Action on Education

Feb 27-28, 2015
Scholar and Feminist Conference
Barnard College

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Speakers include Ujju Aggarwal, Lalaie Ameeriar, Abigail Boggs, The Black Youth Project, Nuala Cabral, Natalia Cecire, Jaz Choi, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Kandice Chuh, Antonia Darder, Dána-Ain Davis, Ejeris Dixon, Tadashi Dozono, Melanie Duch, Rod Ferguson, Cindy Gao, Jamaica Gilmer, Dana Goldstein, Che Gossett, Karen Gregory, Zareena Grewal, Ileana Jiménez, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Bettina Love, Elizabeth Losh, Jessica Luther, Samantha Master, Jake McWilliams, Jennifer Nash, Vani Natarajan, Miriam Neptune, Emily Owens, Jessica Pierce, POC Zine Project, Maria Rivera Maulucci, Andrea Ritchie, Sarah Rodriguez, Amina Tawasil, JeNae’ Taylor, Michell Tollinchi-Michel, Cally Waite, Bianca Williams, Wazina Zondon, and more!

Barnard was founded 125 years ago with the feminist mission of providing education to those who were excluded from major avenues of education. In honor of this legacy and the 40th anniversary of BCRW’s signature Scholar & Feminist Conference, this year’s conference builds a feminist framework for understanding the institutional, social, and pedagogical facets of teaching, learning, and schooling. Scholars, activists, educators, and artists explore the K-12 landscape and investigate who can attain post-secondary education, under what circumstances, and at what cost. They discuss diverse feminist approaches to such topics as the Common Core standards, educational alternatives, the school-to-prison pipeline, adjunct labor, sexual violence on campus, and continuing racial and economic segregation within educational spaces. Full schedule available below.

This conference was made possible by generous funding from the Virginia C. Gildersleeve Fund from the Barnard College Provost’s Office.

Image courtesy of Pete Railand, justseeds.org.

Program

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Friday, February 27
9:30 AM
Registration

Lobby, The Diana Center
Breakfast will be provided.

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Welcome and Opening Presentations

Janet Jakobsen and Tressie McMillan Cottom
Event Oval, The Diana Center

  • The Octopus: Cognitive Capitalism and the University
    Natalia Cecire, Miriam Neptune, Nicci Yin

    It has often been remarked in recent years that we have entered a second Gilded Age of capitalist deregulation and socioeconomic inequality, with patterns of a hundred years ago repeating themselves. And while the rhetoric around the university is that it affords social mobility, as tuition and student debt have risen and affirmative action and need-blind admission have been revoked, it has become increasingly apparent that the university is an engine of that inequality and the many violences that attend it. This presentation uses visual art and documentary video to explore the university’s complicities with and resistances to power, focusing on the University of California system as a case study. By proposing images for figuring these complex dynamics, we hope to initiate a conversation about how to bring elusive and even immaterial relations into concrete form, and render them available to critique and action.

    Octopus website: http://sfoctop.us | Video on Youtube

  • Dreams of Feminist Education
    Tadashi Dozono, Ileana Jiménez, Cheyenne Tobias, Galiba Gofur, Mirwat Majumder

    Two teachers of color, both feminist and queer, will share their dreams for feminist education in schools. Moving from theory to action, Ileana and Tadashi work alongside their students using various feminisms such as women of color feminism, global feminism, trans-feminism and queer theory. Their pedagogical practices incorporate restorative and social justice, inspiring innovative curricula that are intersectional and interdisciplinary. In collaboration with Cheyenne Tobias, feminist artist and Ileana’s former student, Tadashi and Ileana will bring us on a visual journey through two different school contexts via the successes they’ve had and the challenges they face in bringing a feminist vision to their respective classrooms. Calling us to action through their own personal storytelling, Ileana and Tadashi will urge us to consider the role of feminism in schools and the role that schools play in feminism.

