In this episode we speak to two brilliant professors here at Cambridge, Mónica Moreno Figueroa and Ella McPherson about a data project they launched at the University of Cambridge to track everyday racism in the university. We discuss using technology for social good without being obsessed with the technology itself and the importance of tracking how racism dehumanises people, confuses us about each other, and causes physical suffering, which students of colour have to deal with on top of the ordinary stress of their uni degree.
Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge. She was born and raised in Mexico. She studied a BA in Media and Communication at the Universidad Iberoamericana in León and Mexico City, and then worked at the Instituto Mexicano de la Juventud, Secretaría de Educación Pública (Mexican Youth Institute, Ministry of Education), first as Head of the Addictions Prevention Department and then as Coordinator of the National Youth Gender Programme.
An integral part of her academic work has been her commitment to explore different forms of engaged and engaging sociology with a deep concern for social justice. This has taken her to develop links and projects that aim to make racism public as a strategy for its elimination. In the summer of 2011, she co-founded the Collective COPERA (Colectivo para Eliminar el Racismo en Mexico) alongside Dr Emiko Saldivar (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Dr Alicia Castellanos (UAM-Iztapalapa) and now has grown to include a wider group of academics and activists. The collective has been developing a series of initiatives to make racism public in Mexico, visibilise racism in its multiple forms in the country, link academia and activism and incorporate a 'race' perspective in public policy and human rights activism.
Dr Ella McPherson is Associate Professor in the Sociology of New Media and Digital Technology as well as the Anthony L. Lyster Fellow in Sociology at Queens’ College and Co-Director of the Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR). At CGHR, she leads the research theme on human rights in the digital age. She is also the Deputy Head of Cambridge's School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and is the founder of The Whistle, a digital tool which help verify the authenticity of digital evidence of human rights abuses.
End Everyday Racism is The End Everyday Racism initiative is an independent research project developed by Dr Ella McPherson and Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa based at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. The project aims to develop our understanding of everyday racism with numeric, descriptive and geographic evidence, in order to build a collective case to support antiracism advocacy and social justice activism at the University and further afield (read more in Varsity). Find out more and share your experiences here: https://racismatcambridge.org/
Reading List:
Lorgia García Peña (2022) Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color
Sara Ahmed (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (2021) The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.
Jason Arday (Ed.), Heidi Safia Mirza (Ed.) (2018) Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy.
Lola Olufemi, Odelia Younge, Waithera Sebatindira, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (Eds.) (2019) A FLY Girl’s Guide To University.
Transcript:
KERRY MACKERETH:
Hi! I’m Dr Kerry Mackereth. Dr Eleanor Drage and I are the hosts of The Good Robot podcast. Join us as we ask the experts: what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? If you want to learn more about today's topic, head over to our website, www.thegoodrobot.co.uk, where we've got a full transcript of the episode and a specially curated reading list by every guest. We’d be so grateful if you could leave us a review in the Podcast app or wherever you get your podcasts, and do get in touch with us, we’d love to hear from you. You can email us - our emails are on the website - or tweet us @thegoodrobot1 with questions and comments, we’d love to hear from you. But until then, sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode!
ELEANOR DRAGE:
In this episode we speak to two brilliant professors here at Cambridge, Ella McPherson and Mónica Moreno Figueroa about a technology they launched at Cambridge to track everyday racism in the university. We discuss using technology for social good without being obsessed with the technology itself and the importance of tracking how racism dehumanises people, confuses us about each other, and causes physical suffering, which students of colour have to deal with on top of the ordinary stress of their uni degree. They’re also open to partnerships at other organisations so do get in touch if interested. Thanks for listening.
KERRY MACKERETH:
Thank you so much, both of you for joining us here today. So just to kick us off, could you tell us a bit about who you are, what you do? And what's brought you each to anti racist data collection and scholar activism?
