners. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“As a class, we were taking everything we had learned in our previous courses in the rhetoric department and using that to guide our decisions with the awards,” says Julia Gutterman ’20, a double major in German and rhetoric from Mamaroneck, N.Y.

For example, the Icelandic film Woman at War, about a music teacher’s battle against the island nation’s aluminum industry, drew unqualified raves at the festival screening and received the Audience Award for Narrative Feature. But, says Cavallero, his students’ responses were more specific and nuanced, scrutinizing the film’s treatment of climate change and its representation of women.

The process was also a useful exercise in navigating a welter of different ideas to arrive at consensus, says Abel Ramirez ’20 of Denver, a double major in rhetoric and Spanish. “I truly learned how to negotiate. That skill will definitely be useful once I leave �ֲ���ý.”

The substantiveness of the debate was a pleasant surprise to Cavallero. “I thought the discussion about awards would take, like, half a class, and it stretched over three. It was fantastic to see.”

Students picked director Joe Talbot’s film for the Narrative Feature Jury Award.

The students deciding the Jury awards viewed each entry in light of a rubric, or a set of points for consideration — for instance, did the “film form,” a movie’s aesthetic machinery, effectively convey its message? The rubric had been prepared months previously by Cavallero and students in a Short Term Innovative Pedagogy (Re)design course.

A prime criterion for a Jury Award was alignment with the festival’s mission statement, which has a pronounced social justice component, Gutterman says. The jurors also considered what “the film aesthetically did for the medium, and how it challenged ideas in either filmmaking or just in its story.”

And the students pondered a tactical reality rooted in the film industry ecosystem: Should they consider a potential recipient’s reputational value to the �ֲ���ý festival? “It was almost like, do we think of that self-promotion when we’re awarding a film or should we not do that?” Gutterman explains. And then, in a meta sort of way, “the conversation definitely came up as to how much that played into our decisions.”

In fact, there’s no shame in wielding a festival laurel wreath as a promotional tool, as evidenced by their abundance among film marketing campaigns. For �ֲ���ý, of course, awards are a way to get the festival’s name out — and to discerning eyes, the pairings of film and BFF Jury award signal the festival’s values and interests.

“We’re seeking films to show,” as Gutterman says, “and then maybe people will want to submit films for us to show, and it turns into something bigger.”

Providing pecuniary as well as promotional value, the awards program “makes our festival more attractive to filmmakers,” Cavallero says. Short films, in particular, “usually are not made to make money — they’re made by people that love filmmaking and think they have something to say.”

Film and screen studies professor Jon Cavallero and students in his “Film Festival Studies” course meet with Dining, Conferences, and Campus events staff (center right) for festival planning in October 2019. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Cavallero points out that in their thank-you for the BFF Jury Award for Narrative Feature, the makers of Last Black Man in San Francisco noted specifically that the cash prize is going directly to salaries for the film team’s next picture.

“We highly appreciate this honor that you’re giving us because the movie meant the world to us,” Last Black Man star and co-writer Jimmie Fails said. “All we ever wanted to do was make art that will last forever and we plan on continuing to do so.”

A BFF award “is a recognition of work well-done, but it also helps more work to be made,” Cavallero says. “I think, increasingly, as big movies dominate the megaplexes and independent films end up going to festivals, it’s important for festivals to step up and support this kind of work.”

Brookman, whose agency, an industry powerhouse, represents the interests of major figures in entertainment, sports, and media, agrees. Especially given the �ֲ���ý Film Festival’s ethos, he says, the festival awards spotlight “the kinds of things that move the needle out there in the world. It’s film having high impact.”

A scene from the Oscar-nominated Nefta Football Club, 2019 Audience Award winner at the �ֲ���ý Film Festival.

One class session with rhetoric professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano in 2015 was enough to turn Claire Sullivan ’19 into a rhetoric major.

Sullivan’s first-ever class at �ֲ���ý, it was the opening session in the course “What Is Rhetoric?”

Kelley-Romano showed music videos by female country artists, including RaeLynn’s “God Made Girls” — which features lyrics like, “Somebody’s gotta be the one to cry / Somebody’s gotta let him drive … So God made girls.”

Kelley-Romano then struck up a discussion encompassing heteronormativity, gender roles, and who’s excluded from a worldview like RaeLynn’s. “She just went off on the absurdity of the rhetorical implications of this ,” says Sullivan of Montville, N.J. The class “made me want to be a rhetoric major because she just had so much passion and enthusiasm for it.

Stephanie Kelley-Romano leads a “Television Criticism” class on March 6, 2019. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

“She emphasized the way we look at certain cultural texts. When you critically analyze them, you get so much more out of them and see their cultural and sociological implications in a really different way.”

Praised as a teacher who’s exacting, empathetic, authentic — and passionate about her field — Kelley-Romano has received the college’s 2019 Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Associate professor and chair of the rhetoric, film, and screen studies department, Kelley-Romano is known at �ֲ���ý and beyond for her professional focus on topics in the popular consciousness — the rhetoric of television, conspiracy theories, and abductions by space aliens, to name a few. Her biennial course on presidential campaign rhetoric is built around a mock campaign that affords an intensely hands-on, multidisciplinary experience for students.

She has led public workshops on spotting fake news, analyzed for the local newspaper a debate between candidates for Maine’s 2nd District congressional seat (including Jared Golden ‘11, who ultimately won), and, with math professor Meredith Greer, she is modeling how conspiracy theories spread.

“It’s infectious to be in a classroom with somebody who is excited about what they’re teaching.”

“Rhetoric allows us to understand how realities are created,” says Kelley-Romano. “Why we call someone a survivor, as opposed to a victim, matters. It matters who we define as terrorists. The way we criminalize drug use by some but construct it as a health crisis when it affects other people, matters.

