Released in March by Pennsylvania State University Press, “Sorcery or Science?” focuses on the lives and beliefs of the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad al-Kuntī, two influential West African Muslims who lived in the Sahara Desert in what is now Northern Mali in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These scholars believed that the physical world is surrounded by an invisible realm.

“They wrote a lot of works where they describe the world that we see as surrounded by this vast invisible realm full of invisible entities,” said Marcus-Sells, who is also the Distinguished Emerging Scholar at Elon. “This invisible realm is both around and within, so it surrounds and penetrates into the visible world.”

The works of the Kunta scholars describe practices to manipulate the invisible realm, with the goal of changing the material lives and conditions of people in the physical world.

“These practices involve things like trying to control invisible entities, creating amulets and talismans, performing numerology on say, the names of God, for the purposes of really anything you can think of: healing, defense, and traveling instantaneously between places,” Marcus-Sells said.

Marcus-Sells originally began research for this book for her doctorate at Stanford University in 2012. Research for this book took her to Mali, Morocco and France to collect materials. She has spent the last few years re-writing it.

“There’s actually been an explosion of interest within Islamic studies within religious studies and specifically on what is variously called magic or the occult,” she said. “That really has reframed a lot of this discussion and really changed my thinking on a lot of the approach to the book and these topics.”

Since Sorcery or Science? has been published, it has garnered interest among many other scholars in the field. In March, Marcus-Sells was invited to present at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought at Northwestern University.

Marcus-Sells’ work is unique because even though there has been interest in the history of magic within religious studies in recent years, scholarship has not yet connected Islamic traditions to ancient Mediterranean and Western European magic traditions. There is also only one other book about the Kunta scholars, which is based on outdated research, she said.

“I am contributing to an understanding of how Islamic history intersects with the development of the histories of magic, and also challenging certain ideas that these histories of magic and discourses about magic are exclusive to Western European history,” she said.

This book is important to Marcus-Sells because she wants to tackle the historical bias that West-African Muslims were not as intelligent as Muslims in North Africa, the Middle East and Persia.

“It’s just so not true,” she said. “These works are so cool and they’re so good, complex, and so sophisticated and they’re so deeply erudite, and I want to be part of scholarship that lifts up that aspect of the work of African Muslim scholars from the pre-colonial period.”

Minton started with the Peace Corps in August of 2018. He lived and trained in a small village in Zhytomyr region in western Ukraine, with a host family who spoke Ukrainian and Russian. His training consisted of learning Ukrainian and training to be a teacher. Minton was then placed at a school in Mukachevo, a city in western Ukraine, where he taught English and helped with teacher training.

He enjoyed most of his time in Ukraine and said that Ukrainians were very hospitable. People happily gave him directions or helped him when he looked confused.

“I had very positive experiences in Ukraine, I was afraid that I was going to butcher their language, but they were very happy I was speaking Ukrainian,” Minton said. “Most of the time they were trying to help me and were very encouraging.”

Fielding questions about views on Russia in Ukraine, Minton said that in his experience, Ukrainians in the western region were either indifferent when it came to Russia or were very anti-Russia. He said there are more nationalists in the west, and more people who only speak Ukrainian, instead of both languages.

Eidum, who served in south-central Ukraine as a Peace Corps volunteer, said that the central and eastern regions of Ukraine are more intertwined with Russia culturally and many have family in Russia. She described the complexity of Ukrainians who have family members in Russia who don’t believe that Russia is committing war crimes.

“They are deeply saddened and disappointed and horrified by the family members who live in Russia and have been listening to the Russian propaganda and they call and say, ‘wait is this true?’” she said.

When COVID-19 hit in March of 2020, Minton’s cohort was told that they had 24 hours to evacuate and get to the Kyiv airport. In all the confusion at the beginning of COVID-19, they were stranded at the airport, but the U.S. State Department was able to get them out about a week later.

Minton spent four months in the U.S. but decided to go back to Ukraine to be with his girlfriend, who is now his wife. He continued to teach English classes online as a private citizen.

Since there was a lot of skepticism about the war earlier on because Russia has previously threatened similar actions against Ukraine without follow-up, Minton didn’t leave right away. He decided to leave after U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that war could potentially break out in 48 hours. On Valentine’s Day, Minton and his wife traveled to Kladno, a small town outside of Prague, where they have been living since.

“We packed up our entire lives and put them in these bags,” he said, showing a photo of the belongings they took with them.

