December exhibition will present students’ views of belonging and campus needs
The two-day retreat took place over the university’s fall break, when the commuter-heavy campus was extra quiet. About 30 UMBC students and 10 faculty and staff sat at tables with five or six other participants inside the same multi-use hall used for religious services. The semester-long Picturing Pluralism project asked participants to show personal photographs and respond to prompts about belief, belonging and barriers on campus, with the aim of creating meaningful connections.
UMBC was founded in the 1960s and today enrolls about 13,530 students. Faculty interviewed for the reporting described the university as one of the country’s “most religiously diverse campuses,” pointing to a student culture spanning multiple branches of Christianity and Islam as well as Jewish, Sikh and Dharmic groups. Student groups have recently hosted a Muslim women’s fellowship, a Sikh festival, a queer Orthodox Jewish gathering and a South Asian Christian organization, according to project organizers and participants.
At a table with other students and campus leaders, Keven Guruswamy, a senior psychology major and Seventh-day Adventist, held up a photograph of Bibles arranged on a shelf. Some were in Tamil and others in English. Some he acquired himself and others were gifts, including from his grandmother, who has since died. Growing up in a religiously mixed family that included Hindus and Christians, Guruswamy said, introduced him to “the beauty of interfaith cooperation.”
The university lacks some of the religious infrastructure found on other college campuses, Hoffman said. UMBC has no formal chapel, and demand for prayer and religious practice space means different communities use the same facilities. On Fridays, the center’s multi-use hall 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. Huberman sometimes arrives for a Jewish student gathering as Muslim students conclude their prayers.
“It’s very much like a delicate dance,” Lisa Huberman, the social action engagement associate at UMBC Hillel, 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 retreat came as colleges remain flashpoints 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 Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and to protest the ensuing war in Gaza. Organizers said they were sensitive to the tensions and prepared for potential conflicts, while Hoffman and Huberman said they had begun to see proximity as an opportunity. Hoffman asked, “What do we do with the diversity?”
Picturing Pluralism is a partnership between UMBC’s Center for Religion, Spirituality and Pluralism and Interfaith Photovoice, an organization that combines amateur photography with structured dialogue across religious, spiritual and cultural differences. Joshua Polanski, Interfaith Photovoice’s director of engagement, said the organization has reached multicultural communities in Michigan, Oman, Pakistan and Texas, in settings from corporate spaces to higher education. Roman R. Williams, the organization’s founder and a visual sociologist, said the goal was to “take someone that is maybe even barely an acquaintance and shift that relationship into something where they’re gaining knowledge.”
Participants showed personal photographs that could depict a prayer practice, object, landscape or relationship. Each spoke for four minutes while others listened, after which the group asked questions and gave each speaker time to consider them before responding. Participants seemed hesitant at first, but many became louder and more enthusiastic as conversations progressed. Some became tearful while sharing vulnerable reflections.
One Palestinian-American student shared a self-portrait intended to explore her identity during an especially fraught and difficult moment. She said she had spent many years feeling “too Palestinian to be American, or too American to be Palestinian.” Guruswamy said the experience represented a shift from “cultural competence” toward “cultural humility.” The process, he said, “allows you the opportunity to be humble with one another.”
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 also reminds her of the physical distance she feels from Sikhi as a member of the diaspora far from the faith’s historic center in Punjab, India. She kept the bracelet partly because she did 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 had undertaken herself. “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.”
Duncan Winger, a second-year student creating an interdisciplinary course of study around what he calls “holistic learning,” said the experience changed how he viewed ordinary scenes across campus. One participant described praying while taking a daily walk. Winger, who grew up in an atheist family and describes himself as agnostic, said the account made him realize he could pass someone without knowing what that person was experiencing internally. That recognition, Winger said, “opens up empathy.” He also said he did not need to understand every aspect of another person’s religion before engaging them: “I can still ask and be curious.”
Velma Funebe, a senior public health major, said the retreat made her reconsider how she communicates her Christian faith. She sometimes shares written reflections about religion and spirituality on LinkedIn and wondered whether photographs could communicate more. “I think people can take so much from just a picture,” she said. At the same time, as the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda swept across American cities, some students who were not born in the United States were cautious to be interviewed or photographed. Some participants’ photographs and explanations touched on questions about immigration status and fear.
It remains open whether the encounters will produce lasting institutional change, and the project does not provide proof that photography can resolve campus polarization. Abdul Samad Amjad, a Photovoice facilitator and scholar of community-based participatory research who was born in Pakistan and lives in Ohio, said the method gives 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.”
On the retreat’s second day, participants turned their individual stories into a collective exhibition. Each selected a photograph they considered essential, and the group examined the collection, asked what was missing and developed captions. The exhibition is scheduled to open Dec. 2 in UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery, presenting the students’ account of belonging, unmet needs and the campus participants hope to build.
“My dream is that these spaces can be more beyond campus, too, and that we can all be more interconnected, to just be human with each other in rooms, across difference,” Winger said. Kaur said she arrived at UMBC unsure how people with different beliefs could live together, but some of those people are now among her closest friends. “We are living in the same space with different beliefs,” Kaur said. “We coexist but we are not blending with each other. We have our own identity, and it is so beautiful.” Williams cautioned against treating such encounters as proof that photography can overcome every division participants bring into the room and said building relationships takes longer. “It’s a theory of change, but we see it happen,” he said. “Sometimes in very small ways.”