12:00 – 12:30 PM
Lunch pickup

Event Oval Lobby and 5th Floor Lobby, The Diana Center
Lunch will be provided.

12:30 – 2:00 PM
Workshops / Breakout Sessions 1
  1. Educational Access: Policy and Program Strategies
    Michell Tollinchi Michel and Melanie Kwon Duch
    Diana Center 504

    In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama detailed his plan to increase access to higher education through publicly funding community colleges. “Forty percent of our college students choose community college,” President Obama said. “Whoever you are, this plan is your chance to graduate ready for the new economy, without a load of debt.” President Obama’s proposal for free community college comes at a time of critical focus on the rising costs of educational attainment, especially for low-income students and students of color, and simultaneous divestment from public education by state and local governments. This interactive workshop will explore the meaning of educational access; the policies and programs meant to encourage educational access; and the role that educational institutions, the private sector, the government, and communities play in creating access. We will spend time examining several specific examples of innovative policies and programs that work to increase educational access, as well as brainstorming solutions and paths forward.

  2. Transformative Justice Approaches to Sexual Violence on Campus & Beyond
    Ejeris Dixon, Andrea Ritchie, BCRW Research Assistants
    Diana Center LL103

    In light of recent events across university campuses, this workshop is collaboratively organized and led by community organizers and BCRW Research Assistants to discuss transformative justice as a means to ending sexual violence both in and outside of the university setting.

  3. Radical Pedagogies in the ‘Neoliberal’ University
    Dána-Ain Davis, Jennifer Nash, Emily Owens
    Diana Center LL104

    This panel considers the ways that the ‘neoliberalization’ of the university shapes pedagogy, research, and students’ experiences of learning, with a particular focus on the day-to-day experience of scholars who labor in the “studies” (e.g. Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies). We also will collectively discuss our own strategies for developing and sustaining radical pedagogies in the context of the corporate university.

  4. Pedagogy, Precarity and Labor: Life Support System
    Liz Losh and Karen Gregory
    Diana Center 502

    Using Lois Weaver’s concept of the “Long Table,” this workshop will involve all participants in a conversation about the making “normal” of precarity and mapping the terrain of teaching in the University: training and recognition, valuing of labor, voices represented/silencing of voices in governance, free and emotional labor, organizing across campuses and interest groups. We will ask how we can bring an iterative practice to the design challenges of structural oppression, “re-mapping” the terrain of teaching. Where are our points of contact with one another? Where are our support links? Where are there “weaknesses” in the emerging economy of teaching that can be exploited? We contend that precarious teaching touches not only those who teach and those who learn, but extends to all invested in the mission of Higher Education, particularly the mission of public higher education. Therefore, we invite participants to draw from their own experiences and to consider what they might offer to those around them. In addition to our own support, what feminist technologies might we give rise to through our conversation that could become part of our support system? What do we need? What do we want? What can we create? We hope the the format of a dinner table encourages the opposite of formality, but rather the spirit of enjoying a good meal together. The discussion of precarity is too often coupled with a despair that obscures the resources and support we can share with one another, such as a meal, a good conversation, and visions of the future not limited to our current reality.

2:00 – 2:15 PM
Coffee Break

Event Oval Lobby, The Diana Center

2:15 – 3:45 PM
Workshops / Breakout Sessions 2
  1. Learning and Pedagogy: Strategies for Radical Honesty in the Classroom
    Jake McWilliams and Bianca Williams
    Diana Center 504

    In this workshop, we offer strategies for bringing radical honesty into the classroom in order to reformulate the educational alliance between teacher and students while building a community rooted in vulnerability and trust. “Radical honesty” is a concept that describes a pedagogical practice of truth-telling which seeks to challenge racist, patriarchal, and heteronormative institutional cultures in the academy. This practice emphasizes the significance of personal narratives, and opens a space for scholars and students to bring their “whole self” to the classroom, while openly discussing strategies for self-care and self-love.