“So it’s important to allow students to see that just because something is in a history book or in a newspaper,” that doesn’t necessarily make it true, she says. “Objectivity is a little looser than they may have been led to believe.”

Like Sullivan, it was in her first class at �ֲ���ý that Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston first encountered Kelley-Romano. As with Sullivan, the professor’s enthusiasm made a big impression. “It’s infectious to be in a classroom with somebody who is excited about what they’re teaching,” Chisholm says. “You’re automatically engaged because �����’s so engaged and so happy to be there.”

Stephanie Kelley-Romano talks with Molly Chisholm ’17, who portrayed a Republican candidate for U.S. president in a fall 2016 campaign rhetoric course. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I love watching students gain confidence and skills,” Kelley-Romano says.

“When I’m trying to teach a critical-thinking skill or to get them to understand the logical organization for a paper — when I see it actually happen, that’s a great feeling. And then to see it again and again, and see the change in them from the beginning to the end, is just so satisfying.”

She adds, “If I honor and respect their process of coming into knowledge and coming into themselves, and just try to help that along, then it gives them so much agency. And they’re so much more invested in doing well.”

In Kelley-Romano “there’s an element of genuineness” that’s uncommon, says Sullivan. “She lets us see who she is as a person.” For example, ����������-��dz����Դ�’s sons, 16-year-old George and 14-year-old Richie, are no strangers to Pettigrew Hall (and they also help keep their mother in tune with pop-culture trends).

“In return, she expects us to show her who we are as people,” Sullivan says. “She just cares so much about understanding where her students are coming from and what makes them people, more than just students.”

Kelley-Romano listens to a remark by a fellow faculty panelist during a viewing and discussion of the televised inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“She has a great degree of empathy, and I think that’s always present in her pedagogy,” says ����������-��dz����Դ�’s colleague Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies. “If you talk about the importance of care in the process of teaching, Stephanie exemplifies that.”

Some of that empathy may be traceable to ����������-��dz����Դ�’s undergraduate experience. A first-generation-to-college student at Emerson University, she took away a certain understanding of the uncertainties, insecurities, and feelings of isolation that can come with being a first-gen. She’s not shy about putting that understanding to work.

Openness about her own experience is a way to help put students at ease with their situations. “To articulate those fears or seeming insecurities and make them laughable, and to own them,” Kelley-Romano says, “makes students feel a lot more comfortable” — helps them “see that on the inside everybody can be silly, or insecure, or uncertain, and that it’s okay.”

None of which is to suggest that she is a pushover. “She wants, probably demands, that her students excel,” Nero says. “She sees her role as giving them the tools to excel, and she thinks a lot about that.

“And I think that when students leave her class, they’re aware that whatever happened — the good, the bad, the ugly — it’s on them. She encourages responsibility.” Nero adds, “I would daresay that she is brilliant as a pedagogue.”

A 2017 graduate, Gabe Nott experienced those high expectations as he honed his senior thesis under ����������-��dz����Դ�’s guidance. Now a New York City resident, Nott was writing about the TV program Last Week Tonight, hosted by comedian John Oliver, and the implications of news-focused comedy for civic discourse.

“It took me a while to figure out my argument for my thesis,” says Nott. “Every time I thought knew what angle I was going to take, she’d come back with a question I wasn’t able to answer. Honestly, it was pretty frustrating.

“But, when I finally got there, I realized that all that prodding and pushing helped me craft a more incisive analysis” that even transcended Oliver to shed light on how, Nott says, “we as a country talk about politics.”

Michaela Britt ’17, Molly Chisholm ’17, and Brennen Malone ’17 confer with Kelley-Romano during the 2016 campaign rhetoric course. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

He adds, “When I finally figured it out, she was as excited as I was. All that just made me feel like she was really invested in helping me become the best scholar I could be.”

Sullivan took the fall 2018 edition of ����������-��dz����Դ�’s campaign rhetoric course. The mock campaign involves students in just about every aspect of a campaign that involves communications — which is pretty much all of it, from developing a platform to writing ads and speeches to holding debates to mounting a crisis response.

“The mock campaign felt so practical,” says Sullivan, who played the role of the Democratic vice presidential candidate. She plans to work for a real campaign after graduation as a prelude to a career in law or politics. “She expected a professional quality of us, and so it felt like we were running a real campaign.”

She adds, “It allowed us to really think about how political campaigns craft narratives, which is obviously a huge part of the study of rhetoric.”

The fictional presidential candidate for the Democrats was a military veteran, as was his wife. “He was Jewish, and so we talked about his Jewish identity a lot. We made my character queer and married to a woman.”

Rhetoric professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano meets in her office with Kathryn Carew ’17 of Falmouth, Maine, in 2016. Carew and Kelley-Romano published her senior thesis, a study of Donald Trump and the “birther” movement, in the Journal of Hate Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Sullivan says, “It got us thinking about how we talk about identities, and how those identities are perceived and portrayed to a greater public.” Developing candidate personas — their backgrounds, beliefs, relationships — reflected an important emphasis in the �ֲ���ý approach to teaching rhetoric: an understanding of intersectionality, how different aspects of identity relate to one another and how they are treated in communications.

“Our focuses on gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity are crucial organizing principles to our major,” Nero says. “Stephanie has been fundamental in the creation of that.”

Four years after the RaeLynn revelation, Kelley-Romano advised Sullivan on her senior thesis, which looks at the role of conspiracy rhetoric in the Fox News coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — a research project they hope to publish together.

The relationship has meant a lot to her, Sullivan says. “To have somebody who has known me throughout the entire four years, academically and a little bit outside the academics, has been a very comforting experience.” Even after �ֲ���ý, “I know that she’ll really be there for me.”

