A new club at IU is attempting to foster the creation of safe spaces and the transmission of differing ideas about politics, society and the world.
Professor Pamela Jackson, an IU sociology professor, started the club WOKE last year with the assistance of Alondra Galvan, who is a junior at IU and the club's current president.
As of the end of March, the club consisted of seven officers and 10 members. To become a member, a student would have to take, or plan to take, a sociology-based course at IU.
The club does not consider itself a partisan group, said Jacob Castaneda, the incoming president of the club. He said he wants to create a place for both sides of the political spectrum to talk.
“We want everyone to show and give in their opinions because this is not a political club,” Castaneda said. “It’s not like Young Republicans and Young Democrats.”
Galvan said the biggest event the club has done so far was having a speaker come in to talk about stress levels of Americans after the 2016 election, focusing specifically on millennials.
One future event for the club consists of partnering with Student Life and Learning to hold a movie viewing for the HBO project “Clínica de Migrantes: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," which is about the hardships immigrants go through to get healthcare in the U.S.
This event is planned for mid to late April.
The club is also partnering with Sigma Lambda Upsilon, a Latina-based sorority, for a sexual assault awareness symposium on April 24. Through this, Galvan said, WOKE plans to help bring awareness to sexual assault on campus with specific reference to minority students.
Galvan also said one of the goals for WOKE is to organize a conference at IU. The conference would bring in people from around the world and political spectrum to discuss popular and unpopular ideas.
“We just want each other to be able to talk because it’s not something that has happened on this campus,” Galvan said.