MÓNICA MORENO FIGUEROA:
Okay, hi, thank you so much for the invitation. My name is Mónica Moreno. And I'm an Associate Professor in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge. And I’ve been doing research on racism and understanding the everyday experience of racism for a long time now. And yeah, with Ella, we started with the idea of how we could use technology to track everyday racism in the university, and we started this project and developed it based on a previous work that Ella has been doing. I’ll pass to her.
ELLA MCPHERSON:
Great thank you also for this invitation. It's such a wonderful podcast. It's lovely to be a guest. I'm Ella McPherson, also Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. And my research area focuses on technology and human rights and how we can use technology to help kind of collect and analyse data on kind of difficult to assess situations. And then how can we think about how we use that process or that data to help move towards, you know, solidarity building and institutional and social change? And yeah, so Mónica and I started talking several years ago now about the potential for this project, based on her research areas and around race and racism and mine on tech analogy and kind of institutional social change and how we could work together to build this tool in our own local community.
ELEANOR DRAGE:
Fantastic thank you so much. And now our 3 billion dollar questions, what is good technology, is it even possible? And how can feminism and anti racism help us get there? Maybe Ella, would you like to kick us off?
ELLA MCPHERSON:
I've said this to well before but you know, I adore your podcast, but I worry about the creeping in of financial metaphors, and all kinds of places. So I wouldn't call it the billion dollar answer, but rather a kind of, I don't know, thinking point, which is, when I think about how technology I think spend a lot of time thinking about how technology can be helpful or useful to us in our everyday lives, or to projects that want to make the world a better place. And I think for me, it's about who, who's designing technology, who can control that? How much that lines up with the people who are trying to use it. So I think technology that helps you, as a user, as a person, achieve what you're trying to achieve. That's according to your own norms. I think that is a good technology. So there isn't a one size fits all answer. And I think that's where kind of feminist thought comes in is that it's, you know, each person from their own standpoint is going to have a different need for technologies. And so what I think we need is a world where it's much easier for all of us to build our own technologies, or opt out of technologies altogether, and still achieve what we want to achieve. So what I want to see is a technological world that's like, kind of reverse, so like, grassroots, rather than top down.
ELEANOR DRAGE:
Fantastic. Thank you. And you're quite right, there are priceless questions or unquantifiable questions!
MÓNICA MORENO FIGUEROA:
Well, I think anti racism and feminism and anti sexism are kind of starting points, starting criteria, let's say to explore issues. And it's always like an adventure, it's in development. Now, it's always like, you're asking questions, you're like, how do we best do it? And what kind of notion or idea of racism or sexism is behind these proposals? So I think it's a very good compliment in a way, in order to think in order to think about social transformation, having these kinds of a visions of change, that is, you know, there has certain criteria that has a certain shape or colour, you know, certain taste, with the technology that can be as Ella says, you know, thought about carefully, for what and why and how.
