Portland State’s student publications have been joined by a new voice, The Spectrum, an equality and tolerance advocacy news magazine. Established by a number of students led by Nathan Keep and funded in part by the Queer Resource Center, the publication prints submissions relating to queer rights, as well as a hope to have a wider lens on equality issues in general.
New kid on campus
Portland State’s student publications are about to be joined by one more, The Spectrum, an equality and tolerance advocacy news magazine.
Established by a number of students led by Nathan Keep and funded in part by the Queer Resource Center, the publication prints submissions relating to queer rights, as well as a hope to have a wider lens on equality issues in general.
“I want people to tell us about their experiences,” Keep said.
The Spectrum‘s main goal is to shed light on far ranging issues facing those who do not fit into contemporary standards of “normal”. The pieces submitted to the current issue of the publication primarily focus on gender equality.
Keep hopes to publish every submission, limiting only pieces that are excessive in length.
“I don’t want to pick and choose what people say, and the more controversial the better. We need to start a dialogue,” Keep said.
The kickoff event was small and intimate, with the official part over in a matter of 20 minutes. Those in attendance gave the magazine a warm reception and had a positive reaction overall.
“Here in Portland, we take things for granted. We really live in a bubble, and don’t understand what diversity really means,” Keep said. He went on in his speech to thank Christie Jacobson, who led the artwork in The Spectrum.
It is hoped that The Spectrum will help foster more discussion on issues like equality, and Keep expressed an interest in working with other groups like the NAACP. The Spectrum will serve as a forum for many wide-ranging issues beside gender equality, and will hopefully address other forms of discrimination, and as Keep put it, “isms.”
For the foreseeable future, The Spectrum will be a quarterly publication. However, Keep talked about meeting with the publications board and the hope to secure funding to publish more frequently.
“I think that this is something that is needed, because no other regular paper really confronts the issues that we want to handle,” Keep said. “The other papers aren’t bad, but I think another view would be good.”
