Sappho Road

Fully functional since January 2019, the center serves as a safe space where female victims of violence can access legal counseling, psychological support and other services. The center also organizes discussion groups and fundamental awareness-raising on women’s rights in local communities.

About: Sonja Agustsdottir is an Icelandic women’s rights advocate with a background in law, human rights and gender studies. She holds an LLM from University College London and a diploma in Applied Gender Studies from the University of Iceland. For the past four years she has been working in international human rights cooperation with the Secretariat of the Council of Europe and later as Iceland’s Representative to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Sonja is currently a project officer in the children’s rights division of the Council of Europe.

About: Constance and Sheila both attended Douglass College (Rutgers University) in the 1960s and have been friends and working partners ever since. With degrees in linguistics, they both have had long teaching careers at Sciences Po. Their publications include English grammar books (e.g., My English Is French), a Disney video series for French children (Magic English), the American politics explainer Focus on American Democracy, and several French cookbooks on American food. All along, they have been translating from French to English: social science, art, and feminist writings. Their major and life-changing work is the translation into English of Le deuxième sexe, by Simone de Beauvoir.

About: Mélissa has been with Samuel Hall’s Children & Youth Pillar since January 2018. She pursued a masters in International Relations at Sciences Po Lyon and a masters in International Law at Paris II Panthéon-Assas School of Law, before obtaining a scholarship to complete her LLM in International Law at Fordham School of Law. Based in Kabul, she conducts research on child returnees from Europe and the implications in term of child protection and legal obligations, and on girls’ education.

About: Claire Pryde is an Anglo-Franco international broadcast journalist who got her start in Australia, where she worked for the ABC, the country’s leading source of information. She then reported for Reuters in London and is now a senior anchor for France 24 and cover presenter for The 51 Percent, an award-winning show about about women who are reshaping our world. As executive producer of news bulletins of their Spanish channel, Claire often travels to Colombia where she also trains the next generation of multimedia journalists.

The workshop entailed:

• introducing the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies: what they are, what they are not, which are the best known, what are the main differences that distinguish one from another and how they work;
• outlining critical security practices;
• demonstrating different storage methods: software wallets, hardware wallets, paper wallets, online wallets and exchanges;
• installing a crypto wallet on each smartphone, sending and receiving small amounts of bitcoin and viewing all these transactions live on a block explorer;
• answering the many, many questions as they arose during this session.

Jo’s work is based in photography though not limited by its conventional expressions, but is rather directed toward various forms of cameraless photography. She has, for example, created striking visual pieces using photo receptive techniques with uranium, a method first introduced in the 1800s, and part of her recent installations have included glass itself made from uranium, which produces an ominous, green glowing effect. Beyond the art itself, Jo’s exploration of the uranium mines and getting her hands physically on Marie Curie’s notebooks in Paris are themselves part of the creative engagement, where the process of actualizing a project is just as pertinent, highlighting other aspects of the human experience including perception, communication, access and education.

To learn more about Jo’s work, please visit her website, Jo Yarrington. For more on the Utah uranium mines, please visit Wise Uranium and Uranium Watch, and contact Jo directly for the latest on her collaborative research on the subject. Other contributors to the uranium mines project include Morgan Post, also of Fairfield University, Reid Elem, David Carter, Julie Olster, and Byron Howard of Utah Valley University, Hakim Sol of Long Island University, and cinematographers Nick Russel and Charles Witherspoon.

Along with poet Kim Bridford, Jo was also part of the collaborative exhibition in Paris entitled “Handwriting the Constitution”, a global initiative by artist Morgan O’Hara. Jo and Kim hand-copied the French and US Constitutions at Café de Flore and Shakespeare and Company in Paris. They had pens and paper and copies of the constitutions to share.

To find out more:
Handwriting the Constitution.
NY Times: The Constitution, by Hand.

How can this happen? There are several major determining factors including: demographic growth, growing demand for water, pollution and climate change. Moreover, if we look at water consumption on a global level, 70% goes to agriculture, 22% to industry and 8% to domestic use.

Marie-Laure indicated that there are two important levels at which the Global Water Crisis needs to be addressed: providing sanitation and safe drinking water worldwide, and establishing equitable and sustainable development goals. As ratified by the UN resolution of 2010, everyone has the right to water and sanitation, which is not currently a reality. What can we do, and what does Green Cross do? Promote awareness, engage politically, fundraise, consider your water footprint.

