Tag: academia

A decolonial checklist for your decolonial online event. PART 1/2.

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Screen reader caption for blind or visually impaired people: A small river zig-zagging into the jungle and forming three increasingly big waterfalls as it comes towards a small, crystal clear pond. There is a small wooden bridge on the upper-left side of the photo, almost invisible, deep in the jungle. Research shows that even short interactions with natural scenery, including pictures and audio recordings can improve human mood and well being. And, oh we’ll need some, when talking colonial stuff! Photo by Rifqi Ramadhan on Pexels.com

Lately, the term “Decolonize” has finally been removed from the unwritten censorship lists by the Committee of White Tears or something. No longer hushed in outrage during classes, conferences and webinars, it is now the buzzing term being probably fed to ChatGPT by lecturers and various organizers so that is now buzzing all around. I should know, I’m in a Decolonize Think Tank [this page is under maintenance], trying to Decolonize International Voluntary Service [project description]! And since the EU is now “updating” its funding strategy to the Cold War and non-EU participants won’t be allowed in any longer (very decolonial) you can start by supporting the International Solidarity Fund of CCIVS (the Coordinating Committee of International Voluntary Service), the umbrella organization who open the discussion about the need for the International Voluntary Service movement to be more intentional, vocal and active about decolonial intentions, talks and practice. As usual, mention ≠ absolute endorsement.

Indeed, saying that an institution, project, exhibition or event are “Decolonial”, does not automatically make it decolonial. I know, shocker. And, sure, a checklist will absolutely solve the problem for good.

Bear with me with a little story. When I was about 18, I communicated to my parents that I had received a supportive ok go from our family doctor to go vegetarian. Me and Dr. Pinecone - the best rendering of the Roman dialect nickname we gave him – devised a one year transition plan starting with reducing meat and fish consumption to twice a week each. “That’s not even a thing – my Mother said – we already do that“. One week and one dutifully compiled checklist later, we knew that the actual amount was nine times cumulatively – because, yes, bacon and ragù are meat and tuna is fish too. So, yes, we are in therapy now and, yes, I like checklists: this is the second here and won’t be the last 😉

1 – TIME ZONES

Speakers, facilitators and participants are made aware of the schedule according to their own time zone from the moment they are invited and at all times, consistently, throughout communications.

Pro-tip, a.k.a. would you dare?
Have Euro-Americans speak, chair or facilitate at 10pm or later, for once.

2 – SPEAKERS, CHAIRS&FACILITATORS

These are the people that are put on the banner, at the center, on a chair, on a stage, on a full screen, or that are given the mic. Choose wisely, critically, “reparatively”, not quantitatively. “Best-selling”, “most published/established/famous”, “decades-long research holder” … often are synonyms of the pale-male-stale – oh my, PMS! – trinity. If you want to “ensure diversity” but still include the PMS – not ready for an all BIPOC, all-neuro-divergent, all-queer, all-women panel? Why? – ensure they have the elegance and sense of humor to take a damn joke about the true fact that they graduated the same year the first woman was ever admitted in their department.

Pro-tip, a.k.a. would you dare?
Have someone who completely challenges your comfortable and streamlined organizing. Give them unconditional trust and negotiation power, and pay them well.

3 – GENERAL PROMOTION AND VISUAL

In short: visibility and representation matter. This includes but is surely not limited to:

  • The order (first to last, center to margin, top to bottom) of the speakers on all promotional materials. Does it reproduce colonial hierarchies?
  • The wording of each speaker’s written bio, the way they are introduced before they speak, the way they are addressed during the discussion. Do they reproduce colonial tropes?
  • The speaking time, the amount of time each speakers is addressed, the speech support devices they are provided or accessible to them (slides, screen-sharing, video-sharing …), the content of their speech. Is it counter-balancing the exclusion, dispossession and abuse of colonial times?
  • The imagery produced before, during and after. Is it reproducing colonial imagery?

Pro-tip, a.k.a. would you dare?
Would you dare to use each decolonial event to collectively train or re-train, participants and organizers alike?

And speaking of training …

[Continue to PART 2/2]

POWER TO THE LITTLE ONES!!!_Part III_On all-nighters, a.k.a. the ultimate team effort.

