Students from the “Social Change and Community Action” J-term class are joining with Building Bridges to help plan and organize this year’s conference, “Hidden in Plain Site: Recognizing and Rejecting Rape Culture.”

Associate Professor in Religion; Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies; Peace Studies; and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Thia Cooper first started teaching this course seven years ago. Cooper wanted a course that combined both advocacy and service and knew that Building Bridges was an organization that resembled this vision.

“I wanted it to be half service and advocacy and half classroom analysis. I knew about Building Bridges and loved the topics that students chose,” Cooper said.

The class is broken into three different service groups: one Building Bridges, another focused on immigration and the third working with Adult English Language Learners in Mankato.

Sophomore Gabe Grosshuesch who is in the Building Bridges group described the three areas the students are working on to help Building bridges with their conference.

“I wanted it to be half service and advocacy and half classroom analysis. I knew about Building Bridges and loved the topics that students chose.”—Thia Cooper

“One group is working on the action piece which is the interactive portion of the conference that gives the audience the opportunity to move rather then just sitting there and getting a lecture. Another group is working with workshop to help them get organized and find speakers. Finally my group, which is comprised of just me, is working on the history project for Building Bridges as it is their 20th year,” Grosshuesch said.

Cooper describes that the most rewarding part of her job is seeing how  students grow beyond reading to actually seeing what works in practice.

“The most rewarding part of the class for me is seeing the students make connections between their projects and the more academic readings we do. They learn more about the broad issue at hand in the reading and see what works and doesn’t work in practice,” Cooper said.

Sophomore Adam Peters has learned a lot from this class and even more so about Rape Culture, which is Building Bridges’ goal.

“From this class I have learned things like how putting myself in uncomfortable positions makes me a better and more worldly person. I have also learned a lot about Rape Culture and how nasty this culture that we live in is about physical and sexual abuse against women,” Peters said.

Senior Building Bridges Co-president Kyle Maloney has been excited to see how the students’ work and energy has benefitted the organization.

“Their work continues to infuse positive creative energy into the committee, and we’re looking forward to seeing what they are able to create,” Maloney said.

Building Bridges is featuring the movie The Purity Myth as a preview to the conference and to get students excited about the coming keynote speaker for the main conference.

“We are showing the film both to feature Ms. Valenti, who will be our second keynote this year, and because the film highlights the problematic tendency in our society to commodify sex and judge peoples’ self-worth based on their sexual activity,” Maloney said.

The Purity Myth will be featured on Tues., Jan. 27 at 6 p.m. in Wallenberg Auditorium. Tickets for Building Bridges conference on Mar. 7 are now available through the Gustavus website.

-Christine Peterson