KERRY MACKERETH:
Fantastic and so the two of you together, run the End Everyday Racism project, and which would you design an innovative anti racist reporting tool and data collection process? So could you tell us a bit more about what the project is, and it's background such as why you decided to make this tool
MÓNICA MORENO FIGUEROA:
So the end of the day racism started maybe, now I'm gonna get lost with the dates maybe four years ago, I think something like that. And it basically comes like… Ella and I have been, we're working in the university, we are tutors. We've been tutors or Directors of Studies, in touch with students everyday lives and realising that the serious amount of issues that students go through, and also as colleagues and with our colleagues, you know, so there was something off in a way, it's like, how is it that we are in this institution, and we keep hearing things that once you start opening up people come up to you all the time to tell you, well, all that was happening already 20 years ago, 10 years ago, similar kinds of things. So, thinking of that, and also with my experience as a Race Equality Champion, that I was taking that role at the university, we decided to kind of try to think about using this as a case, you know, that will also test The Whistle that Ella is going to surely talk about a bit more to see if we can try to get at something that is very, very difficult, which is the everydayness of anything, which in this case of racism, because it is it is a sort of process. A thing that happens that is so normalised, that people are uncomfortable about and that people don't want to deal with but you have to deal with in a way and then you just kind of normalise it in order not to can not, yeah, not to be hurt so much or so constantly all the time. So thinking of those times, we were like, Okay, let's try. And it's a sort of political intervention. It's a research project. It's a positioning of, let's offer the data we want to give, in a way, I think that's kind of a bit of our motto, something, you know, like, we've been asked all the time to prove the existence of something we know exists, totally exists. But it's always disbelief because of maybe the normalisation and because of this uncomfortableness. So how can we do it? So with that in mind, that's how the project starts. It’s more than a reporting tool to follow up a procedure of claims, we are like, this is a research project to demonstrate, and to have already archived and documented the kind of experiences that people have the variety, the multiplicity, and particularly the emotional effects of those experiences. Because I think most of the projects will tell you the story, or of the reporting systems, like exactly what happened. And in a way we know the story. I mean, we know because it's, it's a similar kind of stories, well not necessarily similar, but there are different kinds of stories, but you’re not going to hear “this is a new thing, Oh my God, I've never faced this ever. I've never seen anything like it”. Now we've seen it. But I think that what we're less aware of is what are the accumulated consequences of these in people's lives, once the event is gone, so that we kind of have another perspective and take it more seriously, I guess, more and more seriously.
ELEANOR DRAGE:
What are the major themes that have come up in the testimonies that people have given?
ELLA MCPHERSON:
Well, we kind of ask four key questions, I guess. One was what are the emotions that you received during that as a victim of these events? You know, what are the things that you felt got to you? Then what are the things you felt yourself when this was happening? How, yeah, how did you feel? And then what are the physical consequences for you? What were the physical effects that this had on you, from feeling like you know, nervous and freezing and sweating and dizzy and trembling and stomach pain, you know, and from that on? And what are the consequences in your everyday life? You know, and I think from those areas what has come is like, well, there is a variety of emotions, a variety of issues that come, of feelings. So basically when we talk about emotions being directed to people, like what people experience, hostility was really big like almost 50%, and also followed by things like contempt, rejection, indifference, anger, disgust, well-meaningness, resentment. And I think it's important here to just mention, the point here is to make explicit the kinds of things that people have to receive and take, you know, from a group class situation, another person, a context that is racializing this person and being racist towards them. The other one, the emotions experienced, it means with anger, more than 50%. But it's followed by things like indignation, incredulity, humiliation, embarrassment, confusion, sadness also discussed, feeling threatened. I mean, it's like, how can you have an experience a university experience, do your studies develop yourself, you know, grow as a person, if you are having this, this kind of effects you know, in your, in your life, and physical reactions know, from nervousness, bodily tension, feeling frozen pressure in the chest, headache, breathlessness. I mean, it's serious, you know, in a way. So I think, having these, it's a really good contribution of this project, because it allows us a window into these kinds of broader aspects. And you can then just imagine, and multiply it for so many people all over the UK, the world, you know, university settings, etc. This is how people go either throwing out these sorts of effects and then receiving them.
