I spent most of the week at home attending two events located (or that would have been located) in Chicago.
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Computing was held virtually for a second year in a row, and I was lucky to be able to secure funding from the conference as a Faculty Scholar. Although it is a bit of a pain to access, I love this event, the chance to get together with other women in technology, and the wealth of learning it always provides.
The program was more pared down than previous in-person versions I’ve attended, but there is a wealth of on-demand content that I intend to make time to access over the following months. And I still managed to connect to people, despite the obvious challenges of hosting a large virtual conference.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Dare To,” and the program definitely had sessions which challenged attendees to dare more, in their careers and as allies. The sessions which resonated more strongly for me certainly had an activist bent. With great power, etc.
Some personal highlights:
- Numerous sessions intended to help provide “local flavour” to the conference.
- The poet Cleo Wade talking about pausing versus stopping, and the importance of deliberate planning. So much wisdom in what was a relatively short discussion.
- Multiple keynote speakers on Wednesday calling out large organizations for their performative nods to diversity and inclusion which do not reflect their internal actions or culture. This is so important to reflect and act upon, as we marked the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada.
- Repeated calls to reflect upon our own personal privilege, and to use the power this imparts for good. This seems obvious, but everybody needs a reminder from time to time.
- An extremely useful session by journalist and communications skills expert Alina Jenkins on body language cues that can be used to project presence, even virtually. I used some of this advice later in the day as…
Now pretend I frantically packed my stuff, rolled it and myself away from downtown, a couple of stops down the train to the University of Chicago.
The last two days of the week I spent at the 3rd Annual Symposium on Applications of Contextual Integrity (CI Symposium 2021), to present a position paper, engage in thoughtful discussion, and meet like-minded researchers. Mission accomplished?
As a bonus, this event was dedicated to making itself approachable for all, whether you were attending in-person or remotely. I though the breakout rooms and the side-channel chats on both Zoom and the research community’s Slack workspace provided many opportunities to feel connected.
This was an excellent opportunity to make contact with other scholars engaged in tackling the same kinds of problems as I have in my research. Although I haven’t had much opportunity to take up my research post-defense (Hi, worldwide pandemic and teaching-track appointment), I’m very much inspired to continue working on a couple of projects now:
- continue to grapple with privacy issues for undergraduate students. There is a lot we don’t understand about how on-campus (we need a new term for this in a virtual/remote world. At-university? Institutionally mediated?) data collection impacts the privacy of students (and other members of the university community).
- consider how to best teach data ethics in my own local environment (or help other people work on teaching it in theirs)
- papers, so many papers I could be reading…
This week was a refreshing change from what has become my everyday routine. It’s the first time I’ve had to intensively engage with communities outside of the University of Calgary for a bit, and reminds me how important the ability to get “out there” is.
