(Intro)

Hello everyone, I'm Michael (?~0:05), the audio/video manager here at Uplift, and I am proud to announce that we will be producing three new shows on this YouTube channel.  The first of these shows is, well, this show.  This month at Uplift.  Now what this show will do is cover what Uplift is doing on a month-to-month basis, what we will be doing in the future, and reflect on what we did in the past month.  This can be anything from a talk an Uplift member does or a convention appearance or anything like that.  As an example, we have (?~0:38) Chapman on later in the episode to talk about her recent appearance at LeakyCon, and we'll be giving you details about a webinar featuring our communications director, Jennifer Dorsey.  

Next up, I am proud to announce that Engage by Uplift will be returning for a season two.   This will be hosted by newcomer Jess Barnes who is currently in France at the moment, but we have been brainstorming new episodes and we are so proud of what we are going to be bringing to you in mid-October. 

Finally, we have Uplift Around Us, a roundtable discussion show that will discuss current events related to sexual wellbeing and gender identity.  The show will be broadcast here on YouTube Live so we can bring you guys into the discussion with your comments and questions.  So be sure to subscribe and click on the bell for notifications as well as check out our social media for the announcement for when we will be live.  

So thank you all for your support and I will try my best to answer any question you may have.  Just put them down below.  

Now, without further ado, here's Kristin Chapman talking about LeakyCon.

K: Hi, I'm Kristin Chapman, I'm the Programs Director here at Uplift, Online Communities against Sexual Violence, so that means that I work on a variety of our programs.  This can mean various campaigns, our presence at conventions, we've done presence at Hackathons and like, ways of kind of bringing technology into solving these kinds of problems, so those are kind of the main things that I've been working on.  We did the Engaging in Positive Fandom panel in collaboration with the Harry Potter Alliance.  Essentially, we wanted to talk about, in panels like this, how we can, you know, continue growing as a fandom and continue challenging ourselves to be better.  Also, acknowledging positive ways that our fandom has come forward in the last years.  We also talked a lot about how fan/creator dynamics, how that's improving, of ways that we can get better both from the fan side as well as the creator and kind of special guest side.  You know, fans has a lot of power to create these spaces that they want and the ways in which like, grassroots efforts have made a big impact in our community.  

One of the things I really like about LeakyCon is that it is a kind of space to dissect the text and think about the ways in which you know, we may have done something differently or why did something work like that and the ways in which it's kind of--can impact the community and I think when you think about something that is, you know, a book that influenced so many of our lives and really the lives of so many in this generation, it's important to like, critically think about the message that it's sending and I think that there's a lot of things that when you were reading it when you were younger, you can gloss over, but as soon as you start thinking about them more critically, it's kind of a more problematic message to be sending, so we kind of wanted to dig into that both on the side of the text and things in the canon but also things within the fandom, and some ways in which that has influenced things.  

So the most obvious one is love potions.  I think when we think about love potions, it's kind of creepy that people are being encouraged by adults in their life that children should be giving out these drugs to people that essentially force someone to fall in love with you.  It's very nonconventional and I think that's a really obvious one to see.  I think going deeper, one of the things that we talked about a lot is the ways in which often, in a lot of these cases like the use of love potions or the ways in which kind of the dormitory rules are set up such that, you know, under no circumstances are men, like, are the boys allowed to visit the girls' dormitories but it's okay the opposite, there's a lot of things that set up this society which mimics our own in which when men are the victims, it's considered kind of a joke and it's like, a hilarious scene where Ron is under the influence of love potion but if you flip the gender it really becomes pretty clear kind of like, what the values of the wizarding society that we're seeing and also the ways in which that impacts our own society.

M: Thanks, Kristin.  Now, coming up in November, communications director Jennifer Dorsey will appear on a panel, How to Stay Safe (and Sane) Online, sponsored by the Tech Ladies.  Link to the full description as well as to buy tickets online, click on the link in the description.  

Thank you all for joining us for this first episode of This Month at Uplift.  Our next episode will be on October 21st and as I leave you today, I want to introduce you to some of the newcomers here at Uplift.  Thank you all.