Graduate students

Theater student helps Egyptian women find and use a stronger voice

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 18:59:52 +0000

Theater student helps Egyptian women find and use a stronger voice Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/03/2018 - 11:59

Jeff Thomas

When Sarah Fahmy, a master’s candidate in theatre and performance studies at the �鶹��Ƶ, returned to her native country of Egypt last summer, she had a lot more in mind than visiting family and friends.

“Over the course of two months, I worked with 55 young women, ages 11 to 17, using theatrical exercises identifying how we can use our bodies and our voices to adequately express ourselves,” said Fahmy about the Young Women’s Vocal Empowerment sessions she conducted in Aswan and Alexandria, Egypt.

Lerato Osnes (left) and Sarah Fahmy (right) perform a scene for a workshop on voice for Casey Middle School in May 2018. At the top of the page, Fahmy (back row, far right) joins young the women’s vocal empowerment group in Boulder in 2017. Photos courtesy of Beth Osnes.

Her efforts employ a novel strategy to encourage women to express themselves more fully; it combines methods developed by theater performers and by speech pathologists to strengthen a speaker’s voice and expand her expressive range. The hope is that women “rehearse using their empowered voice” in different social contexts.

The Young Women’s Vocal Empowerment program was developed by Fahmy’s advisor, CU Boulder Professor Beth Osnes and alumna Chelsea Hackett in collaboration with Guatemalan organization Starfish.

“For the most part they addressed issues such as equal access to education or the health-care system and gender equity in the workplace” said Fahmy about the concerns of the young women. “But they also addressed issues of water pollution, in the oceans or the Nile.”

The exercises are of no casual interest to Fahmy, who is focusing on post-colonial female playwrights in the Middle East, and applied theater such as the empowerment program. The CU Boulder Office for Outreach and Engagement helped sponsor the trip, and Fahmy was using applied theatrical techniques developed by Augusto Boal.

Fahmy hails from the Alexandria area, though she spent about half her life in England before coming to Boulder. Alexandria is the more cosmopolitan city, and Aswan more rural, but both areas are very “touristy,” Fahmy said.

Several different applied theater techniques were employed during the 10 days she spent in both cities. One of the exercises, image theater, required the young women to address—first non-verbally and then verbally—the transition from a polluted environment to a healthful one, envisioning the current state, the transition state and how it would be if the problem were solved.

Marina, a participant from Aswan, writes the original empowerment song the girls composed on a white board. Image courtesy of Sarah Fahmy.

“What was interesting was a lot of the girls in Aswan were more willing to address their creativity,” Fahmy said. “That wasn’t what I expected when I chose the locations, but that was the experience."

Fahmy also used the trip to explore the political activism expressed by women playwrights in Egypt. Her emphasis on applied theater and Arab modernity is focused on non-traditional theatrical forms, especially those involving political activism.

While the country is about 90 percent Muslim, Fahmy said that in Egypt, and much of the Middle East, women’s issues are different, but not necessarily worse, than that in the United States. Religion doesn’t necessarily dictate women’s inequality, but the patriarchal structure of the government does, she said.

For example, in 1919 Egyptian feminists led by Huda Shaarawi held an all-women’s march protesting the British occupation, and that became one of the most significant marches in the country's history; this was at the same time that the 19th Amendment allowing women the vote was being ratified in the United States.

My applied theatre work, aligns with women’s longstanding history of activism and civic engagement in the country, as it encourages young women to practice using their voices for self and community advocacy."

“I know in fact a lot of performance in Egypt was focused on political activism, and there was a prominent women’s march in 1919, which was one of the first public acts against British rule,” she said. Performance history here dates back to the ancient Egyptians, including religious festivals, puppetry and storytelling, although a Western model of theater, with the concept of playwriting, wasn’t introduced until the 20th century.

At that time, theatrical performances and cultural salons were popular among the upper class. There was also an increase in women's enrollment at schools and universities and their contributions to writing for literary publications and newspapers.

“In 1922, May Ziada was the first woman to write something and call it a ‘play,’ but I can't locate any of her scripts,” Fahmy said. “I’m definitely having a hard time finding works, even though we know they exist,” she said.

Looking at women’s contributions through a performance-studies lens has helped compensate for the lack of scripts available during this period. However, the tradition of women using non-traditional theater in political activism during the Arab Spring in 2011 is a bit easier to document.

“A lot of it is verbatim or documentary theater—gathering stories from the protests in Tahrir Square and putting them into perspective,” Fahmy said. This type of experimental theater is very much in the same vein as Fahmy’s studies.

One example of an Egyptian female playwright Fahmy researched was Dalia Basiouny, an assistant professor of theater in the English Department at October 6 University in Egypt. Basiouny said the documentary theater during the revolution acted like a touchstone to the realities of the revolution. Basiouny was active in this effort during the revolution and is also a playwright in a more traditional theater sense.

This is compelling to a woman who is researching Arab modernity and post-colonial theatre and who just happens to be Egyptian.

“It’s very interesting to draw parallels between women’s active engagement with performance and political activism during the 1919 and 2011 protests,” she said. “My applied theatre work, aligns with women’s longstanding history of activism and civic engagement in the country, as it encourages young women to practice using their voices for self and community advocacy.

“While empowerment and liberation will not happen overnight, and will require a lot of sustained community effort, I plan to continue working with the university I partnered up with last summer—The Arab Academy of Science, Technology and Maritime Transport—and the Ministry of Emigration, to facilitate applied theater programs around the country.”

Fahmy has been invited to give a presentation on her applied theater work at the fourth Edition of the National Conference for Egyptian Expatriate Scientists and Experts (Egypt Can - Education Edition) hosted by the Ministry of Emigration and Egyptian Expatriates Affairs, Dec. 16-19, 2018.

“I am hoping that this collaboration will help emphasize the importance of, and revitalize the arts in Egyptian education,” Fahmy said.

Sarah Fahmy employs a novel strategy to encourage women to express themselves more fully; it combines methods developed by theater performers and by speech pathologists.

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CU Boulder pollster emphasizes need for rigor in political surveys

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:11:26 +0000

CU Boulder pollster emphasizes need for rigor in political surveys Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:11

Sarah Schleifer

Carey Stapleton, PhD candidate at CU Boulder, was survey lead for the American Politics Research Lab’s Colorado Political Climate Survey

The nature of political polling is changing in the United States, and Carey Stapleton, a PhD student in American politics and methodology at the �鶹��Ƶ, is equipping his undergraduate Survey Design and Analysis class, to meet these changes head-on.

Carey Stapleton

The result of this class was the recently released Colorado Political Climate Survey. Through creating a class centered around surveys and polls from CU’s American Politics Research Lab (APRL), Stapleton is teaching his students not only to think critically about politics and survey design, but also how to analyze the data of a large-scale poll.

Stapleton, who has “a substantial background in survey design,” was approached two years ago by Professors Scott Adler, Anand Sokhey and David Brown to create a class in survey design and political polling.

“We all sat around and developed the syllabus for the course, and we finally started teaching it last fall.” He says the class has grown by a factor of three in two years, and is continuing to pick up speed.

Stapleton says the Colorado Political Climate Survey took a couple years to perfect. “We tried to get both information that's relevant to Colorado specifically, but also kind of how Coloradans feel about broader national issues.”

It’s why the poll features questions ranging from intent to vote in the gubernatorial election to opinions on sports gambling, recreational marijuana laws, and if “Dreamers” should be allowed to remain in the country.

In 33 pages packed with data and analysis, the survey “is designed to gauge the public’s political and partisan leanings,” and correctly predicted the outcomes of the gubernatorial and congressional races, but revealed inconsistencies in polling with issues on the ballot like Propositions 73, 74 and 112.

In this midterm election, pollsters stood poised to redefine the relevance and format of political polls and surveys after the stunning upset in the 2016 presidential election defied the predictions of many major polls.

I tell my students all the time, ‘I don't care what you think in this class. I care that we do science in the appropriate way so that we can get to the reality, rather than what we want to be true.’”

On the nature of polls and the argument that they might yield biased information, Stapleton argues, “We're not here to tell people what to think about the results. We do this to get this information out there.” His responsibility is to be an impartial arbiter of the reality that the poll is reporting, he says.

Stapleton argues that transparency is key among polls and pollsters, citing the intersection of science and politics as an area that should be free from biases. He observes: “I tell my students all the time, ‘I don't care what you think in this class. I care that we do science in the appropriate way so that we can get to the reality, rather than what we want to be true.’”

Undergrads “are just now learning to think things through and come to conclusions,” which is why making sure students analyze the reason certain conclusions are reached is critical.

In his own research, Stapleton focuses on the role anger plays in American politics: “Emotions are critically important to our daily lives, and one thing that politicians can do is use their own emotional projections to influence how the public feels.”

The prevalence of emotional manipulation in today’s politics only reinforces the importance of unbiased, science-based surveys, he says. According to Stapleton, the goal of a survey like APRL’s is to create a more nuanced view of politics among voters and his students.

“I think that's our goal ultimately,” he muses. “Do people leave your class with a better grasp of reality and the truth? My hope is they do. And then do they take that and apply it in the real world? My hope is they do.”

Through creating a class centered around surveys from CU’s American Politics Research Lab, grad student teaches his students not only to think critically about politics and survey design, but also how to analyze the data of a large-scale poll.

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New CU Boulder philosophy course tackles sports

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 04:40:03 +0000

New CU Boulder philosophy course tackles sports Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/26/2018 - 21:40

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Class tackles four hot-button topics: doping, collegiate athletics, sex and gender, and sports and politics

Ask fans in the stands or a star athlete on the sidelines about the connection between philosophy and sports, and it’s a fair bet that many would find the question puzzling.

Philosophy, after all, is seen by many as a kind of ultimate pursuit of the mind, while sports is deemed an expression of the body. As the late Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss pointed out in his groundbreaking 1969 book, Sport: A Philosophical Inquiry, every human society watch and participate in sports, yet the world’s greatest philosophers barely brushed against the subject, considering it vulgar.