ELLA MCPHERSON:
Yeah, I mean the data that Mónica just outlined was like, incredibly striking. And I think, coming along with that was it's kind of unintended, not unintended, but sort of, sort of unexpected pieces of data that were coming back at us from people who've given testimony, which helped us think about what a project like this was doing in our community. So obviously, you know, we have taken the data and we have a wonderful Research Associate Hande Guzel who did the data analysis and helped write the report. And so we have the data and we've taken that data around to different sort of powers that be and shared it in the hopes that it will start shifting the institutions. And we've also offered the data, the data is available to anyone listening, if you're a part of our community, you can help, you know, you can use the data to help you in your own kind of different kinds of data justice projects. But one of the things that kept coming in at the end of the testimony form, we have a question, like anything else you want to add. And we had these kinds of spontaneous comments, like, you know, this was really cathartic to put this into to write about this, I'm so glad that someone's paying attention to this. You know, I really hope that this does something. But I feel a lot better having submitted the form. On the one hand, we were hearing that, on the other hand, we also heard that, you know, it was it could be extremely difficult to be alone, and to be filling out the form because it evoked like the emotions which were re-lived in a sense in kind of filling out the form. And so, you know, the whole time we, you know, once we launched the project, we're working on it, and sort of thinking about it in the community. We were thinking we're trying to figure out what it was doing in the community and like how it could support our community. And so we started thinking towards this idea of this project runs on a methodology of solidarity, and in a way that connects to some of the kind of more academic thinking about witnessing, which is, you know, what is witnessing it well witnessing is seeing something and saying something or experiencing something and then doing something, this is a witnessing project, but you know, the endpoint of witnessing of trying to get change. There's so many other factors that are out of your control when you're trying to get something big to change, that you can't guarantee it and you can't set its timeline and you can just work towards it. But equally important in this project was the kinds of community events that were happening around the project. So not even the technology or the questionnaire, specifically, but the existence of the projects in our community and what that was doing and how that was opening up space for conversation, how we started creating what we call the pizza lunches, which is where we have this kind of format where you can come and have a piece of pizza, bring a friend, sit down, put in some testimony, have a chat, even though it's anonymous, but you're sort of chatting side by side about experiences of everyday racism, about what it feels like to be part of such a project, etc. And so that the existence of the project itself and the kind of ecosystem of our community, even before it gets to kind of reports and sort of meetings with high levels, people, etc, was a positive thing. And we needed to put energy also into that methodology of solidarity along the way. So this is something we figured out from, you know, in collaboration with our witnesses, and what they were saying back to us about, you know, how just the act of witnessing in and of itself as part of a community can be a goal, not not the kind of, it can be a sort of means to end an end, right. And we felt like that was really important and helps us think about how to build solidarity around. Joe Cotton, who was our communications lead, had talked about it as a collective case against racism. And so how this existence of the project helps us build that.
KERRY MACKERETH:
Absolutely, and I think the solidarity aspect of it is just so crucial. I’m reading Lorgia García-Peña Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color at the moment. And I think something that your project does so brilliantly, is to combat this kind of enforced sense of alienation that comes with what she calls her being capital T, capital O, The One that any institution, I'm sure so many of us have had that experience of, you know, being feeling alone and being alone and being marked out as this different person who has to do everything all at once. And I think that just being in the community and recognising that you're not alone in this, but also that there are people who not only share your experiences, but want to support you through that experience, and the after effects of it is just so crucial. And I think something which is so different about your reporting tool is its emphasis on affect, and particularly just how these experiences impact the body and also affect you emotionally in these really deep and profound ways. And you've touched on this a little bit. But I want to ask you a bit more about that. Because in so much technological development, emotions considered kind of antithetical to tech and ways which is being challenged a lot of different kinds of tech industries, and has been challenged a lot by feminist scholars. But I want to ask you how you approach this question of how do we deal with emotional and very effective responses to racism in the way that your tool was designed and made?
