Skyping with Rocio...

Yesterday for the first time I talked with one of the Dickinson's students, Rachele. Well, I though that her name was Rachele, actually it is Rocio, so I started that weird conversation saying “Hi, Rachel” and her response was “Who is Rachel?”. It was definitely embarrassing for me, but I decided to laugh at it, together with the other members of my group. The rest of the conversation was, however, quite successful and interesting as well. We exchanged some basic information about us and we found out that she is Spanish and that she went to the United States to study, in other words she’s an Erasmus student. At the beginning I was convinced that she was born in the United States and that she probably had Spanish origins but clearly I was wrong. As there were three of us, I mean three members of my group out of four, we decided that we could all talk with her creating a conference, otherwise one of use had to go home. We spoke about immigration, discrimination and the topic of our final project as we were supposed to decide together with our American peer what issue we should develop in our Wiki page.

As far as immigration is concerned, she said that American people are really open minded, probably more open minded if compared to Spanish or Italian people, and that they are prepared and willing to accept people from other countries and belonging to very different cultures. She told us that when she arrived at the Dickinson College she was afraid not to be accepted or that the other students could be not very friendly, instead she found a lot of friends and did not feel like stranger. However some problems aroused discussing this particular topic: as far as I understood, she spend all the time within the campus of the college, so she confessed not to have a precise idea about immigration in the US and she said she could talk only about immigration in Spain or about what she noticed visiting New York. Here in Italy it’s quite different: students do not live in a campus, we live in the city and we do not form a sort of community; we live just like the other citizens and with the other citizens, so as a consequence we can have a better view of the problems related to immigration. This led us to the topic for our final project: as she lives primarily in the campus together with other students, we thought it could be a good idea to analyse the difference between life in an American college and life in a European university. As far as I am concerned, I’m really happy with this topic, really enthusiastic about it. I guess that living within a community of students is quite different from living in a big city so I am really curious to see what Rocio will tell us about it and I'm looking forward to creating our Wiki page.

Final Project: Women in Politics

When I heard we had to think about a cultural topic to develop for our final project I had not doubt: I would like to write about women in politics, in Italy and in the United States. Probably the fact of working on Us elections for so much time and contributing to the Wiki page fully dedicated to this issue has influenced me a lot. One of the Democratic candidates running for the office of President of the United States is in fact a woman, Hillary Clinton, and I guess this is the first time a woman gets so close to such a meaningful and high political position. I think that this is really amazing, I mean, the whole issue fascinated me a lot but at the same it made me wonder and a lot of questions suddenly came up to my mind. A President woman: could it ever be possible in Italy?
The embarrassing low presence of women in the Italian political scenery is a matter of fact: considering all European countries, Italy stands in the one of the latest places with only 10% of women in the government. On the contrary, it seems that in all Anglo-Saxon countries and particularly in the North of Europe, the percentage of women occupying leading positions in political institutions is very high, or at least their number is equal to that of men. In Italy the situation is rather sad: women seem not to be interested in politics, they don’t candidate and they usually don’t vote for other women. The government introduced the so-called “quote rosa” hoping to increase the number of women in Parliament trying to solve this problem but it seems to me that nothing really changed. My impression is that the world of politics still belongs to men and as a girl studying in a faculty where the number of girls is clearly predominant if compared to that of boys, in a University that is, as a far as I can see, mostly ruled by women, I really would like to see more women involved in politics. So, what I would like to do is try to analyse the problems that women still have to face with as voters and as candidates in the Us and in Italy and most of all to examine what are the social and cultural factors that prevent women from becoming important political leaders.
This week we were also expected to think about immigration in Italy and to do some on line research to gather information, so that we will be prepared to talk about it with the American students. So I just came back from surfing the Net looking for the latest data, statistics and news about it and I found some articles taken from “La Repubblica” stating that immigrants in our country are more or less 4 millions, 6.2 % of the Italian population, and that they mostly concentrate in the cities of Rome and Milan. They talk 150 different languages and they primarily come from Romania, Morocco and Albania. A recent statistic revealed that the relationship between the Italians and the immigrants is hard and contradictory: 48,5% of Italians still consider immigrants as the cause for the lack of jobs available for Italian people and the lack of public safety. Anyway, one Italian out of two see them as a meaningful resource: without them probably our country would collapse. Immigrants work, pay taxes, send their children to school, make Italy a multicultural country but they still cannot vote, or better they can do it only after they have acquired the Italian citizenship, that is to say after 10 years, isn’t it? I really think this is unfair: immigrants should vote and politicians should talk about them and the problems they are involved in while doing their electoral campaigns. No one instead mentioned them and this is really paradoxical. Anyway there are so many things to say about immigration in Italy, it is such a vast and appealing topic to talk about that a single post cannot be exhaustive. I will look for other information before Wednesday and I’m looking forward to hear what the Dickinson students think about it, what their point of view is and how they feel about immigration in their country.