Minton is continuing to teach English online for his students, most of whom he says are internally displaced. He talks to 15 Ukrainian students about once or twice a week. He is also �þ��� English to a Ukrainian boy who lives in his apartment building in Kladno, who otherwise is not going to school due to the crisis.

He’s also been offering his observations about Ukraine on his blog, “.”

While Minton has no guesses for how the war will turn out he said, he said that “the Ukrainian people now are incredibly nationalistic and occupied cities are going to be very difficult to occupy, if that even happens.”

Minton hopes that he can go back to Ukraine eventually, as he misses many aspects of his life there, from his apartment to the country being at peace.

“Imagine being told you have to leave immediately from your home, and you don’t know when you’re going to make it back,” he said. “You’re going to want to go back there.”

Due to the escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Elon students, faculty and staff were invited to attend a moderated discussion, “Understanding the Conflict between Russia, Ukraine, and ‘the West’” on Monday, Feb. 28 in LaRose Digital Theater. The event was hosted by the Department of Political Science, the International and Global Studies Program and the Peace and Conflict Studies Program.

Samuel Greene, professor of Russian politics and director of the Russia Institute at King’s College, London, and Graeme Robertson, professor of political science and director of the center of Slavic, Eurasian and East European studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, gave insight into the current situation.

The discussion opened with an explanation about Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1992. Robertson explained that Ukraine had nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union and agreed with the United States, Russia and western Europe to give them up in return for security guarantees and recognition of its sovereignty.

Many people are struggling to understand how this conflict could benefit Russia, Greene said, and it’s important to understand how Russian president Vladimir Putin thinks in order to find an answer.

“I think if we’re going to get one, we need to very carefully try, as uncomfortable as it might be, to see both the demands and incentives of internal Russian politics and the demands and incentives of international relations the way that Putin does,” Greene said. “Otherwise, we’re going to get this wrong again.”

Russia struggled economically in the late 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the country was getting back on its feet in the 2000s, Russia started to see NATO expansion as a growing threat to the country’s security and there was rationality behind Russia’s fear, Robertson said.

“They started saying in 2007, 2008, that the current setup in Europe was unacceptable and that NATO expansion was a threat to their security,” Robertson said. “You can kind of understand this from a very simple logic of a security dilemma. If NATO is coming closer and moving troops closer and moving weapons closer, why are they doing it if they do not have hostile intent?”

A pivotal moment in understanding this conflict is in 2008 when Ukraine and Georgia, also a former Soviet state, were invited to join NATO. Russia acted immediately, invading Georgia which “effectively killed stone-dead any possibility of Georgia getting into NATO,” Robertson said.

In the Euromaidan demonstrations which lasted from November 2013 until February 2014, Ukraine overthrew a government that preferred integration with Russia over integration with western Europe. The leadership was replaced with one that was pro-European Union and pro-NATO, to which Russia also acted quickly, annexing Crimea from Ukraine in order to prevent the peninsula from becoming a part of NATO. This annexation began an ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.

Another key piece to understanding Russia’s conflict with the west is that Putin blamed uprisings in former Soviet countries on the U.S. and western Europe, claiming that any demonstrations were initiated by the west to threaten Russia. Putin is dependent on this narrative of conflict with the west because Russia’s economy greatly struggled after the global financial crisis and has since never recovered.

“The legitimacy of his regime increasingly depends upon this idea of conflict with the west and of his entourage and himself being defenders of Russia as a ‘besieged fortress,’ is the term you’ll see used,” Robertson said. “They needed a new formula and this formula of conflict with the west presented itself at a good time,” Robertson said.

The problem with this narrative is that it has real consequences. Ukrainian citizens have been killed and displaced. Russian citizens, mostly young men, who have been sent to fight in Ukraine, are dying. The Ukrainian government claims that 7,000 Russian troops have died so far, although Russia disputes this number.

“If Putin had wanted to push Ukraine into the Western Alliance and away from Russia, his behavior over the last 10 years has been making that happen,” Robertson said.

Greene and Robertson both said that this conflict was going poorly on Russia’s end.

“It clearly hasn’t gone quite to plan,” Greene said.

Ukrainians have shown that they are willing to fight for their country and Russians are protesting the war in about 50 to 60 cities across the country.

“It’s a moment of a different understanding of who Russia is on the European stage and what kind of actor Russia could be, and quite frankly, it makes me very sad,” Robertson said.