MÓNICA MORENO FIGUEROA:
No, the thing is, I can, I can say that, in relation to thinking about the emotional effects of anything … something that I've been very concerned about, both personally and theoretically and intellectually, is how can we even move forward in exploring social change or analysis and explanations of the situation as it is, if we don't consider the emotional effects of oppression? That's something that is really important in my work and in my thinking. Because yeah, I think the impact that things have, you know, the processes that have in a way, so as the building blocks that allow certain things to happen or not from like, I'm not gonna start this thing with my mom or with whoever because I'm angry, and how that modifies and changes your relationship to how someone can be totally inferiorised and felt and made feel like they are worthless, after a series of continuous and systematic attacks to their humanity. So oppression overall, which is a core interest of sociologists, you know, if you're interested in power you're interested in how oppression shapes inequality and allows for power to be developed or taken over. So looking at these emotional effects is really important. And in a way, sociology seems to always sort of step away a bit from that, because it's like, oh, well, how do you measure the emotional effects of anything? But also how can you not, I would say, consider that if the main function of oppression is to dehumanise us and to make us confused as to each other, it confuses me about you and you about me, therefore, I can treat you like you're nothing or that you don't matter or that you matter too much, then how can we move forward? So I think that's the kind of perspective I'm coming from, to consider that this is something really important to capture. And it's difficult to capture in a sort of systematic way. I mean, you can do interviews, of course, and you can explore that. But in this project, I think it's giving us a really good way to demonstrate it, but also to mobilise that these areas needs to be considered when we think of policies and things in the in any institution, or processes, policies, etc, things that we want to do, we need to consider that is done by people, that people are carrying a lot of things that objectivity doesn't exist, that we are always making decisions on the on top of ourselves and of our feelings. So I think that's kind of where I'm coming from, and why I think this project, it's a really good contribution towards exploring this area. Yeah, I would say that.
ELLA MCPHERSON:
It's really interesting, Mónica. And I think I'll speak to how that sort of how the process of this project was mediated through technology, and how the giving testimony through technology, about emotions, kind of can influence our emotions about the testimony and, you know, the project, perhaps? Because I think, yes, I agree with you, Kerry, that a lot of the tech literature, you know, particularly in my space, which is human rights and technology does not deal with emotion. It's kind of legalistic, it's pragmatic. And I'm very interested, like Mónica in thinking about the emotions involved in my area of research, so engaging with technologies, to advocate for human rights and to investigate human rights violations. And so, what the problem is, of course, when you are doing something not face to face, as we all know, from having lived through the pandemic, you know, it's flattened in some ways. And so, on the one hand, the technology of this project has been great, because it's anonymous, and allows people to give testimony as they want to do, as they choose to do it. At the same time, we have worried a lot about the lack of face to faceness of it and anonymity and thinking about community support, and how actually, I've heard this a lot in the Human Rights space as well. And we we're worried about it with this project is that it can feel really extractive to you know, pour your heart out into a form. And at the end of the form, it's like, “thank you!” And you're like, Well, what, what's happened to it? Where is it and like, Who's got it, who's looking at it? Who has this data? Who has this content piece of me, right? And it was, that was the last thing we wanted, the last kind of feeling we wanted people to have while using this, this testimony tool. At the same time recognising that actually, that distance was something that was going to allow us to collect possibly more data. And so a lot of that is around a lot of our thinking around that is that kind of methodology of solidarity and having in person testimony events. And also being really clear, you know, what happens with the data and that, you know, everyone can use the data and, you know, the data sort of belongs back to the community, we're kind of managing it, you know, we're taking care of it and being careful with it, but it is community data generated according to the needs and the desires of the community because Monica led a big consulting process at the university before we even got started around what kind of data is useful and interesting. And so that's that one thing about thinking about the technology and sort of trying to mitigate that feeling of its effectiveness, but also I I think one of the other things, and I see this again a lot in my other research is around kind of the allure still of technology projects and how people kind of like, woo, like, fascinated when it's a tech project, and they kind of like the heartbeat goes up and stuff, I see this at least. And it's like, oh, it's exciting, because it's a tech project. And I think, you know, while recognising that can be a useful kind of feeling, in terms of engaging people in our project, that's not actually the feeling we want our project to provide. Because, you know, the project is about so much more than the technology. I mean, the technology is great. Our technologist Louise Slater has made a very sensitive tool, but it's so much more than the technology, it's not a technology-first project, its technology is kind of like I was talking about the beginning as an enabler of what we're trying to do. And you know, what our community is trying to do. So kind of, again, getting away from that feeling of excitement that comes simply from the technology and saying, you know, that is just the kind of way to facilitate this other bigger project.
