Hello,
My name is Georges Casimir. My interest in Social Psychology is to create media that help people connect across cultures with a sense of appreciation, understanding, and celebration.
Although my Haitian-born parents were married and lived in Mexico City, I was born in Haiti. My father is a Sociologist and my mother is a retired social worker. The first year of my life was in what is now known as Zaire, a fact which has always made me feel connected to its continent. We since lived in Brazil, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. To help keep a constant in our lives, our parents enrolled my sister and me in French-instructed schools overseen by the Alliance Française based in Paris. The latter, along with our Haitian-based upbringing, served as a contrasting background to the various cultures that we were exposed to.
In college, I studied Mechanical Engineering and Environmental Science, and in graduate school I obtained an M.S. in Applied Science with a concentration in Robotics. The university environment offered many lectures and seminars on African culture and history that left me questioning why was it that I never came across this information? And I wondered how much more there was about other cultures that not included in mainstream education and media. It was then that the seed was planted to create and distribute media featuring different cultures of the world. For years this idea remained a side project while in my professional career I managed and project managed teams of technical professionals in Scotland, France, Singapore, India, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Mexico. As an entrepreneur I co-founded a Media and Technology company.
It became evident that despite the speed and magnitude at which technology evolved, some social groups kept benefitting more than others. The answer as to why I found looking back at an early side project in which friends and I co-created cross-cultural communication workshops based on the examination of our mental filters, our biases. The search for how to make inroads into providing everyone with access to the quality of life benefits resulting from technological advancements has led me to the field of Social Psychology.