Alex Wolf-Root, a PhD student in philosophy, is shown above in class and at the top of the page competing in the 2014 USA Cross Country National Championships. Photos courtesy of Alex Wolf-Root.

Alex Wolf-Root, a former collegiate track athlete pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the �鶹��Ƶ, first got the idea to create a course melding philosophy and sports following a conversation with a co-worker about “Deflategate.” For non-sports fans, that was the media’s tag for a scandal in which the New England Patriots were found guilty of deliberating deflating footballs during the 2014-15 American Football Conference championship, allegedly to make it easier for star quarterback Tom Brady to throw the ball.

“Assuming the allegations were true, it raises some interesting philosophical questions,” says Wolf-Root, who is not a football fan.

That seed has now bloomed into a course, Philosophy and Sports (PHIL 2240), offered for the first time at CU Boulder for the fall 2018 semester. Most of Wolf-Root’s 32 students have never before taken a philosophy course, which is exactly what he was hoping for.

“I wanted to pull people into philosophy classes who would never otherwise do that, to practice the skills of philosophy and discuss interesting issues they otherwise wouldn’t discuss,” he says.

He deliberately dropped his students into the deep end during the first weeks of the course, examining such conceptual issues as the nature of sports, sportspersonship and cheating.

“The first unit is really about the metaphysics of sport,” he says, “though I never used the word ‘metaphysics.’”

From there, the class is designed to tackle four hot-button applied topics: doping, collegiate athletics, sex and gender, and sports and politics.

Wolf-Root has had strong feelings about doping in sport, though many of his views changed once he began to critically examine the issues. Regardless of his own views, he has sought to foster discussions that will help his students see shades of gray. For example, using caffeine isn’t considered doping, even though the drug has been shown to give endurance athletes a leg up. Likewise, many athletes use iron supplements to boost red-blood-cell counts and improve oxygen uptake.

“Talking about ‘unnatural’ enhancement is incredibly problematic,” he says. “What does it mean for something to be ‘natural’? Wearing clothes isn’t ‘natural.’”

Ultimately, it’s all about context, he argues, and what’s agreed upon within the sporting community.

The course examines two main questions pertaining to collegiate athletics: The connection, if any, between athletics and academics, and the exploitation of athletes in money-generating sports such as football and basketball.

Talking about ‘unnatural’ enhancement is incredibly problematic,” he says. “What does it mean for something to be ‘natural’? Wearing clothes isn’t ‘natural.’”

Wolf-Root is so troubled by some of those issues that he won’t watch big-time college athletics—men's basketball and football in the "Power Five" conferences (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC). He sees big-time college athletes as “exploited free labor” and is dubious about the traditional arguments supporting athletic programs at colleges and universities.

“Supporters say (athletics) teaches values of teamwork, leadership and hard work,” he notes. “But not only is it not clear that big-time college athletics teaches that, there also are tons of other ways to learn those skills.”

Wolf-Root sees the value of connecting athletics with the modern university, but believes the current system is unjustifiable. That's not to say that he doesn't see a value of connecting athletics with the modern university, but rather that he sees the current system as unjustifiable.

Issues relating to gender in sports can be contentious. Sex and gender, he notes, are not the same thing, and neither is strictly binary; not even anatomical or chromosomal differences are always clear cut.

Binary approaches to athletics can lead to humiliating or invasive situations, as when South African runner Caster Semenya was forced to withdraw from competition until she underwent a “sex verification test.” She was later allowed to return to competition, though allegedly only after she underwent mandatory hormone therapy.

And determining what is an “unfair” advantage can get tricky, Wolf-Root says.

“People under six feet tall are more likely to be discriminated against in professional basketball, and most professional sprinters have an innate physical advantage because they have a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers,” he notes. “That might be unfair, but is it necessarily problematic?”

He literally laughs at the idea that there has ever been a time when sports have been free from politics, noting that African-American baseball players were forced to play in separate leagues for decades and that the U.S. Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars to turn professional football games into a platform for its messaging.

When former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the National Anthem to bring attention to racial injustice, many Americans accused him of disrespecting the military. Meanwhile, former college and NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, who is white, was widely hailed for kneeling in prayer after scoring touchdowns.

“Kneeling is one of the more accepted ways of non-violent protest. It shows respect,” Wolf-Root says. “But people hate Kaepernick because he’s using his platform to put a spotlight on how racist our society is.”

Whatever his own opinions, Wolf-Root hopes that such discussions will help his students “cultivate critical-reasoning skills.”

“Education is not just about getting a job. It’s about helping students learn the skills to flourish and engage in the world around them, be it in work, life or politics. Even more broadly, it's about helping students figure out what matters to them, and what makes their lives have meaning and value," he says.

Alex Wolf-Root, a former collegiate track athlete pursuing a PhD in philosophy at CU Boulder, first got the idea to create a course melding philosophy and sports following a conversation about “Deflategate.”

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