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Screen reader caption for blind or visually impaired people: the opening sentence reads “Man, staying up all night doesn’t affect you?”, the monster doll Glen from 2004 movie “Seed of Chucky” replies: “Nope, look at me, fresh as a daisy”. Photo credit: @memers.media

What follows is Part III of an email I sent on 15th November 2020 to the youngest of my cousins, Riccardo. He had just started his first year of university after graduating through the pandemic, we had lost our legendary grandpa Nonno Alfredo just few months prior, and the family would not be reunited for the next two years. So, an email was my best available means to pass on my tradition of giving The Talk to “the little ones”, as they ventured to university as future first generation graduates. This part is also dedicated to another former “little one” among the recipients of this email, a.k.a. my little sister. She would be happy if you could show some Instagram love and $UPPORT to LuchaYSiesta, a community-run and community-funded center for women escaping domestic violence and their children, active since 2008 in our parents’ neighborhood with a library, a tailoring workshop, a garden and a room for screenings, assemblies and other events – I’ll write with and about them soon because they’re facing eviction threats for the 10th time or so >_<


[A necessary premise of collaboration vs. competition …] starting from year 1 of uni, it appeared clear to me and a certain group of colleagues – some still friends now – that you can’t get anywhere by yourself, and that competing makes no sense. In the spirit of unity, during each exam session we would split the work and make a strategic attack plan: lesson with no mandatory attendance were equally shared, notes, tapes, talents and fears have always been pooled, Bolshevik. This, and only this, has carried all of us till the end sane – excluding pre-existing pathologies and peculiarities, and/or heavy drugs matters.

Team up, sweet pea! ❤

ALL-NIGHTERS

Shit happens, unfortunately. So, regardless of all your best will and independently from you, you may find yourself pulling an all-nighter or [hm] helping someone writing their thesis in 48 hours. There are several ways to pull an all-nighter, someway or another, I’ve pulled a couple of ones and this is what I’ve learned:

– NEVER ALONE : as I’ve repeated already several times, unity is strength and this is never as true as in all-nighters’ case. To be in a group means sharing the workload, sharing the stress, and usually have some fun with joyful blasphemy.

– THE RIGHT PLACE : in order to avoid having to move or facing eviction at 2:00 AM, make sure that the place you choose is “all-nighter-friendly”. No kids or pets around, no roommates coming back home annoyingly drunk in the wee hours, no anxious parents interrupting the work and demanding reports at 1AM on why is it that you got to study last minute and-of-course-it’s-CAUSE-YOUNEVERLISTENTOME! etc. etc.

– THE RIGHT FUEL : Provided that your all-nighter will start after dinner, and that food (better savory or fruits) be a constant presence in strategic position other than your working table … you’ll want to be easy with coffee. It must be rationed cautiously. Particularly efficient is the ritual called *Caffè dello Studente* [Italian for: The Student’s Coffee] between 1:30-2AM. This is just a regular coffee prepared by replacing water with coffee in the bottom part of your moka machine [I found a 2 minutes video about it]. The sages would assume two slices of whole wheat bread before consumption, as a “buffer” for this highly corrosive liquid. Ideally you want to take it sugar-free, because sugars have that “down-phase” … but since it tastes like mud and gasoline, you can submerge it with cane sugar counter-balance the down-phase with stress and the existential crisis you may have around 3AM. You know, the one in which you and your companions hug and cry, howling “That [insert appropriate insult] has to die a painful death!”. And then you go back to work.

– THE RIGHT MUSIC : I have been curating various playlists along my study years. One of them has been made with the purpose of studying after 11PM [link to Spotify]. Then there is an instrumental one that I play while reading, and another one I called “Queen of Badassdom” to hype up when I’m on the low. [a new one I devised more recently is for each song to be played on repeat, it’s called REPEAT|repeat|reapIT|trip-it … continues …]

Go to Part I | Go to Part II | This is Part III

Why I don’t use AI for literature reviews (hint: it’s political) and what I do instead.