The Lunar New Year is a major celebration in several Asian cultures, following the lunar calendar. It marks the first full moon of the year and lasts 15 days. This year’s lunar new year fell on Feb. 1.

“In terms of intensity it’s about as important as Thanksgiving and Christmas,” said Emma Walker ’22, co-president of APSA.

Local martial arts school, Lee Brothers Martial Arts Academy kicked off the night with a performance of their skills. Throughout the night there were performances, games, crafts and plenty of food from local restaurants.

“We wanted to bring something more authentic presentation-wise to campus, which is why we wanted martial arts, because that’s just something different from what we could find here at Elon,” said APSA co-president Kelly Leang ‘22.

The Lunar New Year is a time to honor spirits and ancestors by cooking food, offering blessings and prayers and celebrating with family.

“It’s just a way to get rid of all of the bad energy of the last year and welcome a new year,” Leang said. “Usually a lot of people clean, they wear red and it’s almost like rebranding yourself in a way.”

A zodiac is associated with each Lunar New Year and 2022 is the Year of the Tiger which symbolizes courage and bravery. Every 12 years, the zodiac cycle repeats itself.

For Leang, the importance of this celebration comes with the fact that the percentage of Asian & Pacific Islander-identifying students at Elon is low at 2.3 percent.

“There is still this representation on campus, and it shouldn’t go ignored,” Leang said. “It’s a way to bond those students in the community as well as �þ��� others about what some students here experience and practice.”

Walker highlighted that the celebration event shared cultural experiences with the Elon community.

“This particular event is a great example of everyone being welcome, the entire Elon community, not just API-identifying folks, not just students of color,” Walker said. “The more people we have, the more fun we have.”

Multifaith Coordinator and Ripple Conference advisor Allison Pelyhes said interfaith is not about creating a singular belief system, but rather conversations between those who have different beliefs.

“It’s about the interactions between people who have different worldviews, whether that’s religious or spiritual or from a secular or non-religious orientation,” Pelyhes said. “It’s essentially creating meaningful interactions so that people can collaborate and build community and work together for the common good.”

Interfaith is particularly important now because of national and international polarization, Pelyhes said, which can impede common goals. “It’s essential to build those skills of how you encounter differences, and how do you work together to find the commonalities enough so that you can address real-world problems?” she said.

This year the conference will take on a hybrid model, with students, faculty and staff participating in person and online. Ripple usually just has attendees just from the southeast region but holding the conference virtually in 2021 allowed more schools from different regions to participate. The hybrid model brings back the in-person component in addition to having a wider variety of schools.

This year’s theme is “Sustained Interfaith” which intends to spark conversations around environmentalism and sustainability as it relates to interfaith work. The theme focuses on the fact that we are all responsible for sustaining the earth, as we are all connected by this planet.

“Sustained Interfaith” asks, “What does it mean for us all to work collaboratively together to address injustice in our communities and, acknowledging that we all walk this earth?” Pelyhes said.

This year’s speakers include:

• Keynote Speaker: Huda Alkaff, ecologist, environmental educator, and the founder and director of , a grassroots environmental justice group formed in 2005.
• Leah Thomas, founder of eco-lifestyle blog and , a community and resource hub centering BIPOC and historically excluded voices.
• Amira Chandi, environmental equity consultant, multimedia artist and model, and researcher of localized fibersheds, food systems and Ayurvedic healing.
• Sabs Katz, founder of platform, and a cofounder of .

Full information about the conference as well as registration details are available .

As music played to keep spirits up, students wore masks, hairnets and gloves and were at both sides of 10 tables, moving efficiently to scoop ingredients into bags. Volunteers then weighed and sealed them and finally, the sealed bags were packed up into boxes that were loaded onto the Rise Against Hunger truck. Keeping with the event’s tradition, a gong rang every time students packed 5,000 meals.

“We went so fast that we actually missed a couple,” said Autumn Cox, assistant director to the Kernodle Center. “I’ve never seen it before and it ran so smoothly, they really have it down to a science.”

Last year, the Elon community volunteers were able to pack 23,000 meals for the Rise Against Hunger event.

is an international hunger relief organization. Their goal is to end hunger across the globe. To reach this goal, they regularly host meal-packing events, and this is the 16th time the event has been hosted at Elon.

After a year of virtual and hybrid events, students were excited to be attending the event in person.

“I was really impressed and also just loved the energy of all the students,” Cox said, who is in her first year at Elon. “I’ve heard this from other campus partners that especially this year, students are just so excited to be involved in things again.”

