Project News

In 2013 Project Humanities, led by Neal Lester, an English professor at ASU and the founding director of the organization, launched the first Hacks for Humanity hackathon. During the annual, 36-hour event, people from all occupational backgrounds team up to create a tech product for social good. Oct. 19–20, Project Humanities will be hosting their sixth hackathon.

Google tells us many search to learn whether the costume their child wants to wear might be racist or insensitive. Many of us moms and dads grew up wearing Native American head dresses and Geisha garb and didn't hear boo about it. Sadly.

Ahwatukee Professor Neal Lester’s Project Humanities at Arizona State University will host its sixth annual Hacks for Humanity hackathon Oct. 19-20. Hacks for Humanity is a 36-hour creativity and innovation event for people of all ages and professions who create technologies that address local and global issues. The finished products must embody these seven principles that Project Humanities identifies as Humanity 101: kindness, compassion, integrity, respect, empathy, forgiveness, and self-reflection. 

Food is not only a staple of life, but a staple of one’s own identity; that’s the idea behind an Arizona State University engagement program designed to examine and discuss how foods define us.

Mention the word “hackathon,” and the people who don’t look puzzled probably think of a group of geeks locked in a room, huddling over computers and working on codes. But Neal Lester, foundation professor of English at Arizona State University, has something a lot different from that going on with his fourth annual Hacks for Humanity scheduled Oct. 6-7.

Project Humanities at Arizona State University will host its sixth annual Hacks for Humanity hackathon on Saturday and Sunday, October 19-20, 2019. Hacks for Humanity is a 36-hour creativity and innovation event that challenges intergenerational and multi-professional participants to create technologies that address local and global issues.

Serving abroad for the Peace Corps. Pledging money to sponsor clean drinking water in developing countries. Working an election booth to ensure fairness. All of these are prime examples of showing humanity. Unfortunately, there is no shared language to define human rights.

First Institutional Baptist Church in partnership with various community organizations will host Arizona’s Commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of Enslaved Africans Brought to North America at a Festival Event on Tuesday, August 20, 2019. This event will bring together Africans, African- Americans and others from across the state to remember, reflect, respond and recover from the inhumane systemic racism that spanned from Africa to North America, while bridging the African Diaspora, moving into the next century with determination and deliverance.

Having a seat at the table takes on a whole new meaning for me when I was sitting next to author Toni Morrison. Thanks to poet friend Nikki Giovanni – a literary giant in her own right – I was invited to attend a celebration of Morrison soon after the untimely death of Morrison’s son.

With a literary oeuvre that includes 11 novels, several children’s books, plays, and even an opera, Toni Morrison long has been revered as one of the most accomplished and impactful writers in American literature. The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author died this week on Aug. 5, 2019, at the age of 88.

Over her six-decade career, Morrison cast light on the complexities of black American life through historical and contemporary contexts that chronicled the joys and anguishes of flawed narrators and characters in novels such as “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon,” “The Bluest Eye,” “Jazz,” “Love” and “Home.”

ASU Now asked several professors at Arizona State University to reflect on the authorship and scholarship of Morrison and weigh in on the impact of her popular, and controversial, body of work.