Professor Anne R. Roschelle

Professor Anne R. Roschelle, Department of Sociology, was appointed to a two-year term on the Ulster County Human Rights Commission. The commission meets once a month and their activities include: monitoring human rights violations in Ulster County, engaging in public education about human rights, keeping abreast of national and international human rights issues, organizing public events and forums on human rights, engaging in public outreach to agencies, and lobbying state and local legislative bodies when appropriate.  In November, the Ulster County Human Rights Commission is having a conference on Disproportionate Sentencing of Juveniles in Ulster County.

This spring semester, a group of approximately 15 undergraduate women from SUNY New Paltz came together to collaborate on a workshop for the young women at Columbia Girls Secure Facility in Claverack, New York.  Columbia Girls is a juvenile facility where young women between the ages of 13 and 15 who are accused of serious felonies and sentenced as adults are sent.  If they still have time left on their sentence by the time they they turn 21–and many of them do–they are transferred to the New York State Department of Corrections.  There are approximately eight young women in the facility now, although it has a capacity of 25 beds.

The women of New Paltz who devised the workshops brought a variety of different perspectives to the table.  The women represent a range of majors, from Black Studies, to Sociology, Political Science, Art, and Communication and Media.  They are members of a wide number of student organizations–from Urban Lyrics, to the African Women’s Alliance, Fahari Libertad, the Black Studies Student Association, to Chi Upsilon Sigma, and the Student Association.  The first workshop centered around the idea of the higher self, which included presentations by New Paltz students on women who had been incarcerated as well as a poetry workshop.  The second workshop, building on the first, centered around the theme of Sankofa, or the need to reach back to the past to comprehend one’s present.

“The Columbia Girls workshops were not only an opportunity for students to share what they have learned in the classroom with the young women at the facility, but it was also an opportunity for the students and for me as a faculty member to see the possibilities of dialogue between those on the ‘inside’ and those on the ‘outside’ as a means of facilitating an understanding of the dignity and humanity of those behind bars,” said Assistant Professor of Sociology Alexandra Cox.  “This galvanized me and the students: one student took the initiative to plan an on-campus event on the effects of incarceration on women, which took place on Friday May 2nd, and convinced her sorority to take on the issue of women’s incarceration as the cause that their sorority would work on in the coming year.” The students and Cox plan to continue these visits on a regular basis starting in the fall.

Since she began teaching at New Paltz, Cox has taken her students each semester to a secure boy’s facility called Brookwood to engage in joint college classes. “These trips have helped to inform my students’ understandings of incarceration and have opened their eyes about the experiences of young people behind bars,” noted Cox. “The trips to Columbia, however, were an opportunity for me to sit back and learn from our students about the ways they were able to infuse their curriculum with both their intellectual and personal understandings about the role of identity in shaping our social sympathies.”

The Department of Sociology presents a timely lecture on race and social media activism on Wednesday, April 23 from 3-4:30 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium.

Crystal Fleming

Stonybrook University Associate Professor Crystal Fleming will deliver a lecture entitled, “In Virtual Defense of Harriet Tubman:  Black Twitter and the Intersectional Politics of Social Media Activism,” which examines All Def Digital’s production and release of a “Harriet Tubman Sextape,” as well as the professor’s experience writing an online petition to remove the video. Writing in the genre of analytic autoethnography, Fleming brings reflections of her experience as an African-American woman learning about, viewing and reacting to the video in dialogue with content analysis of over 200 comments written by signers of the petition.

In her work, Fleming develops the concept of “spiritual reflexivity” by exploring how her engagement with Christian mysticism, Hinduism and Buddhism shaped her emotional experience of feeling gendered and racialized offense and rage at the portrayal of Tubman. Fleming’s lecture will introduce a theorization of stigmatization as a “symbolic attack,” demonstrate how spirituality can shape how an individual interprets and responds to symbolic attacks and emphasize the role of the Internet in providing opportunities for transforming emotional catharsis into commiseration and collective action.

The talk is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in CSB 110 from 4:30-5:30 p.m.

The event is sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Campus Auxiliary Services.