04/27/2026
On April 24, the Smith College campus celebrated Collaborations, a time for students to share and showcase their scholarship with the broader community. This year, that scholarship included our very own STRIDE student, Moby Yang! 🤩🤩
Moby has been working with us for the last two years, creating your favorite social media content. But they have also been researching and curating a project that they turned into their Collaborations exhibit called “To Be Home or to Be College? Conceptions of “Community” in the History of Smith Dining and Housing.” The exhibit uses materials from the College Archives to tell the story of Smith dining and its connection to the housing system throughout different Smith eras. 🏠
Moby was inspired to research this topic because of their time so far at Smith. They write, “When I arrived at Smith, it was the fall after the closure of the Cushing/Emerson dining hall. I remember hearing from upperclassmen how inconvenient and upsetting the closure was, which helped me understand for the first time how impactful the college’s dining system is for its students. Now that more plans for dining changes and consolidations are in the air for Smith’s future, I find myself wondering if it is inevitable that the college’s uniquely decentralized dining system will dwindle out as we move forward. My hope was that by looking into this college’s history of dining and housing, I could answer some of my questions. If this is the path Smith is on, then what led us here? In what ways has the ‘home’ of Smith offered community for students, and in what ways has it left students out? And if the structures are changing in dining, what could this mean for the college’s sense of community? Or rather, what might our ‘community’ look like in the future?”
Come see Moby’s exhibit in-person on the third floor of Neilson library, in the hallway leading to the Special Collections reading room, up through June! ❤️✨
