Hello Women’s Center friends!

With Critical Social Justice Week approaching, it’s important to remember what needs to be completed before the events! Below are two of the events that require preparation, so please make sure that’s handled in a timely manner:

Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon for CSJ: Ignite on Wednesday, October 24th. Please create a username ahead of time for Wikipedia to recognize your legitimacy. For more details.

Baltimore Walking Tour on Friday, October 26th. RSVP by Wednesday, October 24th so we know how many people to expect for the shuttle. For more details.

This year, CSJ’s theme is Ignite. This topic is especially relevant, as it focuses on the ability to embrace and participate in activism. Everyone with different levels of interest and involvement are welcome to attend all events, as there is something to gain from each of them. Additionally, this year brings an emphasis on STEM fields and activism within them. Often, those academic and career fields are encased in a strict culture that does not allow for much expression or empowerment. Each CSJ event offers the opportunity to learn how activism can be infused into STEM fields. Even if that realm of academia does not house your interests, the events and workshops are a wonderful learning opportunity to expand the horizons of activism within and outside the UMBC community.

See a list of all our events here and read our What You Need to Know blogs here!

Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Ignite with our What You Need to Know series. Written by Women’s Center student staff member Hannah Wilcove.

On October 15th, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano posted the following message to Twitter: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” These sixteen words sparked the rebirth and rapid growth of a campaign created eleven years ago by activist Tarana Burke.

As you probably already know, the #MeToo movement has been a way for survivors of sexual violence to share their stories, or at least acknowledge their existence. Its recent resurgence came on the heels of powerful men like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby finally facing the long-overdue consequences for their actions, although other accusations still loom in the air, unresolved. The sustained prevalence of the movement over this past year, especially given the high volume of news we take in on a regular basis, is a testament to the strength of digital forms of activism. Me Too and other modern movements such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street are characterized by their decentralized structure and reliance on publicity through multiple forms of media. Our keynote speaker Deanna Zandt utilized both her social media presence and her participation in an episode of the podcast This American Life titled “Five Women” to not only share her story, but also to talk about the experience of doing so.

Like the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, the #MeToo movement is about recognizing commonality of experiences and the systemic factors that influence them. This is what the principle of “the personal is political” is all about: while each survivor has their own individual story, the #MeToo movement provides a way for people to recognize that they are not alone in their experience. As an important note, many women of color flipped the script of this common slogan during the time period known as Second Wave Feminism, and advocated that “the political is personal” in order to make it known that the politics of social movements had significant impacts on their everyday lives.

CSJ as a whole and this year’s theme of Ignite is in part about finding community while doing activist work. Whether you’re a seasoned advocate for the causes you believe in or totally new to fighting for social justice, we all need people to support us in our work and remind us that we are not alone. I hope to see you at one (or more!) of our many CSJ events building that community.

Alumni startup RedShred earns unique award for AI work with UMBC research team

The artificial intelligence startup RedShred—cofounded by two UMBC alumni and housed in the bwtech@UMBC incubator—has received a rare Phase II Small Business Innovation Research Award from the National Science Foundation to expand in a new direction, in collaboration with UMBC faculty and graduate students.

Jeehye Yun ‘97, computer science, and Jim Kukla ‘97, M.S ‘00, computer science, launched RedShred in 2014, with the support of a Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer Award from NSF. For the past four years, RedShred has created software to help universities and other institutions sort through complex government listings in search of opportunities (requests for proposals, or RFPs) that meet their needs and expertise. The new Phase II award will support RedShred as they make their products available to companies in the commercial sector.

“At RedShred our mission is to help people read less and win more,” says Yun. “We’re excited about this Phase II grant, which allows us to commercialize our Phase I research and development, and develop new mechanisms to help people understand increasingly complicated documents.”

UMBC faculty and students have collaborated with RedShred to advance the technologies behind their products. Tim Finin, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, and several graduate students have worked with RedShred to better understand how large documents, such as RFPs, tend to be structured, even when each one is formatted differently and doesn’t follow a template. They describe this process as identifying the document’s semantic DNA.

By defining and identifying the core elements of each RFP, UMBC student researchers have been able to create “at-a-glance” summaries of these highly complex documents that provide all the necessary information and save the client the time of wading through levels of detail.

“Our collaboration with RedShred has given UMBC students great opportunities to participate in both basic and applied research focused on developing an innovative commercial product,” explains Finin. “This has involved both undergraduate and graduate students majoring in computing as well as the arts and humanities. For example, computer science graduate student Muhammad Rahman Ph.D. ‘18, computer science, developed a problem he encountered when working with RedShed into his Ph.D. dissertation, which he completed his summer.”

Adapted from a UMBC News article written by Megan Hanks

The post Alumni startup at bwtech@UMBC earns unique award for AI work with UMBC research team appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Ignite with our What You Need to Know series. Written by Kaleigh Mrowka, Assistant Director for Residential Education, and Lauren Mauriello, Assistant Director of Student Conduct.

“[Restorative practices] provide a clear blueprint to ensure that on the path to making social justice, we model that justness in our own behavior – especially toward those people and systems we hope to change.” – John Bailie

Restorative practices is a form of democratic dialogue, which at its core, is about relationships within communities. According to the International Institute for Restorative Practices, the fundamental premise of restorative practices is that “people are happier, more cooperative and productive, and more likely to make positive changes when those in authority do things with them, rather than to them or for them” (Wachtel & Wachtel, 2012). Within higher education environments, this includes teaching students skills for being in relationship with their peers, understanding obligations that exist based on community needs, and engaging within a community to repair harms caused within those relationships.

Restorative justice techniques can be used to address instances of inequality, such as an incident of bias, but can it address the structural issues that sustain oppression? What does it have to do with social justice?

The modern practices of restorative justice have roots in the ways indigenous communities addressed harm. The idea that communities can and should seek to address social issues by including those most impacted by the harms or decisions that impact them is blunted by our western political and social hierarchies and our impulse toward retribution rather than reparation.  Kay Pranis (2005), an expert facilitator of a restorative justice technique called circles, highlights the capacity for restorative justice to pick up when we have reached the limits of democracy.

While it is only recently becoming a known methodology and philosophy in higher education, restorative practices and restorative justice have been popular in the criminal justice system, K-12 education, and other entities for some time as  From a Critical Social Justice perspective, restorative practices lens provides both a methodology and ethos to build stronger communities around difference, reduce power differentials, and create a sense of agency for all members of a community.

So what does that mean for us when considering social justice within a community like UMBC? As the quote that opens this blog post implies, restorative practices can serve as a blueprint for the creation of a more just and inclusive community.  By shifting the focus towards caring for all members of a community, we can seek to create communities that promote justice.

In talking about restorative practices within the framework of Critical Social Justice Week, we will explore the idea of restorative justice as a means to address systems of oppression by looking at methods and tools for restoring power to those who have been harmed, victimized or marginalize, and building individual and community capacity to address community problems. 

To learn more about Restorative Practices, come to our event on Monday, October 22 from 4-5 pm in Commons 329