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Screen reader caption for blind and visually impaired people: two astronauts out in space with planet Earth in the background. The one at the center, looking towards the Earth says “Machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence. Was it all statistic?”. The second one, pointing a gun towards the other’s back responds “Always has been”. Photo by imgflip.com

This post is the spin-off to a conversation I had about a month ago with a small group of current and former long-term volunteers (some turned staff) during the 2023’s International Committee Meeting of Service Civil International (SCI). Your gratitude and support can be directed to the generous, fun-working and exceptionally efficient organizing team of this event, SCI Austria.

One of the reason why I keep attending SCI’s annual meetings even now that my research is over, is the family reunion atmosphere. By now, I think I qualify as the weird and feisty spinster auntie, and so I often take breaks from adult conversations and politely ask the kids to join their circles and get updates about the new cool stuff they’re up to.

In one of such circles, the topic was AI and, more specifically, ChatGPT. Not as in “Do you use it?” but as in “How many creative ways have you found to use it?”. One such ways regarded literature reviews for their term papers or other reports, and several tips and routines were shared and contended before my turn to speak spontaneously came.

Digital activist and computer scientist Joy Buolamwini condensed in a three minute video poem the evidence of AI’s racial and gender bias in facial recognition, and I had my own minute-long rally about the same technology being trained to put together quantitatively justified lists of resources. Spoiler alert, they too systematically reproduce a well known hierarchy: the one having AI masters’ at the top – the male, pale and stale ones. So, it’s political.

The good news is that, as everything human-made and political, a critical discourse and a practice of resistance can be organized, collectively and individually, to turn the hierarchy on its head. In the specific case of literature review, these are the three “OPS!” steps I came up with so far:

  • Origin: find the oldest available resource making use of the keyword, idea, topic, concept or debate you’re after. ASK (structurally) WHY that concept could find its way to publication at that specific, time and place, by that author and publisher, and with that wording.
  • Prestige: find the currently most cited, the hip piece of research carrying the debate. ASK (structurally) WHY in current times that very piece of research is the catchy, the prestigious, the recognizable and recognized one.
  • Subvert: screen for at least one recent contribution through decentralizing, decolonial, trans-feminist, compensatory lens. ASK (structurally) WHY it took longer or it was harder for the authors to get to participate in that debate from their own standpoint.

Note: along the way, you may also stumble upon resources that expressed the same idea without the flashy marketing the currently prestigious contributor had access to, or whose authors were structurally excluded by publishing or obtaining other forms of academic credit.

! – The exclamation point of the OPS! formula comes when we cite them all but order and formulate our citation according to transitional and compensatory.

See?
This is what a human brain can do and is for. Automate this! 😉

POWER TO THE LITTLE ONES!!!_Part II_On citations.

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Me, et al.










Screen reader caption for blind and visually impaired people: a snow capped mountain range top emerges through the clouds. Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com]


What follows is Part II of an email I sent on 15th November 2020 to the youngest of my cousins, Riccardo. He had just started his first year of university after graduating through the pandemic, we had lost our legendary grandpa Nonno Alfredo just few months prior, and the family would not be reunited for the next two years. So, an email was my best available means to pass on my tradition of giving The Talk to “the little ones”, as they ventured to university as future first generation graduates. This part is also dedicated to another former “little one” among the recipients of this email, my architect cousin Arianna. She would be happy if you could follow and show some love to the urban regeneration adventure – or “urban acupuncture” – she is taking part in @needlecrowd – mention does not equate absolute endorsement.

[… continues from Part I … ] I found a very short article (6 pages) with very good pictures. I use it to show you a Google Scholar function you can use: citations.

If you type the title of this article on Google Scholar, the article doesn’t come out per se because it is not an academic article – meaning published by an academic journal after a peer review done by other scholars – but since it has been cited once somewhere it comes out as “[citation]” [in black].

So you can – and this is valid for any article, book or material on Google Scholar – click on the “Cite” button with quotes that you see below the article’s title, next to the little star accompanying the “Save” button. This way you can see all the details you have to include in your citation to avoid committing plagiarism.

ATTENTION! A window will pop up, showing official citation styles: MLA (devised by the Modern Language Association), APA (by the American Psychological Association), Chicago (as in University of Chicago), Harvard (it goes without saying), Vancouver (guess?). And how do we choose? 

