UW News

January 12, 2006

Odegaard exhibit focuses on poor who gained from education

The Missing Story of Ourselves is on display at Odegaard Undergraduate Library through Jan. 30. The exhibit is of museum quality framed color photographs and narratives created by women and men who either are, or were, poor parents and students changing their lives through the pathway of higher education in the United States.


The exhibit is designed to share honest and compelling stories that are all too absent from the contemporary debate about poverty and the poor in America. The images and first-person narratives are reflections of low-income, non-traditional students and parents. The exhibit was developed by the ACCESS Project at Hamilton College. It challenges misrepresentations of the poor, and raises questions about outcomes of welfare reform that denies opportunities for advancement through education.


A public lecture on the exhibit, Reclaiming Our Stories: Poverty and the Promise of Higher Education, will be given by Vivyan Adair, director of the ACCESS Project at Hamilton College. It will be at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 19 in 102 Physics/Astronomy. The lecture is free and open to the public.