A fall 2018 session of her course “What is Rhetoric?” features Kelley-Romano using a Halloween costume to riff on her research into alien abduction stories. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Walk into Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie ����������-��dz����Դ�’s second floor Pettigrew office, and you’ll enter an alien environment. Not that it’s strange or different from other faculty offices. Rather, it’s filled with objects connected to alien beings.

Kelley-Romano, who teaches rhetorical theory and criticism, wrote her doctoral dissertation on “The Myth of Communion: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Narratives of Alien Abductees,” in which she drew from 130 interviews with people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens.

One of her conclusions is that people who believe they’ve been abducted have woven a collective myth that acts as a kind of religion, and �����’s at work at turning the dissertation into a book, What’s Up: Alien Abductions and Why They Matter, the outline of which appears on her office blackboard.

Today, ����������-��dz����Դ�’s calling out a favorite pop-up book, Alien World: Fact or Fiction, that includes three-dimensional paper presentations on aliens, UFOs, and the supposed 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, N.M., which birthed a wide variety of conspiracy theories about alien spaceship landings.

This particular book, like many of the UFO-themed collectibles in her office, are gifts from her students, some of whom have taken the course she teaches on the rhetoric of alien abduction. “�ֲ���ý has incredible academic freedom in terms of what we can teach,” she says.

After offering the course, she began to receive gifts from students, often from study abroad locations, who would discover all kinds of curiosities: alien root beer, condoms, rolling papers, dolls, soaps, and salt and pepper shakers, to name a few.

At top, some of the alien collectibles in Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s Pettigrew office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Her gifts include non-alien items, including a piece of the University of Kansas basketball floor — �����’s a huge Jayhawks fan — and whatever the gifts, they often come from students with whom she enjoys longstanding connections. “It’s a reminder, an acknowledgement of the fondness we have,” she says, “of the relationships that I’ve created and maintained for almost 20 years now.” She remembers how the mother of a student in her alien abduction course years ago quilted an alien blanket for her newborn son, who is now 16.

Students often arrive in her classroom with one question: Does Kelley-Romano actually believe in alien abduction? Subsequently they learn to ask better questions about how we create our belief systems. “Alien abduction functions as a system of beliefs that offer a larger kind of metaphysical grounding,” she says.

“When students take that understanding and apply it more broadly to systems of belief that are created through narratives and stories, they’ll consider why we believe some stories and not others.” They learn to critique and assess different arguments, including conspiracy arguments, how they work, and how we combat them —a legitimate skill sadly necessary for their generation.

Kelley-Romano loves watching her students move “from a place of bemused skepticism to the recognition of this is how we create truth.” They spread their wings, set off to new universes, but their lives remain linked. And the gifts arrive.

Eighteen students in the course “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric” have been going full tilt on a mock White House campaign since September.

And today, Oct. 25, full tilt becomes warp speed as the Republican and Democratic campaigns face what’s known in politics as an October surprise.

8:28 a.m. — It’s a crisis! (Well, not really)

Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano steps to the lectern in a first-floor Pettigrew Hall lounge and gets right to the point.

“You’re being brought into a crisis that’s international in scope,” she tells the students seated before her. “And you’re being brought into the loop because it’s your job to help communicate the crisis, announce a plan to deal with it, and to calm the public.”

That’s not your average class assignment. Then again, Presidential Campaign Rhetoric isn’t your average course.

Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano announces the (not real) smallpox outbreak. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:32 a.m. — And the campaign is on!

Each campaign has already developed biographies and platforms, the Dems offering “Progress We Can Count On” and the Republicans, “The Future We Deserve.”

They’ve held conventions, deployed candidate videos, held debates, used polling data collected by a sociology course, consulted with a music course on campaign music, reacted to attack ads, and, today, have to face a crisis.

All that has drawn in hundreds of other students: “voters,” more than 600 at last count, who include all rhetoric and debate students plus students in 23 other �ֲ���ý courses. “President Clayton Spencer has registered to vote, as have alumni and parents,” Kelley-Romano says.

From left, Republican campaign members Jacqueline Forney ’18 of Bloomington, Ind., Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston, and Honor Moshay ’17 of Los Angeles listen to the details of the public health crisis. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:34 a.m. — It’s smallpox! (but not for real)

The “crisis” at hand is an outbreak of smallpox in the U.S., and the campaigns have until noon to develop a public statement that will inform and calm the nation while announcing a containment plan.

“I mean, smallpox is supposed to be eradicated,” says Gabe Nott ’17 of Bronxville, N.Y. He’s playing a Democrat from Maryland running for president. “Yeah, I know,” Kelley-Romano says, deflecting the implied question.

Another student tries to pull info from Kelley-Romano: “What vaccine do you need to prevent smallpox?” The professor doesn’t bite: “I don’t really know. Maybe you should check with the CDC.”

Gabe Nott ’17 of Bronxville, N.Y., is the Democratic candidate for president in the mock campaign that’s a key element of the course Presidential Campaign Rhetoric. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:40 a.m. — ‘A real disaster’

The campaigns spend the first half-hour or so figuring out what smallpox exactly is — a reminder that they’re young (or I’m old). Lots of us were aware of the last smallpox outbreak (1972 in Yugoslavia, killing 35 people), but these students were born between 1995 and 1996.

“Don’t fear monger.”

The Democrats’ candidate for vice president, Courtney Foster ’18 of Newton, Mass., notes that smallpox was “a real disaster” before being eradicated. Campaign manager Amanda San Roman ’17 of East Setauket, N.Y., responds that their statement doesn’t need to talk about the horrors of the disease. “The public is not already worried about smallpox. Don’t fear-monger,” she suggests.

A senior interviewer for Admission, San Roman has to switch hats because �����’s got two interviews scheduled at Lindholm House. “Sorry, I can’t work on this now,” she says, and heads off.

