“It’s just a word.” How many students on Villanova’s campus have been on the receiving end of words reminiscent of that sentence? How many students or faculty members throughout the nation have talked in such a way and made students feel dehumanized due to their differences? 

Last Friday, Feb. 23, the Association for Change and Transformation (ACT), a program within Villanova’s Office of Intercultural Affairs (OIA), reignited the flames of reflection and discourse related to these questions. The group held its esteemed Touch of Diversity Skit 2.0 in Connelly Cinema, with an intercultural affair held outside afterwards. Miranda Febus, the Assistant Director of Intercultural Affairs, and senior Alyane Wollery, Co-President of ACT, headed the event. 

“It involves submitting authentic student experiences,” Wollery said, describing the skit’s production process. 

Every year, ACT calls for students to submit accounts of real experiences for the members to base their project around. ACT looks at these stories and turns them into a skit performed by undergraduate student volunteers.

These volunteers come together during Diversity Week, held the week prior to Orientation, to act out the skit and receive training from staff members. The training focuses on facilitating topics of intersectionality, socioeconomic status, ability and others of salience to freshmen during Orientation. 

“The over-emerging theme would be a call-to-action,” Wollery said of the production. 

Wollery hoped that students’ take-away is that anyone can be an advocate, regardless of age, and that students are not powerless in these conversations.

Interactions portrayed in the skit included a student in the Muslim community receiving Islamophobic mockery from a roommate simply for her prayer methods and a professor denying the earnest accommodation requests of a student with a visual disability and a writing problem.

“It is kind of striking that we never have a shortage of submissions every year,” Febus said.

After the skit’s conclusion, attendants were treated to an intercultural fair with presentation displays from two other on-campus groups: the Latin American Student Organization (LASO) and Stained Glass Films. The former is a support group for members of the Latinx community and students who want to engage in the celebration and education of Latin American cultures with others. The latter is a student-run production company associated with the University’s International Social Justice Documentary Course. It aims to develop documentaries that pass on the knowledge and cultural appreciation gained from members’ experiences in Salvador, Brazil. 

For further information about ACT, LASO, Stained Glass Films and other cultural and identity-based organizations at Villanova, visit the VU Groups website, the official Stained Glass Films website or the section of the University website dedicated to the OIA, rebranding to the Office of Belonging and Inclusion (OBI) in the near future.