Imari Morris – Illuminate
Imari Morris. Photo: Curtin Guild.
What sparked your interest in student politics?
The main thing was seeing how the guild helps students, both in the short term and the long term. I’ve had my fair share of experiences where I’ve had to jump through loops or advocate for myself in classes and so I wanted to do the same for others. I know I can be loud and stubborn when I know I’m in the right so I figured I’d use that for good and help other people.
What is the purpose of the role you are running for?
The purpose of humanities rep is to advocate and push for changes that’ll benefit students as well as helping them speak up when things are wrong, or they are having issues within their course. Especially in Humanities where so much of what we study is subjective, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking “this is how it is” and “everyone has to struggle with this so just deal with it” but that shouldn’t be the case and students should be able to learn and study without jumping through loops or putting themselves in unnecessary uncomfortable situations just to get a passing grade.
If elected, what will you do for Humanities students?
If elected my main two focuses will be on getting the appropriate warnings placed on any confronting or potentially triggering content. Especially with the wide range of topics covered across humanities courses, students shouldn’t have these things sprung on them out of no-where and while I understand that there are some areas where they are unavoidable students should still be given the courtesy and respect of being warned ahead of time that there will be confronting topics and materials.
My other main focus will be on feedback for assignments. Both in my own experience and through hearing the experiences of my friends I know that there are a number of assignments where students aren’t getting their feedback until the end of semester despite having submitted in the first few weeks because of the way the assignment is set up, or simply because of the way that the unit marks things. It is unacceptable for students to have no way of gauging how they are doing or if they are even on the right track until after they have already submitted their final assessments or a few days before those final essays are due.
What’s your own confession at Curtin, or what’s a Curtin life hack you’ve found?
My Curtin confession would be that I gave up properly reading the required texts for my units about halfway through my degree, so maybe two-ish years ago now. Unless they are directly related to an assignment, the most I will ever read of them is the Abstract and maybe the introduction and/or conclusion if it seems interesting. I hope my UC’s find out about this.
Joshua Frend0-Menendez – Left Action
Joshua Frendo-Menendez. Photo: Curtin Guild.
What sparked your interest in student politics?
Well I’ve always been interested in politics and I guess seeing like-minded people at the Socialist Alternative stalls made me recognise that student activism is a very achievable thing. You know, it’s very easy to get involved if you’re committed to it.
What is the purpose of the role you are running for?
The purpose of the role in my opinion, is to advocate for, you know, humanities interests for both students and staff. Actually, earlier this year the humanities staff were pretty central to the striking that went on and in my opinion the Guild didn’t sort of support the strikes as much as they should have, and I think as humanities representative in that position I would have definitely advocated for more support for the strikes, because um, without humanities professors [who] aren’t getting treated well, it’s going to present itself in our education.
If elected, what will you do for Humanities students?
Well, one thing is definitely advocating for solidarity of the staff like I just mentioned. And also, I think it’s important that we defend humanities units which are often being defunded or just gotten rid of completely, and I think that fighting them every step of the way and trying to advocate for more funding for humanities.
What’s your own confession at Curtin, or what’s a Curtin life hack you’ve found?
I would say don’t spend too much money on coffee, because you get there and you’re like ‘$5 coffee, that’s basically free right!’ And then you buy five of them and suddenly it’s not so free anymore.
A full video of the interview can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CrFaEbfhfyj-RQEkUbpuOT7jvf0PW20X/view?usp=drive_link