At right is campaign manager Amanda San Roman ’17 of East Setauket, N.Y. Next to her is press secretary Ian Erickson ’18 of St. Albans, Vt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:46 a.m. — Is it terrorism?

The campaigns have split up to work. Upstairs in the Republicans’ war room, they’re getting clues about how presidents handle health crises by watching, on a widescreen TV, how President Obama talked about Ebola in 2015. Downstairs, the Dems analyze Obama’s May 2016 briefing on the Zika virus.

Like the Dems, the Republicans are trying to grasp the historical scope of smallpox. They learn that smallpox was used as a biological weapon in the 18th century, when the British intentionally gave smallpox-infected items, including blankets, to Native Americans.

And now, smallpox and bioterrorism, plus some ambiguous hints in two official-looking memos given to the campaigns by Kelley-Romano, has the campaigns on high alert.

The Republicans’ presidential candidate, Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston asks her team, “Do we need to address that?” Downstairs, the Democrats ask the same question: “Are the Republicans going to go to national security?”

On the stool, Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston, the Republican candidate for president, and her team review President Obama’s statement on Ebola. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

9:08 a.m. — ‘We need a lab coat’

On the question of whether to speak to the bioterrorism threat, Chisholm makes the call: “We need to talk about bioterrorism. As Republicans, we need to be the national security party.”

Following her lead, her team comes up with rhetorical tactics, and Honor Moshay ’17 of Los Angeles, the campaign’s media director, is a font of ideas: “Why don’t we get a �ֲ���ý EMS student to stand next to her during her address? We need a lab coat, too.” She adds, “Maybe we could get Paul Menice,” mentioning a well-known officer with Security & Campus Safety.

Matt Baker ’17 of Clinton, Md., Chisholm’s running mate, texts a friend who’s a �ֲ���ý EMS. “We got him,” he says.

Matt Baker ’17 of Clinton, Md., is the Republicans’ candidate for vice president. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

9:17 a.m. — A short walk to another world

When Kelley-Romano told Nott to check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she wasn’t kidding.

A little after 9, the campaigns leave Pettigrew, cross Alumni Walk, and enter Hathorn Hall for their meeting with CDC consultants, aka students in the course Mathematical Models in Biology, taught by Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer.

The Republicans, pictured, and the Democrats head into Hathorn Hall for their meeting with the CDC consultants, aka math students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

9:30 a.m. — ‘We have guests’

The short walk from Pettigrew to Hathorn takes the rhetoric students from one academic world to another. “We have guests,” Greer tells her students as the Democratic and Republican candidates and their staffs enter Hathorn 303.

The professors give a brief overview of the mock situation before the group splits in three: Democrats, Republicans, and students playing the media.

Greer and Kelley-Romano have teamed up before to deliver a public-health “crisis” to the PCR class. That was Ebola in 2014, when that disease was in the news.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer and Kelley-Romano brief the students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Chisholm, in fact, was part of a student team that worked with Kelley-Romano to tweak the course during her freshman year. “It’s really cool to see the interdisciplinary side of the course come into full effect,” she says.

��9:42 a.m. — Mars and Venus

According to the memos, two smallpox cases are in Massachusetts, where the Republican candidate, Chisholm, is governor, and two cases are in Washington, D.C., next door to Maryland, where Democrat Nott is governor.

The campaigns are meeting with the CDC consultants to develop a strategy for containing the smallpox outbreak in their home states.

It’s slow going at first as the two groups, rhetoric and math, weren’t quite sure what the other needs — Mars and Venus and all that.

“It was a tough barrier,” Chisholm says later. “They knew a lot about smallpox and not a lot about rhetoric. We knew a lot about rhetoric and not a lot about smallpox and modeling.”

The students’ discomfort is part of the plan, explains Greer. “They learn so much from working it out on their own.”

Moshay, the Republicans’ media director, asks what seems to be a reasonable question: “Can we quarantine a city?” The math students chuckle — from their reading, they know that large-scale quarantines are easier said than done.

Moshay tries again: “What are the typical responses to smallpox?” which elicits the most blackly humorous line of the day, from a math student: “Widespread panic and death.”

Math students Evan Goldberg ’19 (right) of Belmont, Mass., and Joseph Torres ’17 of Los Angeles work with the campaigns during their visit to the “CDC” in Hathorn Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

10:30 a.m. — ‘That was awesome’

Math student Gabe Whitehead ’17 of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who is working with the Republicans, uses a computational software called Mathematica to run various epidemic scenarios.

He pumps his fist: He’s figured out that a blend of vaccinations and quarantine measures for Chisholm’s home state of Massachusetts would result in a manageable death toll. Without a containment plan, the model predicts all-out catastrophe: 85,000 dead. With the plan, the deaths would number 7,000.

Whitehead shares graphs with the Republicans that show various scenarios. “When we got the graphs from Gabe, that was awesome,” said Chisholm.

“How can theory be used in current-day life?”

It also represented a communication breakthrough. “When we outlined what we wanted to do in our speech — dissuade fear and show the public that we have this under control — they were able to give us what they knew.”

Greer says her students were jazzed to link their knowledge with a real-world scenario. “They loved the feeling of working with data and with real disease ideas,” she says. “This project has an especially realistic feeling, one that is important to see in math classes. All this theory we have learned: How can it be used in current-day life?”

Math student Gabe Whitehead ’17 of Shaker Heights, Ohio, talks with the Republican campaign. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

10:53 a.m. — ‘We don’t want to sound paranoid’

The two campaigns head back across Alumni Walk to their Pettigrew war rooms to work on their smallpox statements, which they’ll deliver in the Digital Media Studios at noon.

Chisholm wants her statement to explicitly say that a foreign country might be to blame. She also says that the statement “has to be a rallying cry. We are still trying to win votes.”