International Green Cross

Driven by the powerful and painful link between them, Danika has tirelessly worked to provide aid and guidance to refugees arriving in France, helping them find their way to available services and ultimately to integrate into French culture and life. “Refugees are coming, they are running from death and destruction. Nothing will stop them. It is up to all of us to take this task and create a future, create the society that will prosper together, that will include all; that will lead to economic wealth and cultural progress. By helping refugees, we are investing in our future, in our civilization.” Watch her full TEDxIHEParis talk here “Beyond our limits”.

Her own experiences as a refugee of the former Yugoslavia made her instinctively active in helping those currently in crisis in Paris. Beyond her own commitments to her family and career, Danika is on the ground tirelessly connecting with refugees and NGO’s on a daily basis while also bringing awareness to the public at large of the very real consequences that refugee crises have in our world today.

She suggests that we reimagine the negativity, segregation and horrific maltreatment that persists. Refugees are a part of our future, and more steps need to be taken both to integrate them and to educate the public about the positive impact of such integration (and what we can do to support it). Speaking to us about the roles we can play apart from making monetary or physical donations, Danika explained how human contact makes a tremendous difference both in the practical lives of refugees and in their personal lives and self-image. Examples included using language skills to help someone set up a bank account or visit a doctor and computer skills to help minors with digital literacy.

At the request of the group, Danika has provided a basic guide to aiding refugees locally in Paris. You can find that document here: Guide to aiding refugees in Paris.

Tamara first pointed out the differences between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and between the Ether / Ethereum Network and Bitcoin, then she discussed the different storage methods and their relative trade-offs (paper wallets, hardware wallets, mobile/desktop wallets, online/exchange wallets), made recommendations for the best mobile and desktop wallets, demonstrated using a hardware wallet, and reiterated the singular importance of crypto private key security (“Not your keys, not your coins.”). Tamara also showed us how to use Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain explorers (a tool that provides information about crypto currency blocks, addresses, and transactions) and live purchased Cryptokitties, a blockchain-based virtual game and marketplace, to illustrate the concept of non-fungible tokens (NFT) (unique, collectible tokens) and to demonstrate how to transact on the Ethereum network (using MetaMask, a plug-in to transact on the Ethereum blockchain via web browser).

Going into detail on a handful of examples Tamara seamlessly guided us, an inquisitive collective of non-experts, through this unfamiliar landscape. Concluding with a short history of Bitcoin —the first of its class— the significance of the secret message embedded in its very first block —the genesis block— and how it and other cryptocurrencies may impact central banking as we know it today. Ensuing discussions moved from contemplating the non-material quality of the entire system to reacting to the very material environmental impact of blockchain “mining” versus the alternatives and, finally, the idea of a hands-on workshop to deepen our understanding of crypto through first-hand experience.

Our ensuing discussions moved from the global impacts of sea levels rising, to individual and “professional” carbon footprints and how to decrease those, to the influence and interest of the public and private sectors in repairing the planet. Marissa shared this research in a fluid and welcoming format that had us listening, then asking, sharing, debating and proposing in all different manners right from the start. It was a full evening that offered another well-received and entirely unique experience at the Sappho Road knowledge exchange.

We learned about strategic essentialism, phallic thinking, genderlect, écriture feminine and intersectionality—all part of the philosophical and theoretical background of so much that is happening on the ground today in the “real world.” Lively ensuing discussions included fashion and feminism, queer culture and the continued controversy of “gay marriage,” and the use of PGP’s (“preferred gender pronouns”) on college campuses and among woke families. It was fantastic to have a presentation where we could exercise and expand our awareness, knowledge and critical thinking skills on these issues of feminism at large, entirely fundamental to the mission of Sappho Road.

Her site L’Afro is dedicated to bringing the presence of Franco-African women to the “mainstream,” inspired by the ambitious journalists of the past and present and their desire to interact with diverse peoples and to share their stories far and wide. Adiaratou’s presentation and the lively exchanges of the rest of the evening compel us to incorporate what we’ve learned more broadly and confidently into the other avenues of our lives.

Led by her theory of “The Social Valley” of French entrepreneurship vs. “The Silicon Valley” of American, we also engaged in wide-reaching and stimulating discussions on the politics, philosophy and cultural implications befitting that distinction.

Claire also gave us a complete rundown on the current ambitious design of her eco-responsible farm in Normandy using transfarming techniques. The flipside of Claire’s talk focused on changing careers mid-life, as she has just gone from advertising executive to farmer!