  2. Beyond the Classroom: Multiple Spaces of Learning
    Lalaie Ameeriar, Jamaica Gilmer, Jaz Choi, Tami Navarro (moderator)
    Diana Center LL104

    Looking at education that occurs beyond the classroom, this roundtable looks at community centers, libraries, and flexible learning centers, exploring the ways students are variously positioned through, for instance, class and gender in ways that often limit their access to traditional sites of learning. Participants will speak to the significance of global power relations vis-à-vis education – in trade schools and apprenticeship programs in Canada, an arts-and-text based curriculum that works to broaden notions of beauty to include girls in the African diaspora in Durham, NC, and through humanistic approaches to design and youth social entrepreneurship in networked urban environments from Korea to sites across South America.

  3. Teaching for Social Justice in Science Education: Possibilities for NYC Schools
    Maria Rivera Maulucci and Felicia M. Mensah
    Diana Center 502

    Barnard Professor Maria Rivera Maulucci and Teachers College faculty Felicia M. Mesah will discuss their experiences with approaching science education in high-need NYC schools, providing strategies for teachers and all those interested in supporting STEM education, especially for women and girls.

  4. Freedom Schools: History & Future of Educational Alternatives for Justice
    Rod Ferguson, Vani Natarajan, Che Gossett
    Diana Center LL103

    This panel explores the freedom schools as a historical entity and as a model and inspiration for present-day political organizing and activism. To this end, the panel asks the following question: What role can/does the archive play in making movements sustainable across time and space and in the face of neoliberal reform? How was the original freedom school a model for democratic education and interventions into the forms of inequality around race and class generated by the U.S. government and by U.S. capital? How might we imagine the future of those interventions for communities differentiated not only by race and class but by gender, transgender, religion and ethnicity as well. In what ways did the freedom schools lay a foundation for thinking about the student as not a passive recipient of ideologies of race and nation but as critics who engage those ideologies as well as analyzing the workings of gender, sexuality, ability, and so on? How do we extend and at times appreciatively depart from the civil rights vision that occasioned the freedom schools? What has been gained and what has been lost through the formal institutionalization and financialization of Freedom School models?

4:00 – 5:15 PM
Plenary Panel: Visions for Action

Ujju Aggarwal, Kandice Chuh, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Dana Goldstein, Cally Waite
Event Oval, The Diana Center

At the end of the first day of the conference, we present a panel discussion to begin to synthesize the ideas and visions of the conference. We bring together educators, writers, historians and organizers to discuss how can can imagine action on education and begin to move forward.

Saturday, February 28
10:00 AM
Registration

Lobby, The Diana Center
Breakfast will be provided.

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Workshops / Breakout Sessions 3
  1. What Do We Want? When Do We Want It?: Activism on Campus
    Jessica Luther and Cindy Gao
    Diana Center LL103

    The passionate energy of campus activism can be difficult to maintain, especially given student turnover and graduation and the insularity of campus politics. In this session, we will work on developing short-term goals and articulating long-term visions for student activist campaigns, identifying what tools are most useful for connecting campus and community activism, and emphasizing proactive tactics to build longer lasting movements that are both sustainable and accountable to the community outside the campus gates. The session will end with a group discussion on strategies that address activist burnout, and how self-care is integral to movement sustainability.

  2. Teaching Intersectional Feminism and Ethnic Studies in K-12 Settings
    Nuala Cabral, José Gonzalez, Ileana Jiménez, Wazina Zondon, Bettina Love
    Diana Center LL104

    In this session, educators, activists, scholars and students will share best practices on teaching women’s, gender, queer, and ethnic studies as well as sex education in K-12 schools and contexts. Teacher-activists will share curriculum design and resources that participants can use that are based on an intersectional, feminist, and anti-racist pedagogy. This session will also include time to envision how to continue building the movement to bring social justice feminism and ethnic studies to K-12 schools nationally.