Her campaign manager, James Erwin ’18 of Yarmouth, Maine, is more cautious. “We don’t want to sound paranoid.” A minute later, Moshay shows up with facemasks and a white lab coat for their �ֲ���ý EMS person to wear.

The Republicans’ campaign manager, James Erwin ’18 of Yarmouth, Maine, plugs away on the statement. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

11:13 a.m. — “I don’t always know what I’m doing”

Amanda San Roman, the Dems’ campaign manager, who had to leave to do Admission interviews, returns. “I talk about this course in all my interviews,” she says because prospective students “are so impressed by it.”

She tells the prospies that the course “is more in depth than anything they’ve experienced before. And it ranges so far around campus. We have all different groups coming together and teaming up to make this as real as possible.”

And what does “real” feel like?

“Adrenaline,” San Roman says. “As a 21-year-old student, I don’t always know what I’m doing in this. But it’s cool to be going through it with people who are interested in it and who are trying really hard.”

The Republicans’ printed statement cleverly incorporated the campaign logo and those of FEMA and the CDC. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

11:29 a.m. — Thai chicken

A half-hour remains until each candidate has to deliver their address, and 95 percent of everyone’s attention is focused on prepping their statements.

Moshay speaks to group’s remaining 5 percent. “What’s for lunch?” she asks. “Thai chicken,” answers Michaela Britt ’17 of South Burlington, Vt., who handles video production for the campaign. “Oh, that’s good,” says Moshay. Then it’s back to work.

Moshay displays progress on their statement. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

11:55 a.m. — ‘We will not crumble’

Gabe Nott will deliver his statement first, and Foster, his running mate, tries to calm his nerves. “Stay calm and controlled,” she says.

“You know me,” he says with a tight smile. “If there are two things I am, it’s calm and controlled.”

The speech goes without a hitch. “Smallpox has been eradicated before, and it will be again,” he says, channeling every president from FDR to Obama. “We did not bow to Pearl Harbor…. We will not crumble now.”

Nott delivers his statement in the studio of the Digital Media Studios in Pettigrew Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen)

12:08 p.m. — “Stay calm and follow instructions”

While Nott delivers his talk alone at the lectern, Chisholm is flanked by the �ֲ���ý EMS student Sam Whitaker ’18 of Hollis, N.H., who plays a CDC staffer, and Erwin, her campaign manager.

Nott alludes to the possibility of bioterrorism without naming a country, saying that the “re-emergence of the disease could have been an intentional attempt to undermine American safety and well-being.”

The Republicans hit the bioterrorism angle, too, saying it’s “very unlikely” that the smallpox came from a U.S. source. Chisholm goes a step further, mentioning specifically that Russia has smallpox stocks and that the outbreak “is a new type of international terrorism to consider.”

“For the rest of us, it’s important to remain calm and follow instructions from public-health officials,” she says.

“We have faced crises of this magnitude in the past, and every time, our attention to detail, our intuition, and our deliberate approach has guided our country. Events such as these endure as memorable moments of strength and unity for our country.”

She concludes her speech by saying, “God bless America.”

Chisholm prepares to deliver her briefing. In background, �ֲ���ý EMS Sam Whitaker ’18 of Hollis, N.H., gets ready to play a CDC staffer who will stand by the candidate. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

12:18 p.m. — Is there a winner?

“They both did well with the specifics of containment and using action verbs to put themselves in the action and in the solution,” Kelley-Romano said.

Beyond the lessons of the day, Kelley-Romano puts a fine point on her course.

“I think life is interdisciplinary — a �ֲ���ý liberal arts education demands the simultaneous consideration of multiple fields of knowledge,” she says.

Rhetoric, specifically, “prepares students because it forces them to consider not only the construction and content of what they see and hear but also examines the medium — radio, television, film, and social media — and its impact.”

Chisholm, flanked by the Republicans’ video production staffer Michaela Britt ’17 of South Burlington, Vt., and Brennen Malone ’17 of Philadelphia, who plays the husband of Democratic presidential candidate Nott, confer with Kelley-Romano after the briefing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Back at �ֲ���ý to work with a class in Indonesian performance, Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 works with rod puppets in Olin Arts Center during a rehearsal for a May 14 concert. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I learned the value of doing what you love for a living through the professionals I met at �ֲ���ý – who were all 100 percent committed to their chosen path,” Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 told the seniors gathered for the annual honors banquet on May 6.

In a world crisscrossed with intriguing life paths, Dissanayake’s stands out. A double major in economics and theater at �ֲ���ý, and a Watson Fellow after she graduated, her chosen path afterward ultimately led home to Sri Lanka.

There she launched Power of Play, a communication company dedicated to practicing performing arts with a special focus on puppetry and theater for education, awareness, reconciliation and development in Sri Lanka.

Sulo Dissanayake ’09 gives the keynote address at the May 6, 2015, honors thesis dinner. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

But this month her path has brought Dissanayake back to �ֲ���ý, where she is collaborating with the Short Term gamelan ensemble and Indonesian guest artists on a performance of puppetry and music at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 14, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission to the performance is free. The event is made possible in part by support from the Edith C. and Raymond A. Kendall ’19 Endowment Fund and a gift from Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

Titled Stories From the Seven Seas, the program pulls together:

• two Indonesian puppetry styles, Javanese shadow puppets and Sundanese “wayang golek” or three-dimensional rod puppets;
• Dissanayake’s puppet work, which is influenced by wayang golek and Sri Lankan folk traditions;
• and the percussion-based Indonesian music called gamelan, performed in this case by students in the Short Term unit Performing Musical Art of Indonesia.

Gamelan is a traditional Indonesian musical form played on tuned percussion instruments. The term can refer to a given collection of instruments, which tend to be crafted in sets, as well as to the genre itself. �ֲ���ý has two sets of gamelan instruments.

