From Campus Collaboration to International Impact: The ROLEPLAY Project

Originally published in the 2024 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine

In February of 2018, I was fortunate to team up with filmmaker and ethnographer Katie Mathews and members of the acclaimed New Orleans-based ensemble theatre company Goat in the Road Productions (GRP), to begin work on our unique interdisciplinary theatre project. Inspired by student responses to the startling results of the campus climate survey on sexual assault, released the previous month, we endeavored to use our expertise to empower young Tulanians to use their authentic stories and voices to change their culture from within.

The collaboration was an experiment full of unknowns: Would students sign up for a year-long theatre devising process, one that had no script and very few concrete details at the start? Could we marry theatre and film, simultaneously helping the students to create Roleplay as an on-stage production while also recording the process for an ensuing ROLEPLAY documentary film? If we succeeded in finding a brave group of students to take on this task, could a play about sexual violence and toxic behavior be truthful, thought-provoking, yet also entertaining?

The project exceeded all expectations. Roleplay’s on-stage production in September 2019, and subsequent remount in January 2023, had a profound impact on Tulane’s campus community. More than six years later, the project is resonating on a national and international level. In March of 2024, ROLEPLAY the film premiered in competition for best documentary at SXSW, to critical acclaim. The film had its regional premiere this October at the New Orleans Film Festival, with additional screenings this fall at the Heartland International Film Fest (Indianapolis, Indiana), the American Film Festival (Wroclaw, Poland), and DocNYC (New York). In March of 2025, the stage play will be remounted at Louisiana State University.

I cannot wait for a larger audience to get to know the brave Tulane students (now proud alumni) who created this project. As critic Ashley Smith noted: “Access to these brilliant young minds and what they’ve accomplished got to me on a cellular level. I remembered to be hopeful for a moment.” The ROLEPLAY project gives me hope, too.

While the problems of sexual violence and toxic behavior continue, I am grateful when I think of the unbreakable bonds of the castmates, of the internal support we’ve received from the School of Liberal Arts, the All-In Committee to Stop Sexual Violence, the Newcomb Institute, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Carol Lavin Bernick, student groups such as Sexual Aggression Peer Hotline and Education (SAPHE) and Sexual Violence Prevention and Response (SVPR), and so many others; of the way community partners like GRP, Gusto Moving Pictures, STAR, the New Orleans Family Justice Center share their wisdom; and how alumni like Nancy Rebold (NC ’88), an executive producer on the film, stepped in at a crucial time to ensure that our film made it to the finish line. The support we’ve received is unlike any project I have ever worked on and demonstrates that when a subject matter galvanizes Tulanians, they have the agency, the creativity, and the support to tackle complicated issues and make a positive impact on the world.

Katie Mathews, Ross Brill, Carl Briggs, Jr., Ashley Bailey, Jo Kramer, Lucy Sartor, Alexandra Elam, James Weiss, Aaron Avidon, Nagelle Leboyd, Grace Graugnard & Hannah Gordon.

“The support we’ve received is unlike any project I have ever worked on and demonstrates that when a subject matter galvanizes Tulanians, they have the agency, the creativity, and the support to tackle complicated issues and make a positive impact on the world.”
— Mercein

Executive Producer Abby Epstein, Mercein, Mathews, Nancy Rebold (NC ’88).
Top Photo: Official Film Poster. Red Carpet Photos: Shunya Carroll.

Tulane’s National Center for Research on Education Access & Choice Receives Funding to Study Inequality in K-12 Education System

The National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) at Tulane University received $340,757 in funding from the William T. Grant Foundation to support a three-year research project to understand whether state policy can support equity in advanced course-taking. The goal is to learn how state course-level graduation requirements affect overall advanced course offerings, advanced course-taking, and graduation rates and whether these policies affect patterns of equity in advanced course-taking for Black and Hispanic/Latinx students. 

Launched in 2018 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, REACH is one of the premier research centers in the country focused on school choice policies and educational inequality. The center specializes in applied econometric work on the causal effects of a variety of public policies on improving educational access for disadvantaged students.

Research on racial and ethnic inequality in K-12 schools typically focuses on the gap in test scores between white, Black, and Hispanic/Latinx students. However, test scores alone do not provide reliable information about how a student will perform in life beyond high school. Advanced coursework in high school is a key element of education that structures work lives, civic engagement, and health later in life. And persistent gaps in advanced course-taking by race/ethnicity and gender contribute to lifelong inequalities.

According to REACH Associate Director of Research and Principal Investigator Jamie Carroll, “Our school system has a long history of excluding Black and Hispanic/Latinx students from advanced coursework and of separating students’ pathways by gender. We hope to shed light on how state policy can reduce intersectional gaps in advanced course taking so all students can be successful later in life.”

This project will build directly upon the center’s prior work, expertise, and data collection measuring inequality in public schools. Specifically, it will add measures of intersectional inequality in advanced course-taking by race/ethnicity and gender from the Office of Civil Rights to its National Longitudinal Schools Database, which includes information on all public and private schools in the U.S. from 1990 through 2020. Throughout the grant funding period, the center will translate its findings into reports to be shared with the public. This work will provide a better understanding of structural inequalities and potentially change the course of inequality in the education system in the U.S. 

Dr. Carroll is a terrific scholar and I'm glad to see her talent and expertise in student access to educational opportunity being recognized by the W.T. Grant Foundation," said REACH Director and Tulane economics professor and chair, Douglas N. Harris. "This is a very important project." 

The William T. Grant Foundation works to build, test, or increase understanding of programs, policies, or practices to reduce inequality in the academic, social, behavioral, or economic outcomes of young people ages 5-25 in the United States. Through its grant programs, like the Reducing Inequality program that funded this project, the Foundation aims to reduce inequality in the lives of young people in the U.S.