At a table with other college students and campus leaders, Keven Guruswamy, a senior psychology major and Seventh-day Adventist, held up a photograph of his collection of Bibles arranged on a shelf.
The photo was one of several Guruswamy brought to a two-day retreat in mid-October as part of “Picturing Pluralism,” a semesterlong photography and dialogue project bringing together about 30 students at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. In a fraught national political climate, the goal is to create meaningful connections on a religiously diverse campus.
Some of the Bibles in his photo were in Tamil, others in English. Some he acquired himself and others were gifts, including from his grandmother, who has since died. He said his experience growing up in a religiously mixed family — which includes Hindus and Christians — introduced him to “the beauty of interfaith cooperation.”
Faculty describe this college as one of the country’s most religiously diverse, pointing to a student culture spanning branches of Christianity and Islam as well as Jewish, Sikh and Dharmic groups. Students recently hosted a Muslim women’s fellowship, a Sikh festival, a queer Orthodox Jewish gathering and a South Asian Christian organization, according to photography project participants.
Yet the university, which was founded in the 1960s and enrolls about 13,530 students, lacks extensive religious infrastructure, said Matt Hoffman, director of the Center for Religion, Spirituality and Pluralism on campus. The college, known widely as UMBC, has no formal chapel.
On Fridays, the hall at the Center for Religion, Spirituality and Pluralism can become particularly busy. Muslim students use prayer mats and dividers for gender-separated prayer; Catholic students hold rosary gatherings and worship music sessions, and Jewish students meet for Shabbat dinners and prayer services.
Sometimes Lisa Huberman, the social action engagement associate at UMBC Hillel, arrives with Jewish students preparing for a Friday evening gathering while Muslim students are concluding their prayers.
“It’s very much like a delicate dance,” Huberman said. “Even just basic functions of existing, even in a mundane way, we’re always negotiating. But it also means there is an opportunity to encounter difference in close proximity at UMBC.”
The project unfolded as colleges remain flash points in national disputes over identity, free speech and inclusion. Several days before the photography retreat, students held vigils, both to remember the victims of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and to protest the ensuing war in Gaza.
Huberman and Hoffman said they’ve begun to see proximity as opportunity.
“The next level,” Hoffman said, is to ask, “What do we do with the diversity?”
Enter Picturing Pluralism, a partnership between the college’s Center for Religion, Spirituality and Pluralism and Interfaith Photovoice, which combines amateur photography with dialogue across religious, spiritual and cultural differences.
Joshua Polanski, Interfaith Photovoice’s director of engagement, said his organization has reached multicultural communities from Michigan to Oman to Pakistan to Texas, in settings from corporate spaces to higher education.
The retreat took place over the university’s fall break. Inside the same multi-use hall where religious services are held, participants sat around tables with five or six others. They showed personal photos, perhaps depicting a prayer practice, an object, a landscape or a relationship.
They then responded to prompts about belief, belonging and barriers on campus. Each spoke for four minutes while others listened. The group then asked questions and gave each speaker time to consider before responding. Students who were hesitant at first to share became more enthusiastic as conversations progressed. Some became tearful as they shared vulnerable reflections.
A Palestinian American student shared a self-portrait intended to explore her identity at an especially fraught and difficult moment, noting she’d spent many years feeling either “too Palestinian to be American, or too American to be Palestinian.”
Onkarpreet Kaur, a second-year microbiology student, shared a photograph of the kara she has worn for six years. The circular steel or iron bracelet is one of the five articles of faith traditionally associated with Sikhi. Kaur said its circular form represents continuity, but it also reminds her of the physical distance she sometimes feels from Sikhi as a member of the diaspora, far from the faith’s historic center in Punjab, India.
She has kept the same kara partly because she does not know where to buy another near campus. “It just reminds me of my values,” Kaur said. “It helps me get to the right path.”
Fatima Hafeez, a second-year political science student, shared a photograph of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. She described admiring the devotion of Catholics who traveled there and connected their journeys to the Muslim pilgrimages of Hajj and Umrah, which she has undertaken.
“I love to hear what people think, how they process things,” Hafeez said. “It’s really easy to group people together,” she added, but listening to personal stories offers a reminder that “everyone is a human with their own individual experience.”
The impact
Second-year student Duncan Winger said the experience changed how he viewed ordinary scenes across campus.
Winger, who grew up in an atheist family and described himself as agnostic, realizes he could pass someone walking across campus without knowing what that person was experiencing internally. That recognition, Winger said, “opens up empathy.”
Velma Funebe, a senior majoring in public health, said the experience made her reconsider how she communicates her Christian faith. On LinkedIn, she sometimes shares written reflections about religion and spirituality. The retreat made her wonder whether photographs could communicate something more to share her faith. “I think people can take so much from just a picture,” she said.
Given the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, some students who were not born in the United States were cautious to be interviewed or photographed. Some shared photography and explanations that touched on questions about immigration status and fear.
On the retreat’s second day, participants began turning those individual stories into a collective exhibition that is scheduled to open Dec. 2 at a campus library.
Abdul Samad Amjad, a Photovoice facilitator who was born in Pakistan and lives in Ohio, said the gatherings give participants a role in defining problems and possible solutions.
“There are different stories being told,” Amjad said. “But at the end, what I’d realize, there is always this story of us, that collective story. Our shared humanity gets represented there.”
Desrosiers-Levine writes for the Associated Press. and wrote this article under an arrangement with Religion News Service.
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