Editor’s note: The Daily’s editorial department acknowledges that this article is premised on several conflicts of interest. This article is a special feature for the Daily’s Commencement edition that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.
Sasha Sabherwal, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, delivered a talk entitled “Collective Fictions of Caste: Unsettling Caste, Gender, and Religion in the Sikh Diaspora of the Transnational Pacific Northwest” on Feb. 8. The talk drew from Sabherwal’s research project studying Sikh communities in the Canadian and Pacific Northwestern diaspora.
Last month, the Tufts University School of Medicine released a gun safety study in partnership with 97Percent, a bipartisan gun safety organization. The study was led by Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor of public health and community medicine at TUSM. Dr. Siegel was assisted by student researchers Kathleen Grene, an MD and MPH student at TUSM, and Amani Dharani (AG’22).
Incumbent State Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven won the 27th Middlesex District Democratic primary on Sept. 6, defeating opponent Jason Mackey. Uyterhoeven, who is currently running uncontested in the general election, won with 87% of the vote and is on track to continue representing the city of Somerville in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
The Division of Student Diversity and Inclusion announced a new identity center for Indigenous students at Tufts last fall, following recommendations from a workstream report the university published in early 2021. More recently, the university hired Vernon Miller to direct the center.
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley announced last month that she had secured $8 million of federal funding for the Massachusetts 7th Congressional District, which she represents, and that $2.5 million of that funding will be allocated for a Somerville project called the Poplar Street Pump Station. The project is slated to begin construction in fall 2022 and will provide critical stormwater management infrastructure to the city.
Tufts Climate Action staged a protest outside of Ballou Hall on Friday, calling for the university’s complete divestment from fossil fuel holdings. The protest complements the work TCA has been doing since its founding in 2012.
Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne recently launched an initiative to diversify city boards and commissions in the Somerville city government. In an effort to make them more inclusive, the city will reevaluate the selection and application process for positions on boards and commissions.
A team of Tufts students and faculty members is working with Communities Responding to Extreme Weather (CREW), a Cambridge-based grassroots organization that helps communities prepare for climate change-induced severe weather, to survey Chinatown and Roxbury residents on their level of preparedness for extreme weather events. The aim of the survey is to examine how social connectedness within communities can help build climate resilience.
Boston-area schools are seeing some variations in their COVID-19 policies now that thousands of college students have returned for the spring semester. At Tufts and other colleges and universities in the area, academic and social precautions continue to shift as infection rates fall from their latest peak. Most recently, Tufts decreased surveillance frequency from every other day to two times per week for all students, beginning Feb. 7.
