Human Library 2021

Hello! I grew up in Alaska and was inspired to become a dog musher when I was 6 years old. I was the youngest competitor at age 14 in the Jr Iditarod. Come hear more about dog mushing, Alaska, and my story.

The day in the life of a museum professional is a dynamic one. We care for our collection, make complex decisions about acquiring new pieces, and are constantly looking for new narratives for the artworks on the walls. How we talk about art and collecting is evolving to be more inclusive and transparent- museums can be impactful and are anything but neutral.

I was born in Akron and experienced, first-hand, the end-game drama of bold letter headlines from the Akron Beacon Journal announcing some negotiation, union decree, strikes, loss and layoff. Tire production in the so-called “Rubber City” declined precipitously in the 1970s and by 1983 Akron had lost all of its tire operations. Goodyear, Firestone, and Goodrich—the industrial backbone of this community for over half a century—closed all of their factories. Gone over the course of a decade was a vibrant union culture and a half-century tradition of having produced up to two thirds of all tires made in the U.S. That which was most solid (the assembly lines, the jobs, the social safety net) melted into air even as a different kind of spirit materialized. Let's talk about that spirit too--

I lived in Bangkok, Thailand and Kyoto, Japan in the early 1990's as part of the Princeton-in-Asia internship program. Happy to swap tales of overseas adventures with fps and students and to encourage students to check out the PiA post-grad program.

Have you ever wondered what is like to do search and rescue work? Come talk to me about it! Not only am I trained as a ground searcher, I also trained and worked a cadaver dog named Digby in the early 2000's. We worked drownings, forensic crime scenes, and missing person cases in both Indiana and Nova Scotia. In our 13 years, we helped recovery 7 individuals. I'd love to share the elation of finding someone alive and helping them recover from hypothermia as well as the overwhelming sadness of locating two teenage boys in a lake.

Science as a human enterprise has been responsible for both amazing technological advances and direct justification for scientific racism and inequality. When we are asked to 'trust the science' in our current policy debates, it is important to remember the historical legacy of the misuse of science to provide context.

I am a book in the form of building. My pages are the ruined stones burned by the Nazis in World War II and the Civil War that followed. I have many stories to tell, but I'm difficult to read. I am different than the two books written about me by the descendants of the families executed under my roof (Eleni 1984; North of Ithaka 2004).

After I graduated from the University of Michigan, I went to Honduras to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer. My project was in the health field, with a focus on child survival and HIV/AIDS education, in a very small town in the department of Santa Bárbara. During the more than two years I was in Central America, I learned so many lessons that I couldn’t have imagined when I applied to be a volunteer. My book is about daily life as a Peace Corps volunteer and what I learned about my host country, the world, and myself during those 27 months.

A World War II family saga between Italy, the Balkans, and Libya.

I was diagnosed with clinical depression in 1996. Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. Sometimes you have trouble doing normal day-to-day activities, and sometimes you may feel as if life isn't worth living. It has not taken over my life, however, and I’m happy to discuss what it is like living with depression for 25 years with all its downs and ups.

I was raised in a very white and conservative small town in Michigan. I attended an all-white religious school growing up and had little to no interaction with people of color, except the few families who were sponsored by my church to come to the United States from their respective countries. The way my community (both church and school) approached the rest of the world, especially those in "developing" countries, was with a white-centered and paternalistic lens: We considered ourselves "saviors" who had so much to teach the rest of the non-white world about our way of living (most importantly, how to achieve “eternal salvation”). No one ever considered the possibility that it could be the other way around. Eventually, after studying abroad in Ecuador and El Salvador, I settled on social work as a profession, no doubt as a result of my desire to "make the world a better place." As I look around, though, I see that much of my profession involves white females interacting with communities of color. The murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor left me pondering my role as a white social worker, and questioning whether my chosen profession is simply an extension of the same paternalistic community I was raised in. If it is, how do I come to terms with that, and how do we ensure social work as a profession (as well as other "helping" professions) evolve to rid itself of its white, paternalistic roots?