Posts by Culturally Enriched Communities

July 20, 2022 Dear Cultural Enrichers, Today marks 48 years since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus that catapulted 1 in 3 residents of the island into life as refugees, my family included. Data from the UN Refugee Agency show that in 2021, 89.3 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes.…

Images of how the van Gabby Petito shared with her fiancé Brian Laundrie looked beforeand during the emergency stop.Image credit: https://www.the-sun.com/news/3702224/bodycam-chaos-gabby-petito-van-brian-laundrie/ Nov. 5, 2021 Dear Cultural Enrichers, Gabby Petito shared her struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) when police officers responded to the emergency call, a few weeks before her body was found in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National…

June 2, 2021 Dear colleagues, As summer is an opportunity to pause and reflect, I want to share Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” with you. The poem builds on Odysseus’ epic journey home to Ithaka after the Trojan war, made legendary by Homer’s “The Odyssey.” The poem’s power comes from the message that the journey matters as much as the destination.  Many…

May 12, 2021 Dear colleagues, Do you ever think about who washes the dishes in your favorite restaurant and why? What about who picks the strawberries you buy? Migrant workers are instrumental to the developing world’s economic growth. At the same time, their earnings transform lives back in their homeland. And yet, migrant workers have been disproportionately…

April 14, 2021 Dear colleagues,  Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner and faculty in my alma mater Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in his book The Sciences of the Artificial (1982, p.129): “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”Simon propels us to shift our attention from “design” to “designers,” asking us to…

March 25, 2021 Dear colleagues,  Today marks 200 years since Greek independence from Ottoman rule. The Greek revolution (1821-1830) followed 400 years of hardship, taxation, intellectual drain, family separations, and societal divide. As we pave the way for building communities in which everyone can thrive, what can we learn from the Greeks’ fight for freedom?…

March 3, 2021 Dear colleagues,Through the end of 2020, Stop AAPI Hate counted over 2,800 firsthand reports of anti-Asian hate crimes across 47 states and DC since the pandemic took a global hold. These included physical assaults, verbal harassment, and being purposely coughed or spat on and were directed toward children, adults, and elders. “We need to talk about…

Feb. 4, 2021 Dear colleagues,  Cleaning out all the boxes my mother has been saving since my elementary school years took much of my December break. That is how I discovered this photograph from the 1980s, when I was an architecture student at Carnegie Mellon University. Taken long before the selfies’ era, it reminded me…

January 26, 2021 Dear colleagues,   I am excited to share that Landscapes of Hope is now a searchable map! Landscapes of Hope is a collection of over 200 stories from buildings and places in the Twin Cities where protests occurred following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The stories elaborate on how the design of…