A student post from The Workshop 12*
“I don’t take Latin — what does that even mean?”
As I sat on my bus back to Andover from winter break upper year, I followed the Washington Post’s coverage of protests outside of the Supreme Court during the Dobbs v. Jackson oral arguments. The bus ride was long, and I was bored, so I figured why not Google a bit more about what was going on?
My Safari tabs quickly grew, an accumulation of all my questions and the rabbit holes I began to go down. I supplemented these searches with a Notes document in my phone to keep track of the information I was learning. The top of the document outlines one of the most important — though simple — phrases I learned in my few hours of research: stare decisis. It’s Latin, and not at all indicative of its meaning (if you, like me, do not have a background in the language). It was the term that made me question why I was never taught these legal phrases in my history classes, or why no one was providing information about legal cases that was accessible to those with varying literacy levels.
My project, the Repro Health Library serves as a tool for me to answer the questions no one has yet answered for me. Learning about the intricacies of stare decisis alone and how integral precedent is to our common law system only widened the information gap between me and others. Others who might not have access to the technology required to research their rights or the literacy to understand the information that they would come across.
As time went on, my desire to increase information accessibility transformed before my eyes. I went from wanting to make an informational pamphlet to reimagining how zines could be the perfect physical artifact for my Workshop project. But what would happen after someone reads my zine? How would I really play a part in addressing both the digital divide and information access gap between communities? I inched toward website building and, every day, woke up with a new dream for this “library.” Studies I read about mHealth (mobile health) and m4RH (mobile for reproductive health) guided me down a text bot path and, with the blink of an eye, my plan was bigger than me.