  3. Transnational Pedagogical Networks: Women’s Islamic Education
    Zareena Grewal, Amina Tawasil, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Lila Abu-Lughod (moderator)
    Diana Center 502

    This roundtable will focus on Islamic education, with particular emphasis on the role of history and the current role of the state in relationship to women’s education. Roundtable participants will discuss the use of girls’ education as the ostensible solution to issues as wide-ranging as poverty, human trafficking, and terrorism in the global south. They will explore moments of international media attention, from the 1979 Iranian revolution to the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in 2012 and the kidnapping of schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria in 2013, analyze the intersections of race and religion in American Muslim communities, and speak about transnational pedagogical networks that connect American mosques to the intellectual centers of the Middle East.

  4. Building Today’s Freedom School
    Rod Ferguson, Vani Natarajan, Che Gossett
    Diana Center 504

    This workshop will bring together the theme of the previous panel with current struggles extending the spirit and intention of the freedom school in our contemporary moment. The workshop aims to engage student activists in exploring questions, such as: What might the space of liberatory education look like—how does it, for instance, challenge spatial norms? How might the repurposing of space challenge the security apparatus of the university in the ways that space is reimagined? How is the space also created via movement-through-space? How can digital space constitute a site for today’s freedom school? How does today’s freedom school push for redistribution of resources, and what does this redistribution look like? How can/does activist scholarship challenge the colonization of knowledge/power and what is the role of the activist-academic in the freedom school movement? What are the various forms of unfreedom that students are organizing against today and how are these connected to history of freedom school and what are strategies for solidarity, joint struggle and support?

12:00 – 12:30 PM
Lunch pickup

Event Oval Lobby and 5th Floor Lobby, The Diana Center
Lunch will be provided.

12:30 – 2:00 PM
Day 2 Plenary Presentations

Event Oval, The Diana Center

  • Critical University Studies, Transnational Campuses, and International Students
    Abigail Boggs and Soo Ah Kwon
    This session engages the figuration of Asian and Middle Eastern international students on U.S. college and university campuses historically and in this contemporary moment. The papers utilize the insights of critical university studies and transnational feminism to examine the significance of incorporative logics and notions of “global diversity” in the current politics and policies of U.S. higher education.
  • Girls Behind Bars: Black Girls and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
    The Black Youth Project 100: Charlene Carruthers, JeNae’ Taylor, Jessica Pierce, Samantha Master
    Black girls are experiencing devastating rates of criminalization, expulsion, and suspension in schools across the United States, yet there is no national agenda to address the specific social and structural barriers that impact Black girls’ access to safe, affirming and holistic education. BYP100 will explore this issue and strategies to transform the lives of Black girls in the education system through grassroots organizing and community accountability.
2:00 – 2:30 PM
Coffee Break

Event Oval Lobby, The Diana Center

2:30 – 4:00 PM
Workshops / Breakout Sessions 4
  1. Access vs. Inequality
    Tressie McMillan Cottom, Pam Phillips
    Diana Center 504

    This participatory workshop will involve discussion around issues of who has access to higher education (and what types), the challenges and barriers, and how to expand opportunities vs the inequality in institutions of higher education. A few of the issues to discuss will be income barriers and college costs, as well as the quality of education at public vs. private institutions.

  2. A New Common Core: Unifying the Feminist and Anti-Privatization Movements
    Antonia Darder, José Gonzalez, Ileana Jiménez, Sarah Rodriguez
    Diana Center LL104

    In what ways can the anti-privatization movement join forces with the feminist, queer, and ethnic studies in schools movement? What issues do these movements have in common? Given their mutual intersectional analysis of education issues, why aren’t they allies? The K-12 anti-privatization movement is gaining momentum but lacks coordination with teachers who are building traction on teaching women’s, gender, queer, and ethnic studies in schools across the nation. Feminist analysis and frameworks can help us strengthen the anti-privatization movement by illuminating and articulating the dangers of privatization in ways that promote what Antonia Darder defines as “intimacies of solidarity.” Furthermore, feminist pedagogy and practices can help us get closer to the “public” schools of our dreams. We are feminist academics and teachers who challenge the on-going privatization of public education. In this panel, we will consider the politics of privatization, identify privatizers and their colluders, and call on feminist academics and teachers to find ways to work within their own spaces to contribute to building the anti-privatization movement alongside the feminism in schools movement.

