As first-year students at the University of Notre Dame, our seminar class expressed the desire to make a difference in our society by expressing our opinions of the Forum and its intentions. When we looked at the Forum website, we saw discussions and essays written by professors, religious figures, ND alumni, and professionals. The only thing we did not see was a contribution by students of the University. We decided that the students’ perspective was vital to the Forum, as we are the immediate audience for the discussions and a mechanism by which the Forum’s message can spread beyond the confines of the campus.
So we made this video.
This video was created by the 17 students in Dr. Carolyn Nordstrom’s freshman fall seminar in anthropology as a promotion for the Forum. The students organized, filmed, and edited the video independently. The video is intended to reflect the unique perspective of these students’ generation. For example, within the video, there are scenes in which a person is on the screen, obviously responding to a question, and yet his/her voice is not heard. This is for two purposes: first, it symbolizes the difficulty an individual has in making his voice heard in today’s world, and second, it prevents the viewer from basing their own conclusions on another person’s opinion. The Forum is meant to promote discussion, and the inclusion of a biased message would be contrary to that goal.