This year the Wurtele Center for Leadership is piloting Amplify, a brand new program designed to help Smith students develop their public voice. Erin Cohn ‘00, director of the Wurtele Center, said that the idea for the program came out of the center’s strategic planning process last year that aimed to identify what Smithies wanted to see in their leadership center. They solicited feedback from students, faculty, staff and alums.
Many students expressed frustration that their work in the classroom never reached a larger audience than their Smith peers. “It was clear – among many other things – that there was real heat and energy around this idea of public voice as a form of leadership that Smith students and Smith faculty were equally excited about,” Cohn said.
Since Amplify is in its first year, Cohn said that they are trying to approach the issue from multiple angles to see what is most effective. This year the program includes a series of speaker events that cover various topics surrounding public voice. In September, Tanisha C. Ford, a professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Tuck Woodstock, journalist and co-producer of the Gender Reveal Podcast, led a talk on “Developing and Owning Your Public Voice.” The second event, held in October, featured Shereen Marisol-Meraji, journalist and co-producer of NPR’s Codeswitch podcast, along with a panel of three Smith professors: Carrie N. Baker, Samuel Ng and Liz Pryor. Marisol-Meraji’s topic was “The Public Voice ‘Tax.’” Finally, on Nov. 19, journalist Audrea Lim, artist Eve Mosher and Leah Stokes, assistant professor of political science and environmental studies at UCSB, will speak on a panel entitled “Public Voice Across Media: Speaking Out Against Climate Change.”
“Those events are meant to inspire and engage students,” Cohn said. Marisol-Meraji’s talk, for example, focused on the intersection of identity and public voice, and spoke specifically to the experience of those with marginalized identities who are trying to reach a wider audience with their voice.
As the daughter of an Iranian father and Puerto Rican mother, Marisol-Meraji’s life has been defined by an unsureness as to what identity she belonged to. She spoke about how her experience being a journalist of color in a room full of white journalists showed her the ‘tax’ she must pay to use her public voice as a marginalized person, specifically in her efforts to write more stories about Latinx communities. She was required to prove the worth of these stories to her coworkers, and was expected to know everything about the Latinx community as a member herself. This ‘tax’ came in this persistent question: “are you who you say you are?”
Cohn’s hope is that after attending this speaker series, students will want to partake in the second part of Amplify’s approach: a competition.
The competition, open during interterm, will accept submissions for three categories: public speaking, public art and public writing. While the Wurtele Center does provide some guidelines and criteria for submissions, Cohn emphasized the creativity and room for growth in the competition’s current formulation. “I don’t think we have a set idea around what is the thing that is going to win in each category. Smithies are so creative, so they’re going to come up with something I could’ve never imagined,” she said. “It’s definitely scrappy and young.” The submissions will be posted on a website only accessible to the Smith community for a viewing period. Winners will be announced in March. You can find more information about the competition, here.
Amplify has also partnered with a group of professors who have incorporated public writing work into their courses this semester. You can find a full list of these participating courses, here. While submissions for the competition do not have to come from a student’s academic body of work, these courses aim to help students develop their public voice and potentially create something that might fit Amplify’s criteria.
Cohn made it clear that, in terms of the competition, the main criterion to focus on is that of “Promise.” Submissions are not expected to be perfectly polished pieces of work – what they are looking for is work with potential to find a space and audience beyond Smith. Cohn said she will feel that Amplify has succeeded if student’s work “ultimately had a longer life span.”
