Skype on our final project!

source

During our last lesson in the lab we (Group 1) did Skype with Chiara Olivi, an 18-year-old student from Dickinson college, who is collaborating with us in our wiki project. It was the first time I did Skype and it was really an amazing experience!! I never talked with Chiara before and I appreciated the fact that she is very interested in our language and in knowing more about our culture! :-) In our Skype conference we discussed the topics we'd like to talk about in our final project, but we realized that they were actually very different from each other... I must admit it was quite hard to find a common topic!

We started discussing Elena’s topic: she talked about abortion, focusing on the current debate which is now taking place in Italy. She said she'd to compare the related laws and the methods of abortion allowed in Italy and in the U.S.: Chiara really liked Elena’s suggestion and she said she would like to talk about the influence of religion on the woman’s right to decide. Moreover, Chiara would like to do some research on a particular aspect of this topic, i.e. on whether health care in the US covers abortion as well as on the widespread lack of information about contraceptive methods, which actually affects the public education system of the two countries.

Then, Elisa talked about her topic, i.e. the importance of music as an expression of multi-ethnic identities and how it could be related with the issue of immigration. I was interested in immigration as well: I talked about the difficulties that skilled immigrants encounter at work and I said I’d like to compare their condition in the two countries. Chiara suggested that we can discuss the situation of Latin Americans, in particular Mexicans, who represent the majority of the immigrants in the U.S.

Finally, Silvia Lovato discussed women’s discrimination at work, in particular in the world of politics: she’d like to talk about ‘quote rosa’ and whether this measure actually promotes women’s career. Chiara appreciated this topic a lot and said that as regards politics the situation in the US is very similar to ours: male candidates constitute the overwhelming majority in the US government with the result that women don’t have equal opportunities in asserting their political platforms.

As our topics differ a lot from each other, we eventually decided to talk about women’s issue; however, since it was too general, we chose to analyze the condition of women at work. In our opinion, it can be subdivided into 5 subtopics, so that each one of us can deal with a specific aspect. So, Elena is going to discuss the condition of stay-at-home mums vs. working mothers; Elisa is going to talk about working mother’s rights; Silvia Lovato is going to discuss women in politics; I’m going to deal with the condition of immigrant women.