What culture exactly am I sustaining? This is the question I have been avoiding since I entered this graduate program. I have many times now seen the confusion as those I am talking with attempt to make sense of what I am doing, and have in the past decided it easier to just let each person answer the question however it best makes sense for them.
In reality, I am dealing with the culture of higher education. I am creating a program that celebrates and gives voice to college students, whether they are students who have been sexually assaulted or not. Though trauma and sexual violence are going to be emphasized in training, and most likely many students who use the peer listening program’s services will be survivors, this is not the culture being sustained. This is one major part of what needs to be addressed when attempting to hold, support, and listen to college students.
That is what I realized when wrapping up my work in Introduction to Cultural Sustainability. I wrote a nine page paper and only really devoted half a page to the concept of dealing with trauma. Even with survivors, they are not their trauma and I do not want to project a message that implies that they are. They are college students, whole college students dealing with a range of issues. They are individuals attempting to balance a huge workload, making new friends, relying more and more on themselves emotionally, physically, mentally. They come from a number of backgrounds, varying in level of exposure to the “real world,” in types of parents and upbringing, in past trauma and suffering.
I would like to build a program that treats these individuals as people with great insight and experience, and as people who could use a peer who knows how, and genuinely wants, to listen. The community I am working with is college students, and I am dealing with the creation and sustenance of a culture within that community that truly listens to one another. Once that culture is present, an array of student crises that exist at college campuses will most likely come to light. But it is important for me to identify that crisis is not my culture.