Visiting �ֲ���ý from West Java are wayang puppeteer Kodrat Hidayah Taryana and Jaja Diatmaja, who instructs the 19-year-old Taryana at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Bandung, West Java.

Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 explains a fine point of puppet communications to students in the course Performing Musical Art of Indonesia, Taizaburo Inoue ’18 of Toon-Shi, Japan, and Leah Zulkoski ’15 of Charlotte, Vt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Diatmaja will conduct the gamelan ensemble and provide the highly specialized drum accompaniment for the wayang golek puppetry, says Gina Fatone, associate professor of music and director of the gamelan ensemble.

“Sulo is used to performing collaboratively, so Kodrat will perform with Sundanese puppets”��— referring to a region in West Java��— “alongside the Sri Lankan version of the wayang golek puppets that Sulo uses,” Fatone explains.

The program will include “The Power of People,” a puppet story that Dissanayake created collaboratively with students in the Performing Musical Art of Indonesia course. A classic tale of good vs. evil set in a fictional land facing the real perils of a modern country, “The Power of People” the story pits a fallen leader against a true savior who has rebelled against the regime.

“Finally, evil succumbs to good in an epic battle,” says Dissanayake, “which ends with the reminder that each human is a combination of good and evil — and true victory is achieving a sustainable balance.”

Dissanayake was prominent in the theater department during her time at �ֲ���ý. Among other achievements, she was one of the rare students to direct a mainstage production — in this case, a 2008 production of Sam Shepard’s Lie of the Mind. She graduated cum laude from �ֲ���ý.

With the ultimate dream of founding a theater company and school to explore sociopolitical issues in her native Sri Lanka, Dissanayake visited Indonesia and South Africa to observe how people in these countries —former colonies with social, political and economic histories similar to Sri Lanka’s — use puppetry and nonverbal theater to explore socially critical issues, an approach not common in Sri Lanka.

Surrounded by gamelan instruments, Sulo Dissanayake ’09 talks with students in the 2015 Short Term course Performing Musical Art of Indonesia. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In Indonesia, Dissanayake studied wayang golek, in which wooden puppets are controlled by rods attached to the hands and a central rod attached to the body and head. There she worked with the most famous wayang golek dalang (master puppeteer), the recently deceased Pak Asep Sunandar Sunarya.

“Indonesian puppeteers have made their work relevant and entertaining to modern audiences,” Dissanayake told the Sri Lankan art magazine Artra. “And that was the goal I came back to Sri Lanka with, that we’re going to revive what’s ours, in terms of puppetry and traditional arts, and we’re going to make it relevant to modern audiences.”

Dissanayake founded Power of Play upon returning to Sri Lanka after her Watson year. Power of Play seeks to use the puppetry and other arts not only to entertain, but also to promote communication and break social, political and economic barriers in Sri Lanka.

“You can’t get angry at a puppet,” Dissanayake said in an interview with the magazine Lanka Woman. “A completely genuine channel of communication is created between puppet and audience.”

The shadow puppets to be used in the performance are part of a collection of more than 300 on permanent loan to �ֲ���ý College. David Eisler, an attorney in New Hampshire, has loaned the collection to �ֲ���ý to honor the memory of his father, Dr. Milton Eisler, and to ensure that the collection remains intact.

Bisola Folarin ’14 of Grand Prairie, Texas, models for the 2013 Inside Africa Fashion Show. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Celebrating the cultural wealth and diversity of Africa through performance and apparel, �ֲ���ý College presents its fourth Inside Africa Fashion Show at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, March 7, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The Africana Club, a student group, sponsors and produces the event. It is free and open to the public but tickets are required, available at . For more information, please contact nkanu@bates.edu or bmabaso@bates.edu.

As in past years, the event showcases contemporary and traditional clothing from around Africa as well as performances of dance, music and spoken-word poetry reflecting African culture.

“This year we expect to have around 30 models,” says event founder Nicole Kanu, a senior rhetoric major from Little Rock, Arkansas. Whether through fashion or performance, the event will represent at least 15 nations, from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east, and from Morocco on the Mediterranean coast down to South Africa at the tip of the continent.

“These clothes aren’t just coming from thin air.”

“We’ve gotten clothes from faculty, from staff, obviously from students��— those who are from the continent and those who have studied abroad,” she says. “And from members of the community.”

At the 2012 Inside Africa Fashion Show, Nerissa Brobbey ’15 models a Togolese boubou dress with matching head scarf. At right, Gulaid Abdullahi ’13 wears a traditional ma’awis and kofia hat. Photograph by Simone Schriger ’14/�ֲ���ý College.

Kanu explains that this year’s show will emphasize the stories behind the outfits. “There will be a lot of personal narrative for the fashion and for the performances,” she says. “The people who own the clothes, you’ll hear what they feel about an outfit or the story of when they bought it. These clothes aren’t just coming from thin air.”

For example, Kanu herself is supplying an ensemble that her aunt, who lives in Nigeria, made for an elderly woman who belonged to Kanu’s church in Little Rock. The woman “was very interested in Nigerian culture, and African culture in general, and so that’s why she wanted it made.

“I think she may have gotten to wear it once, and then she died.”

For this year’s show, Kanu also hopes to include fashions by designers who came to Maine from Somalia and the Congo. This idea speaks to her overriding goal for the show, which has always been to connect people.

“In general, my passion lies in community development,” she says. “I’m very in tune with the fashion, but my point in having this show is really to bring people together, and I think that that’s one thing it has done.

At the 2013 Inside Africa Fashion Show, Jessica Clergeau ’15 of Somerville, Mass., heads the line of models waiting to walk. (Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

“Initially, I thought this might be a one-time thing. But people would come up to me at the beginning of the school year asking ‘When’s the fashion show?’ or saying ‘I want to model,’ and it’s their chance to be on the red carpet.