  3. Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Violence: A Discussion
    Victoria Law
    Diana Center LL103

    Building on the conversations around Black Girls Matter and the school- to-prison pipeline, this is a continuing discussion about how policing
    and surveillance in (certain) schools reinforces a divided educational system and criminalizes students based on race, gender and sexuality. We’ll examine and discuss the correlations between school pushouts and incarceration, barriers to education for those in and returning home from prison and ways to resist and challenge both.

  4. The POC Zine Project: Creative Expressions of Educational Pleasures and Dangers
    Tracey Brown and Daniela Capistrano
    Diana Center 502

    Zines and other independent materiality have the potential to transform the ways we retain and share knowledge across communities and we must make sure making sure the voices of people of color are included and providing leadership in these methods. Drawing on the experience of POC Zine Project volunteers who have worked in schools and after school programs nationwide, we will explore zine making for education and how we can use zines to understand and represent educational systems and community based learning.

4:30 – 5:30 PM
Education through Music – Closing Comments and Reception

Ebonie Smith and DJ Reborn
Event Oval, The Diana Center

Join us to celebrate 40 years of the Scholar & Feminist and the production of a variety of new feminist education projects! Former BCRW Alumnae Fellow Ebonie Smith ‘07 will share her vision for an alternative system of education through music production, and then we’ll all party to the feminist education themed music of DJ Reborn!

Speakers

Lila Abu-Lughod

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, directs the Middle East Institute and teaches anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University. She is a former director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and also of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia. A leading voice in the debates about gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her books and articles have been translated into 13 languages. Her scholarship, strongly ethnographic, has focused on the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation of the Muslim world; and the dynamics of gender and the question of human and women’s rights in the Middle East. Her award-winning books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories; and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Her most recent book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013.

Ujju Aggarwal

Ujju Aggarwal is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy and Research Analysis, Black Studies Department, at the University of Texas, Austin. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from The Graduate Center of the City of New York. Her research grows out of her long-time work as a community organizer and educator. She has taught at Hunter College, the New School for Social Research, and Sarah Lawrence College. Her research examines how “choice,” as a key principle of reform and management in education, emerged in the post-Civil Rights era, and became central to how rights, freedom, and citizenship were imagined, structured, and constrained. Currently, she serves as a national collective member of INCITE!, as a coordinator of the Parent Leadership Project at the Bloomingdale Family Head Start Program, and as a Community Advisory Board member of the Participatory Action Research Center for Education Organizing.

Lalaie Ameeriar

Lalaie Ameeriar received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. During the 2014-15 academic year, she is a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow. Her research interests include globalization, immigration, multiculturalism, education, and labor. Her research draws from multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore and Karachi, Pakistan, and Toronto, Canada. She is currently working on a book manuscript, “Downwardly Global,” which focuses on the transnational labor migration of Pakistani Muslim women and examines the pedagogies employed in governmental educational organizations in Toronto. She argues that questions of unemployment are increasingly being rationalized and understood by governmental bodies and policy makers as questions of culture and racialized bodily difference. She has received fellowships from the Center for New Racial Studies and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB. She has also been a fellow at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. In 2010, Professor Ameeriar was named an Emerging Diversity Scholar by the National Center for Institutional Diversity at The University of Michigan.

Black Youth Project 100

The Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) is a national organization of Black 18-35 year old activists dedicated to transformative leadership development, direct action organizing, public policy advocacy and civic engagement. Facilitators include Samantha Master and JeNae’ Taylor of the DC Chapter, BYP100 National Co-Chair Jessica Pierce and BYP100 National Director Charlene Carruthers. Find us online at byp100.org and @BYP_100.