KERRY MACKERETH:
That's really fascinating. Thank you both for sharing that. And I'm for our listeners actually involved on the project team for EER but it's a real privilege to get to sit and chat with you both and hear about all those intentional choices that were made throughout the entire project. And that's something we think about a lot Eleanor nice feminist scholars in this area - yes Mónica
MÓNICA MORENO FIGUEROA:
I just want to add something to what Ella said that we are really interested, as you can see, in the process, that it is a kind process. And that is - we're very clear with the people that participate that we're not going to follow your case all the way until you go into a demand into a claim, we're not an official reporting space. But we are a sort of a solidarity project that is very concerned with making you feel your experience matters. And helping the process of you doing that to be in a way you know, embracing you, holding you through that process of just being with others, thinking about it, breaking it down, put it in paper, you get a copy at the end, you know, a PDF that you can then use as a base, if you want to continue doing something with it, or you just had a moment to express it to put it out there, you know, to communicate it to not leave… I mean, I think the worst thing that happens is that we leave many of the things alone, you know, many of these experiences and not only of racism, of sexism, of abuse, of mistreatment, more broadly, we do it alone, usually people don't stay, they find it hard. And this is … it's weird that we're saying that technology mediates that aloneness. But I think the way we want to do it is precisely that. Yes, that it can do it, you know that in the way that technology is not standing on its own. It's not a thing that exists on its own, you know, we are people behind … and like using this tool just to get to you, in a way to hold people and say you can do this. And look these are the questions we're asking you because we know these are important aspects of what you live. And we don't want you to do it alone, you know, so some people might come to the pizza lunches. But throughout the process is like a lot of care, you know, a lot of care of thinking, how can you cope with these things, no witnesses and people that have suffered?
KERRY MACKERETH:
Absolutely, that’s so wonderful to hear about how much care is put into all these different aspects of the process, because I think something which is really apparent from a lot of data collection is not very much care as often put into it. And you know, we talk about this with Kevin Guyan, the author of Queer Data, it looks a lot at how various forms of data collection had been used against queer communities but also trying to look at what inclusive data design data collection and design might look like. Also, for our listeners with Priya Goswami, we talked to her about the feminist design processes she's engaged in and making her app Mumkin. So we highly encourage you to check both of those out as well. But coming back to this question of unkind data collection, one of the issues that I think you highlight really well when it comes to anti-racism at the university, is that institutions will often systematically deny the existence of racism, they'll be like, no that's not something that happens here. At the same time, they'll also be like, well collect more data like we need to, you know, be able to have the data Before we can act on anything. And so this is something we've also discussed with Kevin, which is like, to what extent does collecting data then become like the end in itself for places like the University? And so how do you negotiate that tension between needing data in order to make these kinds of meaningful changes, while also recognising that like, sometimes in these institutions, data collection is used as a distraction, or it's used to impede the kinds of changes that you're trying so hard to bring about?
ELLA MCPHERSON:
Well, one, one thing, one concept that Mónica and I have talked about quite a bit, that Mónica brought to this project is Ruha Benjamin's idea of the datafication of injustice and that exact thing of like, we cannot be distracted by just collecting data on everyday racism, more and more and more and more data. And so, at the same time, the data does things right, you know, the findings that Mónica went through, I mean, they're shocking, and they're devastating. And so the data moves people. And so that, I think, I mean, Mónica, tell me if you feel differently, but I think, like the project’s sense is that the data, we have to keep collecting the data, it is helpful for having regular reports on what the situation of everyday racism is like in the community, but also that we have to keep another very strong kind of spirit focus on the process, like Mónica was saying: how do we unfold all of these ways to make this kind of testimony and witnessing, and to make space for it to make space for conversations about everyday racism, to share our approach with other projects. We're starting to talk with other institutions, and other kinds of data justice projects about these different kinds of methodologies and approaches. So we keep it very, like I would say, at least an equal focus on that part, along with the data.
