Join us for social time at I-Square. There's no agenda but we talk about everything League and have lots of political discussions. Many great ideas originate at First Fridays and a lot of work gets done. And we have a lot of fun. Come when you can, leave when you must. No need to register, just come!
Adam Shenxiong Li is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Simon Business School, University of Rochester. His research, supervised by Professor Huaxia Rui, focuses on misinformation on social media platforms and crowd-based fact-checking mechanisms. His work explores how online communities can be leveraged to identify and counter the spread of false information in digital environments.
Are you interested in working with young people to ensure they are registered and prepared to vote? While much of that activity will take place in the fall, the time for planning is now.
If you are interested in joining a team to develop and execute a plan for this work please join this initial 2026 planning session.
Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary.
With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family's encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father's deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother's heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor.
Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.
Presented by Sarah Burns, a fellow at the Quincy Institute and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rochester Institute of Technology.
She has written on war powers, American foreign policy, democratic peace theory, and elections. She will discuss common methods used to mislead the public and fact checking methods.
Join us for social time at I-Square. There's no agenda but we talk about everything League and have lots of political discussions. Many great ideas originate at First Fridays and a lot of work gets done. And we have a lot of fun. Come when you can, leave when you must. No need to register, just come!
When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary.