About Cassandra Decker

Author, Researcher, Activist

My Story

Cassandra Decker, M.A., is an academically trained, ethnographic researcher with advanced degrees in English, Spanish, Political Science, and Applied Anthropology with a cultural and economic track. She’s a passionate and community-engaged researcher and program developer who has served the Tampa Bay are for over 9 years.

Book Recommendations

Scarcity:Why Having Too Little Means So Much

In this provocative book based on cutting-edge research, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that scarcity creates a distinct psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need.

Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town

Environmental racism has become the rallying cry for whole communities – African American, urban, and poor – as they discover that they are contaminated by toxic chemicals and industrial waste. Melissa Checker tells the story of one such neighborhood, Hyde Park, in Augusta, Georgia, and the tenacious activism of its two hundred African American families. 

Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity

In Freedom of Expression®, Kembrew McLeod gathers topics as diverse as hip-hop music and digital sampling, the patenting of seeds and human genes, folk and blues music, visual collage art, electronic voting, the Internet and computer software. In doing so, he connects this rapidly accelerating push to pin down everything as a piece of private property to its effects on music, art and science.

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Is that what they call a vocation,
what 
you do with joy as if you had fire in your heart, the devil in your body?

– Josephine Baker