First, by subject: in sociology or philosophy APA, Chicago e Harvard, are more frequently used. But it depends on who is the recipient of what you write, some professors have their own favorite. In architecture, too … But given the complication of having to cite architectural works, projects and drawings, I’ve found a quite complete guide on how to do just that. [the original link of this email is now behind a membership-only curtain – thanks Virginia Tech, you kinda suck! So here’s one for images, and another framework of reference that can be valid for buildings, design objects, and art pieces]

Second: I use Chicago because other styles in which the author’s name is reduced to a punctuated initial are more subjected to confusion, and can be discriminatory for authors whose surname is very common. This is particularly the case for surnames from areas of the world in which languages are not written in Latin letters, and surnames are numerically fewer than in other languages (see for example, China). 

If you cite material that you found on a website, other than all information [like author, title, webpage name, date of publication and URL] you should also add “Accessed on: …” and adding the date of your last access.

If, instead, you find an academic article on Google Scholar that has been cited already more than once and can be downloaded – click on the link to the title’s right to download, if it’s not accessible from your institution let me know 😉 – the title will be in blue and with no “[citation]” before the title. In this case, to the right of the quotes icon ” you’ll find “Cited by” and the amount of citations that article has received. Clicking on “Cited by” you’ll get to a chronological list of all the publications the article has been cited by, so they can be on the same topic but more updated because they’ve been published more recently. [ … continues …]

Go to Part I | This is Part II

POWER TO THE LITTLE ONES!!!_Part I_The basics

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This photo of Famiglie Arcobaleno [Rainbow Families – Donate!] organization’s flags is exhibit A of my dad’s full recovery from internalized homophobia. He took it last Saturday, as he marched at Roma Pride parade.
It does get better!

What follows is part I of an email I sent on 15th November 2020 to the youngest of my cousins, Riccardo. He had just started his first year of university after graduating through the pandemic, we had lost our legendary grandpa Nonno Alfredo just few months prior, and the family would not be reunited for the next two years. So, an email was my best available means to pass on my tradition of giving The Talk to “the little ones” , as they ventured to university as future first generation graduates. Now that he is venturing his last exam session before graduation – CONGRATS! – he would be happy if you could direct your love and attentions to this young musician here – mention does not equate absolute endorsement.

Ciao bellezza! 😎

It took me until Sunday find a moment and knock out an updated version of my “POWER TO THE LITTLE ONES!” starters-pack … which, I realize now, is starting to get a little bit long … like a letter! But no worries, you can look at it little by little 🙂 Even because, in the past, this passage of information would happen, indeed, little by little as we would gather together … now we’ve got to adapt.

PRELIMINARY ISSUES

So, the assumption is that certain things you might have already acquired in your past 20 years … but let’s refresh ten essential points in semi-random order:

  1. 7-8 hours of good quality sleep per night, scheduling days of to rest … and rewards for when you accomplish something, anything;
  2. Eat “well-combed” … a.k.a. properly! … which is very subjective. But I am still to meet a person who tells me that they get by eating red meat, sugar and process food throughout an exam session. A good indicator other than clinical symptoms is: if you managed to have a focused study session after eating X, X is your friend.
  3. Drink a lot of water. Easy with caffeine – see exceptions later* – and keep alcohol and moderate hallucinators for the weekend … speaking of which …
  4. Avoid synthetic drugs, or “natural” ones coming from the Amazon Forest, or the Andean highlands: let’s remember where we live.
  5. Breathe with your belly and keep calm. Do not quit physical activity.
  6. Don’t stop being in contact with Nature, and with yourself – which is the same thing.
  7. Don’t ever lose contact with friends, those who make you feel all positive and energetic and relaxed etc. after you meet.
  8. Don’t ever quit learning things that have no (apparent) connection with your course of study – such as languages and technical skills.
  9. Avoid jerks, and caring about their jerkiness – same for toxic, negative or energy-draining subjects.
  10. Reserve a specific time and place to screens and social media – like, not in bed, or before 9am, or after 10pm etc.

If you’re good with this, 50% is done and you’re my new personal hero 🙂

Before we put (vegan) flesh on this basic structure, note: if you want to delve into any of the topics mentioned above, you can find agile videos on Youtube. But watch it: because I got to the point that one-two hours of each day ended up being dedicated to “productivity videos” … and that’s a little bit much. [… continues …]

Go to Part II |