Dr. Fowler’s experiences as an applied statistician with using data in constitutional provisions interpretation, including sources such as traffic citations, police reports, Census data, & geolocation.
Dr. Fowler will share her experiences as a statistical expert witness in support of making United States Constitutional Provisions effective in Massachusetts. A series of racial profiling cases shows the development of this area of the law.
This session delves into racial performativity and profiling in digital platforms. It draws from Andre Brock's work on digital blackness, exploring the racially targeted Russian ads in the 2016 elections with the suppression of the Black Lives Matter movement. It highlights the role of platform leadership, such as the hate speech surge under Elon Musk's Twitter ownership. The session further scrutinizes the implications of racial profiling through digital platform design choices, like Mastodon's omission of Twitter's quote tweet feature. The discussion invites participants to consider how social media can both shape and reinforce racial discourse and biases.
"We the People.” Few American phrases are more famous—or more meaningful—than the opening three words of the Constitution. But who comprises that “we”? Who is included in, and who excluded from, the definition of that shared, first-person-plural community? On one foundational issue, that of religious freedom, the Constitution advances a strikingly inclusive definition of an American “we.” Article VI’s strong statement in opposition to “religious tests” for elected and government officials exemplifies the document’s overall commitment to religious liberty, one that was defended by the Constitution’s advocates at both the Constitutional Convention and the state legislature ratification debates. The Constitution likewise featured a more exclusionary element, in its definition of enslaved African Americans as 2/3rds of a person for purposes of representation. But it was one of the new nation’s first laws, the 1790 Naturalization Act, which truly exemplified this exclusionary vision of America. That act limited the possibility of gaining U.S. citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” who had been in the United States for two years. Examining these two documents and their contexts helps us understand how “we the people” was debated and constituted in the founding era, and how those contested inclusive and exclusionary definitions continue to shape our 21st century community.
How do historic and current boundaries influence neighborhoods? In this session, we will explore maps and examine spatial patterns to understand inequalities across communities. Attendees will have the opportunity to use the Mapping Inequality map to examine the history of redlining and the Opportunity Atlas website to understand how communities influence individuals’ opportunities.