Category: Diversity & Equality

  • Writing A Book In And Of Real Life: An interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom

    Writing A Book In And Of Real Life: An interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom

    The name of Tressie McMillan Cottom should be familiar to HASTAC Scholars. She is a HASTAC Steering Committee member. She was on The Daily Show, interviewed by Trevor Noah at http://www.cc.com/video-clips/nsqb7g/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-tre…. And she is a plenary speaker for this year’s HASTAC conference in Orlando, Florida, from November 2 through November 4, 2017, at http://hastac2017.org. During […]

  • Pausing to Reflect

    Pausing to Reflect

    This has been… a big year. While the Futures Initiative team and I formally reflect on the past year through the exercise of writing and designing our annual report, and while we plan for an unusual year ahead, I’d like to take a moment and offer a more personal reflection as well. In working on our […]

  • Let’s talk about women…

    Let’s talk about women…

    This post has been a long time coming as I struggled to find the right tone and direction for the anger I felt over the very public silencing of Elizabeth Warren a few weeks back.  As Women’s History month approached and murmurs of the March 8th protest gained momentum, I began to think about why […]

  • Network Analysis with Cytoscape

    The objective of this practicum was to create visualizations in Cytoscape that allow us to analyze and compare the relationships between law enforcement agencies and the race of the deceased in 2015 and 2016. Going into the assignment, I expected to see which demographic groups were most frequently targeted, and whether certain agencies were disproprtionately […]

  • How others respond to me as a foreigner

    How others respond to me as a foreigner

    Spaghetti,mandolino, mafia, musical accent, gestures,  romantic, loud, fashion, chaos, Berlusconi- these are all words often used to describe Italians.  In every Uber that I took here in Philadelphia I had to speak to the driver of at least one of these topics!!! However, Italians are much more formal than most foreigners imagine and Americans should tread […]

  • Italy and U.S.

    Italy and U.S.

    I always dreamed to visit and live in the U.S. and finally, thanks to the grant i received, i ve accomplished my aspiration. I ve always got influenced by the american culture, especially watching american movies or TV series, and now i have the chance to test theese stereotypes and see what is true and […]

  • How Others Respond To Me As A Foreigner

    “May I fly back to Italy with you? All I need to carry with me is my dog, is that ok? Please!” Being Italian in the United States never generates banal reactions. The first sentence cited above has been said by an Uber driver during one of my first days in Philadelphia. She was very […]