Bard College
PA-4: Diversity and Equity Coordination

The Difference and Media Project is an interdisciplinary, extra-departmental space for students, faculty, staff, and visitors. Inspired by the interdisciplinary, problem-focused nature of the MIT Media Lab, which MIT describes as an “atelier” environment, the Difference and Media Project creates a multi-media laboratory space for “difference.” Difference, broadly speaking, includes race, sexuality, religion, national origin, class, or other ability, but is not restricted to those categories. Difference, of course, is not necessarily an idea that can be captured within these categories, which can only be preliminary and provisional. Media includes written texts, live performance, plays, digital artworks, conversation, art installations, or site-specific interactions with the landscape. The laboratory format allows for rigorous play, spontaneous interactions, and creative analysis.

The Project features collaborative learning, tutorials, workshops, seminars, and conferences. Bard College community members are welcomed into the space to develop projects. It is designed to be a welcoming and open space. While this space will be intended primarily as a space for and about “difference,” a non-exclusionary word that implies a certain relationship to the dominant culture (but with obvious room for fluidity), the intent is inclusive. A focus on difference is balanced with a strategic investment in inter-connectedness, both in terms of building relationships to the world outside Bard–which can produce connections to graduate schools, jobs, and internships—and also within Bard.

In the Spring of 2011, the Difference and Media Project collected information about the diversity of Bard College, including the ratios of students of color, their grades, their advisors, their majors, and their class standings. We use this information as a grounding and weathervane to help us chart the direction of our organization and its effectiveness.

We are currently engaged in a multimedia/web project intended to raise questions about diversity at Bard among the student population, and bring forward hidden and nascent aspects of our reliance on social media and the invisibility of identity online.

Workshops and lectures on diversity and cultural competence, broadly defined, have included interactive panels on "Race and the Pastoral" which used student and alumni experiences to help contextualize what it means to be a person of color in a rural liberal arts college originally founded for the "sons of the manor estates." 60-70 lectures a year focus on Native American, African-American, LGBTQ and other populations, often with student input and participation. Difference and Media Project student fellows curated, jsut this year, a series on Native American culture, including Project 562, a lecture/photography exhibit which seeks to record every known Native American tribal language, Africa Week, with events, talks, and lectures focusing on Africa, and events on Trayvon Martin and blackness at Bard, Queer Life at Bard, and many other related events.