Some of the meals will be sent to Haiti, which was recently hit by an earthquake and then a tropical storm. Rise Against Hunger will follow up with volunteers to let them know where the meals have been sent.

North Carolina has the largest Native American population east of the Mississippi, Cavalier said, and there are eight state-recognized tribes in the state. Cavalier is also a part of Native Organizers Alliance where she has been going across North Carolina encouraging indigenous people to register and vote. “This election cycle has engaged the most Natives in any election cycle,” Cavalier said.

During the primary, several candidates talked about issues related to Native Americans, with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden releasing plans on issues such as tribal sovereignty. North Carolina was a battleground state this election cycle and both presidential candidates acknowledged the importance of the Lumbee Tribe’s vote in particular.

“They recognize that the Lumbee, who are about 60,000 members, can swing political elections,” Cavalier said.

Indigenous youth are also getting more involved in this election cycle using social media such as Instagram to make their voices heard. Cavalier explained that young people were especially motivated by the undoing of environmental regulations and issues like the Dakota Access Pipeline which tribes like the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe opposed.

Native Americans did not fully get the right to vote until the 1960s and while there are still challenges, there has been an increase in voter registration among Natives. “Many of our ancestors died for the right to vote,” she said.

At the start of September, there were 54,000 Native Americans registered to vote in North Carolina. By the end of September, there had been a 20,000 jump in voting registration. While they don’t have the data on who they voted for, Cavalier said this is significant.

“We just know that they registered and voted for the first time,” she said. “So that is huge.”

A full list of Native American Heritage Month events is available here.

Latinx/Hispanic individuals name their identities in different ways, Miranda said. Terms like Latinx, Latino, Latina, Hispanic, using their country of origin or using “American” are different preferences.

“It’s important to know Latinx and Hispanic people are not a monolithic culture. We come from different backgrounds, in all shapes and sizes, complexions and with a multitude of other identities,” Miranda said.

Mackenzie Martinez ‘21, who spoke on the panel, said she identifies as “Chicana.”

“To me, identifying yourself is something really important, that’s a way that you claim your history, you claim your identity and your ancestry,” Martinez said. “So for me, finding the right word was really, really important.”

Martinez chose “Chicana” after learning about the Chicano movement in the 1960s which advocated for social justice for Mexican-Americans. Martinez’s family is from Mexico and she is the third generation to be born in the U.S.

“I really loved that kind of social justice, like taking power back that that movement represented and it also really links to this Mexican American-ness that has very much identified my Latinx experience,” Martinez said.

Ana Eguiguren ‘21, who is from Ecuador, never questioned her identity before coming to college and still finds it challenging to identify herself.

“Latino is not a race despite it being checked in as a race, and it’s not an ethnicity altogether because ethnicity implies a cultural background, and we all have very different cultural backgrounds,” she said. “Even inside of Ecuador, there are so many different cultures and languages so it’s been such a quest for me to try to identify myself and often I think about like, am I trying to put myself in a bigger box, just so that others understand me better?”

East Santiago ‘23 takes on the term “Latinx,” but when people ask her where she is from, she says she is Puerto Rican. Santiago points out another aspect that makes this identity complex: like many Hispanic/Latinx people, she doesn’t know entirely “what” she is as many are ethnically mixed. “Puerto Rican is white, black, everything,” she said.

Associate Professor of Spanish Nina Namaste never wanted a term to identify herself. Her parents are from Catalonia, an autonomous region in Spain, and they fled to the U.S. to escape a Spanish dictatorship. Namaste said she grew up in a privileged household where her parents were “explicit and intentional” that her family could choose what aspects of Spanish and American culture they wanted to adopt.

“My parents taught us multiple languages, all these kinds of things to allow us choice and we were very much encouraged to be different, that it was OK to be different,” she said.

Namaste said she never identified with any particular term and she dislikes the term “Hispanic” because of its association with colonialism. She said terms of identifications felt constraining.

“The terms always seemed limiting to me because I always wanted it to be in this space that was in between, because the space in between allowed choice,” Namaste said.

The discussion shifted to spaces at Elon where Latinx/Hispanic students, faculty and staff can feel connected to each other. Eguiguren said that the presence of El Centro, where Latinx/Hispanic students often hang out, was a factor in her deciding to attend Elon.

“I honestly felt like I had like this tiny family where I could rely on even if I didn’t know them that well,” she said.