“It makes me happy to see them happy, so it has just kind of kept me going.”

Kanu launched Inside Africa in 2012, hoping to raise consciousness about the wealth and breadth of African culture. A rhetoric major, she will graduate from �ֲ���ý in May, making this spring’s show her last, at least as a student.

Taking her place as producer the next time around is Bantu Mabaso, a first-year student from Mpaka, Swaziland. Kanu’s emphasis on community-building, says Mabaso, is what attracted her to Inside Africa.

“That’s what inspires me, and I feel that we can continue with it in so many different and innovative ways,” she says. “Fashion is an up-and-coming industry in Africa. There’s definitely potential for us.”

Not long ago, Stacey Kabat ’85 was talking with a friend, a longtime reporter for The Boston Globe, about the infamous case of Jared Remy, the serial abuser in Massachusetts who ended up murdering his girlfriend in 2013.

Stacey Kabat ’85 talks to students in a film theory course taught by Jonathan Cavallero, assistant professor of rhetoric. She brought her Academy Award, saying, “It’s fun to hold it, so I always feel like sharing.” Students passed it around and, yes, it’s heavy. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

They talked about how everyone around Remy — the courts, police and social systems — had failed to protect the victim.

Kabat and the reporter agreed: “It felt like we were right back in the 1990s,” she said, a time when activists like Kabat were lighting a fire under the problem of domestic violence and reporters covering their work were helping to put it on the national agenda.

Kabat related the anecdote during her visit to campus earlier this week, including a public talk on Sunday and visits to two classes on Monday taught by Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Jonathan Cavallero.

“Defending Our Lives” won the 1994 Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject.

In Cavallero’s class on film theory, Kabat talked about how the early 1990s were heady times on the domestic violence front.

In 1992, she won a Reebok Human Rights Award for her efforts with abused women, including work to found the nonprofit Peace At Home.

In 1994, she was part of the team that won an Academy Award for the documentary film Defending Our Lives that exposed the severity of domestic violence in the U.S.

A year later, Kabat presented at the NGO forum during the United Nations World Conference on Women, held in Beijing.

Kabat, who was just in her early 30s, was already dubbed a “veteran laborer in the vineyards of social justice,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

“Things were snowballing, steamrolling. We were moving and changing,” Kabat said.

In Cavallero’s class, Kabat screened the 1998 documentary Strong at the Broken Places, for which she was a co-producer.

Listening to Stacey Kabat ’85 are Rosy DePaul ’17 of Los Angeles, Mark Charest ’15 of Westbrook, Maine, Nora Kenny ’17 of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Gerald Nelson ’17 of San Antonio, Texas. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

A follow-up to Defending Our Lives, the film tells the story of four people, Arn Chorn-Pond, Max Cleland, Marcia Gordon and Michael MacDonald. Each survived horrific violence in their lives and used their experiences to help other victims of violence and to create powerful new identities for themselves.

Cleland, who would become a U.S. senator from Georgia, lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam after a hand grenade exploded in his hand.

“I lay there shattered and dying,” he says in the film. Heroic efforts — a team of five physicians, hours in surgery and 43 pints of blood — saved his life. “That, it turned out, was the easy part,” he said. “You face a stark reality. You will never be the person you were, yet you don’t know who you will be. You don’t know you the hell you are.”

The film has a more hopeful story arc than Defending Our Lives. With terrifying personal testimonies and graphic photographs of domestic violence by photojournalist Donna Ferrato, the film was “like a grenade,” Kabat says, that blew open the topic of domestic violence.

“It was radical,” Kabat says, to show Ferrato’s images. “It was so different. No one had yet been able to expose visually this hidden family secret.”

So what happened to shift the national gaze from domestic violence?

“I’m not a cynical adult because I know that change can occur,” says Stacey Kabat ’85. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Bill Clinton, who signed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 and talked about growing up in a violent home, lost credibility after Monica Lewinsky. Then, 9/11 and resulting wars forced America’s attention away from the domestic agenda.

When she was 18 and heading to �ֲ���ý, “domestic violence” wasn’t a word, Kabat has said. She had been raised in a violent home but there was no way to talk about that in college.

In the 30 years since then then, “I’ve gone from being ashamed and not be able to talk about it, to being able to talk about it and create programs of change and seeing people change and develop. It’s amazing.”

Today, as Kabat sees example after example of America’s violent streak (such as the NFL’s clueless initial reaction to Ray Rice beating his wife), she is “appalled. It’s frustrating. We should be done with this already.”

“But I thought [the Oscar] would help the violence to stop.”

She says that America, notwithstanding the current “It’s On Us” campaign and other efforts, has yet to “take hold of the issue and address it in a concrete, prioritized way.”

And that’s the bittersweet legacy of winning an Oscar.

“It did bring clout to the issue and put a stamp on it that said, ‘This is important,'” says Kabat, who soon after delivered the commencement address at Simmons College, won a number of awards and traveled the country speaking and showing Defending Our Lives for a couple years.

“But I thought [the Oscar] would help the violence to stop. That was the naive kid in me.”

Sarah Koe ’16 of Portland, Ore., listens as Kabat talks about her career trajectory as an activist. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Today, Kabat is 51 and has two children, one in high school and the other 8 years old. And if �����’s no longer laboring in the vineyard, �����’s still in the field. Transitioning from running her nonprofit, Peace At Home, she is now a maternal/child health nurse and a lactation consultant at Mass General.

“After 9/11, it was so hard to receive aid for what we were doing,” Kabat says. “I couldn’t be fundraising, working, speaking, counseling. It was too much. You can only do 20 years of that. My husband said, “Stace, the Beatles only had 10 good years.’ So I feel OK!”

She’s no longer that naive kid but Kabat still has fire in her belly. “I’m not a cynical adult because I know change can occur,” she says.

