The Office of Student Housing has announced the themes for the houses on Magis Row, a group of fourteen miniature LIving and Learning Communities in University townhouses.
The focus of the houses, which house four or five people, range from the environmental, (“The Georgetown Green House”) to the cultural (“Hip Hop Justified”), to the many houses whose themes revolve around social justice issues
Paul Biedlingmaier (SFS `11), Guillermo Barriga (SFS `11), and Lowell Karr (MSB `11) who will be living in “Justice and Diversity in Action” said theirs housewill be an extension of the current Living and Learning Community of the same name.
Barriga lives on the JDA floor this year, and Biedlingmaier lived there last year.
Both said their experiences on the floor were so memorable that they want to use the house to bring the experience to students who might otherwise miss out. They say they want their LLC to act as a hub for students interested in social justice, and to help channel social justice efforts into the District.
“[The JDA’s] ambitions are always, you know, very worldwide,” Barriga said. “We never really concentrate on D.C. I’m very excited about getting in touch with D.C.”
Residents of the “Education and Literacy in the Washington, D.C. Community” house have similar ambitions, according to future residents Catherine Ingard (COL `10) and Kelly Hughes (COL `10).
Like Barriga and Biedlingmaier, they said they want the house to serve as a hub for all of the educational outreach programs on campus by attracting students with, as Hughes put it, “dinners, discussions, maybe some documentaries.”
“Success for us would just be attracting a lot of different students,” she said. “The more kinds of people we can attract, the better it will be.”
