Diverse identities of women, exhibited

Meet Laura Lyons, a staff member here at Mt. Hood, as well as Portland State University, with a creative and compelling interest in women from around the world.

Her official role here at MHCC is East County Pathways Outreach Specialist. She focuses on dual-credit/College Now students, including many students from groups that are historically underrepresented in higher education.

Lyons has a hunger for experiencing new places, and generally tries to go somewhere new rather than somewhere she’s been. She also has a passion for language; while she is currently in graduate school studying public administration, her undergraduate studies were cultural anthropology with a focus on linguistic anthropology.

Oftentimes she takes road trips here in the U.S. and camps out, sometimes drawing concern from people she encounters, she said. But she just assures them that she likes it that way, and she’s perfectly content experiencing things without the pressure of upholding a persona.

“So, when I travel abroad I also like to travel by myself. I feel like it’s freer because when you’re traveling you’re not really yourself, you’re kind of yourself in the moment,” she said. “And I find that (traveling) alone gives you more room to react in ways you might not react to things at home … Because you’re experiencing new things, you should be able to react in uncharacteristic ways.”

While traveling Lyons captures the moment with a camera. Her photography has been exhibited in the Diversity Resource Center multiple times; earlier this year she won the Intercultural Photo Contest. She is a traveler extraordinaire, whose philosophy in life is along the lines of “If you think change is hard, try routine, it’s fatal.”

The current exhibit in the DRC is called “Women,” which will be up through May 19. It hosts a collection of more than 150 images, displaying a diverse group of women Lyons has photographed throughout her life and travels. The photos are accompanied with pieces of writing by Lyons describing her interactions with a few women she has encountered in her life, highlighting the unique qualities of each, and how they impacted her along the way.

“I first made it because I just wanted to look at all of these accumulated images that I had and then realized that it’s not fair to present people as a lump sum because, yes, they’re all women, but they’re not all the same,” she said. “They all have their own unique ways of experiencing being a woman in this world and that was one of the things I wanted to explore with this piece.

“I wanted to write about the people, and then I also thought well on another level, it’s not fair for me to represent them. I don’t think it’s my place to talk about somebody else’s identity. So I wanted to call out how each of those people in the piece were different, but the only way I felt like I could honestly do that was to talk about how I’ve interacted with them.

“That’s where the writing comes from, it was kind of an internal struggle of how I wanted to write and show their identity at the same time,” she said.

Individuals discussed in the accompanied writing include Lyon’s grandmother, Edna; Anna, an outspoken woman Lyons met in Havana, Cuba; and several women from Gambia she shared a special connection with during her two-and-a-half year stay while she served in the Peace Corps.

There was another individual in particular that Lyons also discusses: Her name is Saja, an Arab woman who lives in East Jerusalem, who came to the U.S. for several weeks as part of an exchange program with PSU. The program brings in about 20 college-age individuals from the Middle East and North Africa. Each individual develops a civic engagement project for their community. Saja is working on a program to work with Palestine youth who have been incarcerated by the Israeli police who return with a lot of trauma, in an attempt to help them recover and integrate back into society.

Throughout this collection of writing and photography Lyons touches on societal factors and in talking to her, her passion for travel and social justice is impressive.

In particular, she touched on the term “intersectionality,” which was created by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a professor at the UCLA School of Law. Based on my discussion with Lyon’s “intersectionality is the idea that our different identities cross to influence our experience of the world.”

Lyons plans to expand the identities shown in this collection of photographs, more specifically women of different sexualities, including transgender women. She also hopes to add writing from the subjects in the photographs themselves, as a way to really have their voice and experiences directly there for viewers to read.

Anyone interested in contributing to the piece with photography or writing may contact her directly at [email protected].

Asked if she offers any words of advice, Lyons said, “Never stop learning about yourself.
“People will tell you that you have to be one thing or another, but you’re the authority on you. You can’t decide what happens to you, but you can decide how you react to things and those are ways for us to learn about ourselves.”