A poem penned in blue is scrawled on Lauren Visconte’s forearm. When asked about it, she doesn’t want to explain it because she’s guarded and suspicious about most everything, and she balks at sensitive questions.
Visconte said she is cautious because she spent six and a half years in divorce court with her parents because of family turmoil. She then moved from her hometown, Oakland, NJ, when she was 19 to attend the University and “to get away from chaos and start a new life,” she said. She hasn’t spoken to her mother since but now remains in good relations with her father, for which she said she is fortunate.
She is especially uncomfortable being asked questions because she is used to being in the interviewer’s chair, she said.
Visconte, a psychology and anthropology double major at the University, has spent the last term interviewing a friend from Japan, who also attends the University, for her honors thesis. Her thesis, “Biography of Face,” analyzes aspects of her friend’s cultural transition, and it was nominated for the Undergraduate Paper of the Year Award in the Department of Anthropology.
After graduation, Visconte will travel to Florida in August to visit her two siblings, 20 and 13, for the first time since the conclusion of the divorce proceedings. Then in October she will fly to Japan where she plans to learn Japanese, teach English at Midorii Sky Stage and work with a professor at Hiroshima University. While abroad, she hopes to earn enough money so that when she returns she can enter graduate school.
As an undergraduate, her award nominations include The American Association of University Women’s Woman of the Year Award and the University Centurion Award. She also guides a women’s and gender studies discussion section and recently gave a speech, “Nigeria and the Global Problem of Human Trafficking,” in Willamette Hall.
In her speech, Visconte discussed the inseparability of the forced trafficking of people across borders and prostitution. Destitute people in other countries are “coerced and lured,” she said, into believing that a better life awaits them in another country. However, they are often just sold into prostitution, a fate suffered by an estimated 40 million women and children annually, according to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, of which Visconte has been a board member since fall.
“It’s a modern form of human slavery,” she said.
Visconte has used her knowledge of human trafficking to guide her women’s and gender studies discussion section. Taeva Shefler, a student in Visconte’s section, didn’t expect to learn as much as she did because it was her final course in her minor. Visconte proved her wrong, Shefler said.
“I joke with my fellow students that our discussion has become more of a seminar on human trafficking and sex slavery than anything else,” Shefler said. “But we’re all really glad for it because we’ve learned a lot more than your typical discussion.”
For her thesis, “Biography of Face,” Visconte describes the concept of “Face” as being “how you perceive I perceive you.” She uses a crowded-room analogy to explain the difference between North American “Face” and Japanese “Face.” Some Americans perceive judgment from only those who are in the room; however, for some Japanese, judgment is “ubiquitous,” Visconte said, meaning they are being judged from all of society.
“It is not a ‘cultural trait’ that typifies ‘the Japanese’ per se,” Visconte’s anthropology professor, Aletta Biersack, wrote in an e-mail. “Hence, (Visconte) offers a biography of face: face as dimension of a specific life history and its trajectory.”
Biersack has instructed Visconte in two courses, including a graduate professional writing course. Visconte was granted entrance because, Biersack wrote, she was ready and “an excellent ‘participant observer.’”
She observes from her subject’s perspective, and she is very attentive to nuance and individuals’ feelings, acts respectful toward them and is ethically supportive, Biersack wrote.
Visconte’s interests in cultural and societal issues stem from her unease with the state of the world, she said, and she is outraged by racism, classism, sexism and all other “isms” in general.
“If you’re not outraged, you’re not looking,” Visconte said, quoting a bump sticker.
She uses that outrage as a motivation for change, she said.
Amy Hertert, an educational studies major and Visconte’s roommate of two years, said that a lot of people acknowledge that there are problems in the world but don’t do anything.
“Lauren has made it a point to not allow that to be her perspective,” Hertert said. “She reminds me how insignificant most things are and where importance truly lies.”
For all her accomplishments and awards, Visconte said she considers simply graduating her real accomplishment.
“I didn’t think I was going to go to college,” she said, “and now I’m graduating.”