Dear fellow scholars and community members,

We write this statement of solidarity, denouncing the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota and the ongoing oppression of Black Americans.

D-Lab mourns with millions across the country over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many other Black people killed at the hands of police. We denounce these horrendous events that are indicative of the systemic racism that is built into the fabric of our society and government. We call for the demilitarization of institutions of higher learning and defunding traditional policing. We support all those who are calling attention to and fighting against these injustices. We decry efforts to suppress the right to speak and protest and we seek to hear Black voices.

D-Lab is committed to justice, inclusion, and equity. Our values do not start nor end in the classroom. Equity means that we need to work towards restitution and compensation for a legacy of slavery, abuse, and violence. We are also committed to leveraging our academic research to promote these values. This includes our work on measuring hate speech. With our work, we are actively creating knowledge and tools to protect marginalized communities, so that we can preserve bedrock democratic values such as  freedom of speech, political speech, and counterspeech. 

Sincerely,

The D-Lab Community

 

Resources:

Message to DSEP Students- Black Solidarity Resources

Anti-Racist Actions, Learning, and Engagement Resources

 
Author: 

Claudia von Vacano

Dr. Claudia von Vacano is the Social Sciences D-Lab and Digital Humanities Executive Director. She is deeply committed to supporting the success of marginalized students including women, racial/ethnic minorities, first-generation college-going, and speakers of English as a second, and she has worked extensively with these groups at various stages of the educational pipeline. Dr. von Vacano has created outreach and intervention strategies through the UC Office of the President and she is currently the program director of a $3 million NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) initiative under the leadership of Faculty Director David J. Harding and with cross-university governance including the Associate Provost of Data Science and Information and Dean of the Information School, in the Computing, Data Science, and Society Division. She is the P.I. of measuring hate speech research project with the financial support of Google Jigsaw and BIDS—that employs IRT and Deep Learning. She is also co-PI with Karen Chapple, City Planning Chair, College of Environmental Design of a Chan Zuckerburg Initiative grant to provide professional development for housing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each year through the D-Lab and Digital Humanities at Berkeley, Dr. von Vacano oversees programs including 300 computational and data-intensive workshops and 1,400 consultations. She co-developed the core curriculum for the Digital Humanities Summer-only Minor and Certificate program at UC Berkeley. She is the lead online course developer of the SAGE Campus, “Introduction to Applied Data Science Methods for Social Scientists.”