Researchers Find Understanding and Embracing Intercultural Tensions and Differences in Teams Increases Information Elaboration and Creativity

“Teamwork makes the dream work.” It’s a popular phrase used to describe the merits of working in teams to get things done. When applied successfully, creating and collaborating with coworkers can produce results that surpass a single individual’s contribution. In the past, teams were mostly homogeneous because this was the makeup of most organizations in…

“Silence represents a theory of the Black man’s reality”

This beautifully written book argues that educators need to understand the social worlds and complex literacy practices of African American males in order to pay the increasing educational debt we owe all youth and break the school-to-prison pipeline. Moving portraits from the lives of six friends bring to life the structural characteristics and qualities of…

8 Strategies To Enhance Civil Discourse In A Divided World

by Marybeth Gasman, Ph.d All you have to do is spend a few minutes on social media and it becomes very obvious we have a hard time talking with each other when we disagree, especially during these volatile times. In our conversations, we often fail to listen to the nuance in arguments, we jump to…

An Exploration of Material Culture: A Case Study of Tranby National Indigenous Adult Education & Training

The following is an excerpt from the collection of critical essays from The Samuel Dewitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, and Justice by Le’Passion Darby, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign February 9, 2020. After a fifteen-hour outbound flight from Chicago, I had finally landed in Sydney, Australia. My objective? To observe, photograph, and record material culture…

Cohabitation rates, rights, and responsibilities

Relationship formation becomes more varied across the globe (Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) Boris Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, (lived) together as the first unmarried couple in No 10. Downing Street. But while cohabitation is celebrated in some parts of the world, it is not in many other parts. A Zimbabwean woman…

Seven extreme accounts dominate X, formerly known as Twitter

What we found was extraordinary. A small group of seven accounts, many unknown a year ago, were racking up hundreds of millions of views each day, out-performing standard news accounts by an order of magnitude and exercising significant influence on the discourse around the war. X’s owner, Elon Musk, had interacted with or explicitly recommended…

Trolling and doxxing: Graduate students sharing their research online speak out about hate

An increasingly volatile online environment is affecting our society, including members of the academic community and research they pursue. Graduate students are especially vulnerable to online hate, because cultivating a visible social media presence is considered essential for mobilizing their research, gaining credibility and finding opportunities as they prepare to compete in an over-saturated job market. Our research has examined the…

Hip Hop: A Culture of Vision and Voice

Hip hop is global, lapping on every shore and landing at every airport. But what does hip hop mean? Is it the music with a chest-thumping beat? The rapid-fire lyrics rapped into a handheld mic? Gravity-defying dance steps? Writers turning walls into canvases with larger-than-life letters and illustrations? The answer is all of the above—and more. Hip hop…