Club dives into political and social climate

Trying to help people on campus understand each other better, senior Zaki Sayyid started the Culture and Social Issues club with the intent of doing more than just a weekly meeting. “We also hopefully plan to do activities on the weekends," Sayyid said. "If there’s a really culturally or socially relevant film that comes out, we would go see it or if there’s a festival or something like that, we would go to that and that would be a weekend event for us.”

Marisa Uddin

Trying to help people on campus understand each other better, senior Zaki Sayyid started the Culture and Social Issues club with the intent of doing more than just a weekly meeting. “We also hopefully plan to do activities on the weekends,” Sayyid said. “If there’s a really culturally or socially relevant film that comes out, we would go see it or if there’s a festival or something like that, we would go to that and that would be a weekend event for us.”

Brooke Colombo, Editor-in-chief
September 27, 2017

Divisions within society are the focus of the Cultural and Social Issues club which has its first meeting Thursday during advisory period in room C217.

“It seems to me that the political and social climate is really divisive– you’re either with us, or you’re against us,” club founder and senior Zaki Sayyid said. “I thought that we should really have a place on campus that’s focused on promoting understanding between people. You don’t have to agree with other people, but hopefully, if you get to see the world from their perspective, you’ll gain a little more respect and be a little more cultured.”

The club doesn’t always get into specifics, and usually centers its discussions around a generalized topic, but current political issues often make their way into the discussion.

“We’ve talked about the alt-right before, we’ve talked about artificial intelligence, propaganda in democracy,” Sayyid said. “You’ll find that what people know as their experience and what’s going on around them, they’ll bring that into the discussions, and we’ll get a lot of interesting insight as to how the current political climate is affecting the way people view issues.”