MÓNICA MORENO FIGUEROA:
Yeah, I mean, the other important aspect is that we want these data to be used by the grassroots organisations of the university, so that they can mobilise it for anything that they are using and asking for or developing, to know that that data is already collected, trustworthy, and with a good intention, you know, of, and ready in a way for them. And I think that is also very important to keep the community together to kind of feel like the data that we are collecting, or that we're inviting people to participate in is not just to have more and more and more, per se, but it is, first because it's a process that we know people are going to have these experiences. I hope that less and less, but at least now I think it's going to increase actually. So I'm kind of on the lookout about how the political situation in the UK changes that we're facing might actually increase this phenomenon or this problem. And so on the one hand, we want to give that approach, we want to give that space for people in the university. And also we just want to keep making the point. I mean, I think we could stop at 117 reports. And then we can compare them with other moments or other institutions and just see, oh, the same things happen. But more than that, it’s a way of keeping the pressure of how much the initiatives in the university are actually working. And how much are we renewing ourselves? I mean, the problem with universities is that people change a lot, you know, students go start again, staff as well. So there's somewhere where continuity is very easily lost. So I was thinking, wouldn't it be great and usually because many of these initiatives have been done by students. So once the students go, these things flatten and they leave. And with Ella we thought wouldn't it be great that the years we work in this institution, we maintain this project as something ongoing, something that is a testimony that then, you know, hopefully, this amount of years will have a better impact in terms of a memory, you know, a collective memory? At the moment I just visited Chile and I’m in Argentina. And the stories about memory have really come so strongly, you know that the memory of the dictatorship and how people really keep that in, they make museums and they make spaces and they like you cannot forget the mistreatment you know that the I mean, the level of mistreatment here is horrific, horrific, but it's still mistreatment and what happens to people that are destroyed in the humanity because of racism is also horrific.
ELEANOR DRAGE:
I have so many more questions to ask, and this conversation could go in lots of different directions, but I know you have to go very soon. So thank you so much, both of you for coming to speak with us today. And it would be great if you could just say in one or two minutes how people can get involved both inside and outside the university. And we'll put lots of information in our reading list and attached to this episode as well.
ELLA MCPHERSON:
Great, so it's been a real pleasure speaking with you both. And as always catching up with you, Mónica. And I would be really delighted if your listeners wanted to be involved in one way or another. So they can go to our website, which is racism@cambridge.org. And that is where if you're a member of the Cambridge community, you can enter a testimony. We would encourage people to enter testimonies, not just, you know, testimonies about having experience racism directly themselves, but also entering it on behalf of someone else, like a friend, or if you were a bystander to a racist incident, you know, those, we need to gather all these kinds of testimonies. Also, we are moving towards a model of partnership with other institutions. So if anyone's listening from another institution, please get in touch with the project to the website, if you're interested in having an ER locally that can be tailored to your community.
MÓNICA MORENO FIGUEROA:
I would also say that we always need help any people that want to get involved in supporting the project as in, you know, talking to people encouraging, helping us lead the pizza lunches or the gatherings imagining new ways to push for our campaign, you know, our social media, I mean, we always need help. We're always gathering bits of funds here and there. So, you know, we try and so too, we have some resources for setting these events and doing these things. And we're always trying to get people involved. So anybody's welcome. You know, anybody can suggest approaches, just send us an email and say, you know, can I, you know, be part of anything of EER and we will get you involved?
ELEANOR DRAGE:
Brilliant, thank you. And I can second that witnessing is really easy. So it doesn't take very long at all. So it's been set up really beautifully. It's a great site, and I can't recommend it enough. Thank you so much for speaking with us today and see you both very soon in person, I hope.
ELLA MCPHERSON:
Thank you so much.
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