It comes from “your actions with people you meet every day. How you interact with your peers, how you interact in your community, how you choose what you want to speak out on, how you vote and how you get involved.”

The best example is right in front of you, she said.

“�ֲ���ý was founded by abolitionists. And there’s a reason for that. They wanted us to think about being part of social change.”

Stacey Kabat ’85, co-producer of the Academy Award-winning film Defending Our Lives, returns to �ֲ���ý for a visit that includes a public screening and discussion of this powerful documentary focusing on domestic violence.

The event takes place at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16, in Pettigrew Hall’s Room 301 (Filene Room). Co-sponsored by the rhetoric department, the women and gender studies program and the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-8294.

Kabat appears in the 1994 documentary and co-produced it with directors Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich of Cambridge Documentary Films.

Kabat, the Los Angeles Times‘ Elizabeth Mehren wrote in 1994, “describes herself as the daughter and granddaughter of women who were beaten by their husbands. But when she headed off to �ֲ���ý College at age 18, ‘it wasn’t acceptable’ to talk about such things, not even the nightmares that plagued her about killing the father who told her, ‘Well, Stacey, people just have violent tempers, that’s all.'”

Kabat won a Reebok Human Rights Award and the Clara Barton Award from the American Red Cross’s New England chapter for her work against domestic violence. She presented at the UN’s Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 and founded a human rights agency for domestic abuse. She now works as a nurse in Boston. .

The dynamic duo of Taylor Blackburn ’15 and Jac Stewart ’14 ended a strong �ֲ���ý debate season with the squad’s first-ever national team title, winning the U.S. Universities Debating Championship on April 13 at Purdue University.

Jac Stewart (left) and Taylor Blackburn brandish their trophy after winning the U.S. Universities Debating Championship. (Photograph courtesy of BQDC)

In the final round, Blackburn and Stewart went up against teams from Yale, Cornell and Loyola Marymount.

The resolution, timely in the context of world events, was “This House regrets the continuation of NATO after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.”

In the , the victory is believed to be the first national title by a �ֲ���ý varsity team, says Director of Debate Jan Hovden.

“Jac and Taylor put forth a tremendous effort to win the national title,” Hovden adds. “Their performance was stunning.”

Blackburn and Stewart, who hail from Atherton, Calif., and Keene, N.H., respectively, weren’t the only members of the Brooks Quimby Debate Council who made the garnet glow at Purdue.

In fact, all four �ֲ���ý teams that entered the championship tournament advanced to the quarterfinals.

The squad’s “overall level of competitive success” at the UDC tourney might be just as big a story as Stewart and Blackburn’s win, Hovden says.

Matt Summers ’15 of Short Hills, N.J., and Stephanie Wesson ’14 of Mont Vernon, N.H., made the semifinals, while the quarterfinal teams were Ben Claeson ’15 of Bangor, Maine, and Emily Schwalbe ’14 of Concord, N.C,�� and sophomores Sasha Grodsky of Watertown, Mass., and Shannon Griffin of Philadelphia.

“It was a tremendous team effort to reach this level of success, and I couldn’t be prouder of the team,” Hovden says.

In winning the championship, Stewart and Blackburn topped some 300 other debaters from top-ranked U.S. programs.

“The BQDC demonstrated its extraordinary depth this past weekend,” said Stewart. “We are a close-knit team, so it was exhilarating to see friends and teammates succeed at USU.”

Not to mention alumni: Colin Etnire ’12, now in graduate school, was on the Loyola Marymount team in the finals; his team placed second.

Blackburn and Stewart’s victory in the British parliamentary style UDC tournament concludes a season that saw the pair rock the BP debate circuit.

(�ֲ���ý participates in both American and British parliamentary debates. In AP debates, a two-person team argues in support of the motion, and a two-person team opposes it. The British style doubles the fun, with two teams on each side of the motion. Besides the format difference, British debate can be faster-paced and more strategy-focused.)

Blackburn and Stewart won the Yale Inter-Varsity Debate Tournament last October and the Brandeis Inter-Varsity Debate Tournament two months later, vanquishing world-class rhetoricians from Yale, Harvard, Brown and McGill, among various institutions.

The �ֲ���ý contingent at the U.S. Universities Debating Championship included (from left) Director of Debate Jan Hovden and debaters Shannon Griffin, Sasha Grodsky, Taylor Blackburn, Jac Stewart, Stephanie Wesson, Matt Summers, Emily Schwalbe and Ben Claeson. (Photograph courtesy of BQDC)

“Debating with Taylor this year has been a pleasure and tremendous learning experience,” said Stewart. “I’m excited to see how she and the rest of our growing team fare next year.”

In January, the pair went on to the World Universities Debating Championships in Chennai, India, where they were ranked 21st in the world — where, too, Summers and Wesson finished at 39th.

And in March, Wesson and Claeson won the King’s College Inter-Varsity Debate Tournament in New York City.

�ֲ���ý’ success in BP debating was matched by equally formidable achievements on the American circuit, and Brooks Quimby ended 2013–14 ranked ninth in the

Summers and Blackburn finished the season as the fourth-ranked APDA team, posting top-five finishes at the largest, most competitive tourneys the nation, including tournaments at Harvard, Columbia, Brown and Boston University.

And the newbies are coming on strong.

Zoe Seaman-Grant ’17 tied as the fifth-place novice of the year in the U.S., while Matt Kahn ’17 finished as the eighth-ranked novice debater of the season. The team of Seaman-Grant and Kahn won the BU Novice Tournament last fall and placed in the top five at the Vassar, Brown and Brandeis tournaments.

“Only a few debate programs follow the �ֲ���ý model of accepting and training all interested students,” said Stewart. “It has been incredible to go from never having debated to learning to perform at the highest levels.

“�ֲ���ý’ no-cut policy is instrumental to our success.”