Director of the Gender and LGBTQIA Center Luis Garay said these spaces are particularly important at this moment where he said he is in a “state of despair.”

“There are not that many of us but the fact that a place like El Centro is here, CREDE’s here, Irazu’s here, that’s really special,” Garay said. “So I don’t want to take away from the not good parts of what it means to be Latinx at Elon, but in these times of such despair, centering joy is supercritical.”

On Wednesday, Sept. 2, the organization hosted “A Political Party” at Speaker’s Corner, with organizers available to answer any questions regarding voter registration and absentee ballots.

Cate Podell ’22 with Elon Votes! stressed that voting is important for everyone, especially this year. Elon Votes! is encouraging students to register to vote, and has provided information about voter registration deadlines and tools for students to verify their voter registration on their website – www.elon.edu/vote.

“It’s your civic duty, it’s how you make your voice heard in this country,” Podell said. “It is a privilege that as citizens of the U.S. we have.”

Elon Votes! offers access to TurboVote, a tool that guides students through the voter registration process and to request an absentee ballot, if needed. Through the end of August, Elon ranked among the top 10 colleges and universities in the country for total voters registered, with 473 new voters registered to vote.

Elon Votes! will be hosting four debate watch parties this semester on the first floor of Moseley and RSVPs will be required. Masks will be required for all attendees and physical distancing requirements will be in place.

The debate watch events will be held:

• Sept. 29 — Presidential Debate Watch Event
• Oct. 7 — Vice Presidential Debate Watch Event
• Oct. 15 — Presidential Debate Watch Event
• Oct. 22 — Presidential Debate Watch Event

Elon Votes! is also encouraging students to host their own small debate watch parties.

They will be hand-delivering goody bags with microwave popcorn, candy, Elon Votes! swag and gift cards, Podell said.

“We’re just really trying to get the whole community really engaged for this election season because it’s a big one,” Podell said.

A double major in music theatre and arts administration with minors in leadership studies, business administration and African and African American studies, McMichael started his role at the D.C. Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative as the education programs manager in February. The D.C. Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative in a nonprofit organization that works with cultural organizations in the Washington metro area. The nonprofit connects these organizations to the district’s public and public charter schools to provide arts and humanities programming at little or no cost. In his role merging the arts with education, McMichael works closely with member organizations to make sure their programming is high quality.

The organization was created because many of the students who were taking advantage of arts educational programming in Washington were not actually from the city.

“Our organization was formed out of that idea that all students in the District of Columbia should have access to the arts and humanities here, “McMichael said. “We’re unique in the sense that we work with D.C.- specific students and D.C.-specific arts organizations.”

The arts have always been important to McMichael. He sang in his church choir, attended opera and theater camp, and went to arts-focused magnet programs in middle and high school.

“For me, the arts have always been coupled with education and I know how important that was for my development,” he said. “I think that I come to my organization at a place where I realized that my normal was not everyone else’s normal.”

The coronavirus pandemic has upended his new role, but McMichael and the organization have adapted. Normally they reach out to educators so students can have in-person experiences, like going to a museum.

“We are in the business, essentially, of field trips,” McMichael said. “Once COVID-19 happened it was like, well, schools are not happening, the museums are closed, the theaters are dark.”

To try to keep arts and humanities education continuing, McMichael developed a distance-learning resource database that is being shared with teachers and families. The database has a collection of over 120 arts and humanities resources and is designed for pre-K students to high school seniors.

“Even if field trips aren’t happening, some type of arts and humanities education still needs to happen because we know that when things become complicated with education, whether it’s funding or anything, the arts are always the first to be rolled back,” McMichael said. “We wanted to make sure that even at home, whatever happens moving forward, that there’s still some place where students can go and have some type of arts education.”

For families who don’t have ready access to technology, the Collaborative has worked on making files such as lesson plans downloadable so they can possibly be printed at home or so schools can deliver them to students. The organization is also exploring options for virtual field trips.

McMichael’s lifelong passion for the arts and the goal to make experiences in the arts easily available to every student, drives his work.

“I knew that growing up everyone else didn’t get an opportunity to go see operas, everyone else didn’t have an opportunity to go to art museums, or ballets or concerts, all of these things that I was fortunate enough to have,” he said. “Part of my life’s mission is to make what was my normal, a readily accessible opportunity for everyone else for who it’s not.”

His Elon experience with being a leadership fellow and having experience in both the performing and business side of the arts helped him navigate being a young professional, McMichael said.