Significance of Immersion Programs

Through our international immersion programs, we hope to have students encounter, share, and grow their perspective of the world and its inhabitants. Some of these encounters occur through direct service; some through learning engagements with government officials, NGO directors, survivors of war, migrants, teachers, doctors, lawyers, families, peers, and many others. Each Immersion is unique, and each student may gain something different. But our hope is to have students return from an international experience with new commitments to promoting global solidarity and the human dignity of all peoples—starting back here with our campus community. ... At this point in U.S. history, exposure to and encounters with the global human family seems profoundly important. As leaders seek to degrade and sometimes vilify those from certain parts of the world for their own personal gain, it is my opinion and experience that building relationships with others is the primary way to seek peace and social justice. Hopefully such education of our students will break down barriers that lead to stereotyping, oppressive practice, and laws promoting American exceptionalism

2020: Kathleen Rossman, O.S.F.

During Women’s History Month, the University of Dayton Women’s Center coordinates, as an experiential learning opportunity for students, an annual exhibit highlighting the contributions women have made at the University of Dayton. Theme for 2020: Women of Courage.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/women_of_ud/1043/thumbnail.jp

Memoria y Resistencia: Sharing UD experiences at the Encuentro to Close the School of the Americas

At UD, our Catholic and Marianist values inform us to uphold the human rights of all people, especially those whose agency has been diminished by unjust laws and corporate government policies. Guided by the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, including solidarity with the poor, we seek ways to join together to bring about a more peaceful and just world. The annual SOA Watch Encuentro, a peaceful protest to close the School of the Americas (SOA), is such a movement. Established in 1946, the SOA has operated at Fort Benning, Georgia since the 1980s. Technically closed in 2000, it immediately reopened as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001. For over 70 years, the SOA/WHINSEC has trained thousands in military tactics, prompting reigns of terror and human rights abuses throughout Latin America. Names like Efraín Ríos Montt, Manuel Noriega, and Mexico’s Zeta Cartel founders are all graduates of the SOA/WHINSEC. The SOA Watch started following the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a champion for the poor, slain while saying mass in San Salvador on March 24, 1980. His assassins were members of the Salvadoran death squads, including two SOA graduates. Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, also a graduate, was identified as ordering the killing by the 1993 UN Truth Commission. The Encuentro, held along the U.S. Mexican border, is an intersectional initiative, bringing together activists to share spaces, stories, and objectives for closing the SOA. With actions like the Presente! Litany, a roll call of the missing or murdered, the public is reminded that memory is strong, powerful and affective. This panel will focus on the stories of UD faculty, staff, and students who have been immersed in this environment of artistic interventions, activist speeches, and scholarly perspectives, all of which that they bring back to Dayton, OH and our campus

Of course we share! Testing Assumptions about Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in today's web and have attracted the interest from our research community in a variety of investigations. The overall vision of our community is that simply through interactions with the system, i.e., through tagging and sharing of resources, users would contribute to building useful semantic structures as well as resource indexes using uncontrolled vocabulary not only due to the easy-to-use mechanics. Henceforth, a variety of assumptions about social tagging systems have emerged, yet testing them has been difficult due to the absence of suitable data. In this work we thoroughly investigate three available assumptions - e.g., is a tagging system really social? - by examining live log data gathered from the real-world public social tagging system BibSonomy. Our empirical results indicate that while some of these assumptions hold to a certain extent, other assumptions need to be reflected and viewed in a very critical light. Our observations have implications for the design of future search and other algorithms to better reflect the actual user behavior

Platform Labour: Contingent Histories and New Technologies

Peer Reviewe