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A Note from Helen Thompson, One Book One Northwestern Faculty Chair
One Book Program Update:
In response to expressions of concern from the Northwestern University community, we have decided to cancel the One Book One Northwestern escape room scheduled for October 5 and 6 in the Norris Center. It was not the intention of those who planned this event to trivialize the historical atrocities that Atwood’s novel depicts. But as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony at the Supreme Court hearing of Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week painfully reminds us, the very metaphor of escape represents a cruel impossibility for persons suffering structural injustice in this city, this country, and this world. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale demands that we recognize the incomplete justice still accorded women and other minoritarian subjects and imagine the dystopia that might follow. What happens next is up to us. We anticipate a year of exciting programs through which we will engage this book’s challenges together.
