Fall 2021 introduced us to many new friends in SOURCE and we were excited to see that the group continues to move forward with the same energy it had at its inception in 2018.  This Fall, the new and returning SOURCE students through discussion organically re-committed to the basic tenets of the SOURCE space. Students re-committed to:

• Independently and jointly “call in”, (and “call out” when necessary).
• Maintaining each other’s privacy.
• Creating safety in the spaces we occupy together when we can.
• Supporting each other’s courage in the spaces where safety can’t be guaranteed.
• Identifying opportunities to amplify the voices of the unheard, even when our own voice is shaking.

In the Fall, SOURCE students (also organically) found themselves engaging in discourse around a number of wide-ranging of topics:

• The role of students in institutional change, in particular when institutions have extensive exclusionary histories.
• The delineation between student leadership and faculty leadership and how to navigate roles when defining your educational needs. What if the content of your course is not meeting the standards of the discipline that you know exist?
• Taking on the burden (and responsibility) of educating others about ourselves, our backgrounds, and our countries of origin. And the tension between representing our personal identity while simultaneously being responsible for representing the history, hopes, dreams, successes, and failings of an entire nation of people.
• The kinds of “wicked questions” and paradoxes we encounter each day like navigating imposter syndrome, while trying to be authentic and own our various nuanced identities.
• The need to feel supported and the isolation of taking a stand alone.
• How much of our identity is excluded due to the topics our society routinely chooses to avoid (the topics we have not learned how to talk about)?
• And we talked about identity (a lot!).

We also touched on

• The concept of belonging** (we looked at some resources and found that belonging is more nuanced than we thought — e.g., do we want to belong everywhere?). We identified small ways that belonging is “activated” like the inclusion of your language on a wall of “hellos”.
• The emerging discipline of Quantcrit
• The new terminology of “impression management”

It looks like another rich year for discourse in SOURCE! As we proceed with our meetings, discussions, and actions, we hope that these topics, concepts, ideas, and discussions contribute to the ongoing discourse in our society and find relevance in multiple spaces across the COE and beyond.