Abigail Boggs

Abigail Boggs is the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research utilizes the insights of queer studies, critical ethnic studies, and transnational American studies to trace a genealogy of U.S. higher education as a transnational entity through the figure of the international student on U.S. college and university campuses.

Tracey Brown

Tracey Brown was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and is an out and proud poly woman of color, community organizer and survivor. With her love for the New Orleans POC community guiding her, she graduated from University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2009 with a dual degree in Psychology and American Studies. Upon returning to her hometown, she became involved in various social justice endeavors such as bike accessibility, food justice, anti-racism work, housing justice, and anything else she could get involved in to help create accountability to and visibility of the local POC community. Among these undertakings was the collective organization of the 2012 Anarchist People of Color convergence in New Orleans. Tracey regularly speaks at universities and community spaces nationwide through her work with POC Zine Project while she prepares to apply to graduate school in order to obtain her Master’s degree in Community and Clinical Psychology.

Nuala Cabral

Nuala Cabral is a Rhode Island native, an educator, activist and award-winning filmmaker, who has taught media production and media literacy in high schools, colleges and community centers. While earning a Master’s degree in Media Studies and Production from Temple University in 2010, Nuala co-founded FAAN Mail (Fostering Activism & Alternatives Now!) a media literacy/activist project formed by women of color. Currently, Nuala manages communications and media programming at a youth leadership organization in Philadelphia. In addition to her media interests, Nuala is a founding member of the Black Feminist Working Group and Black Youth Project 100.

Daniela Capistrano

Daniela Capistrano is an out and proud Queer Poly Chicana, media literacy activist and founder of DCAP Media LLC. She is passionate about sharing the stories of people of color, the motivation for her to found the POC Zine Project in 2010, a nonprofit with a mission to make zines/independent materiality by people of color easy to find, distribute and share. Daniela leverages her network to spotlight and empower QTPOC and poly people of color and is in the process of developing a web series about poly women of color. Follow her on Twitter at @dcap, where she shares media resources, insights and signal boosts important causes. Check out @poczineproject and poczineproject.tumblr.com to access zines made by QTPOC and more.

Natalia Cecire

Natalia Cecire is a lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Sussex, specializing in experimentalism, history of science, media, childhood, and gender and sexuality studies. She has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Emory University, and Yale University. Her current book in progress is titled Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge.

Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi

Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi is the Deputy Director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design, Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research interests are in playful technology, particularly the ways in which various forms of playful interaction are designed, developed, and integrated in different cultural contexts. In her previous research, she developed a new conceptual approach to urban sustainability that recognises ‘play’ as the core of transformative interactions in cities as complex techno-social networks. Her current research explores the intersection of food, design, and technologies; and self-care and mutual aid in urban environments with a particular focus on youth social entrepreneurship. She has collaborated with leading international researchers, published in books and journals across various disciplines, and given invited talks at major international conferences including the opening keynote at the 2010 UNESCO Creative Cities Conference.

Kandice Chuh

Kandice Chuh is a professor of English and American studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Chuh researches and teaches in U.S. cultural studies; race, gender, and queer theory; and aesthetic philosophies and theories. The author of Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique, she is currently completely a book titled The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities and minority discourse. Chuh is also collaborating with Tita Chico, Roderick Ferguson, Laura Kang, and Siobhan Somerville, on The University Beyond Crisis, an ongoing project of examining the organization, pedagogies, and objectives of the university and its relationship to social formation.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom studies race, class and gender inequality through education, work, and media. Her forthcoming book on the rapid expansion of for-profit colleges like The University of Phoenix documents the social inequalities in the high cost, low prestige for-profit college credential market. Tressie has published on academic capitalism; vulnerable populations and social media; and, sociology of higher education. Embracing the department’s mission of sociology without borders, she speaks and publishes widely. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Slate Magazine, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, and Dissent Magazine. Speaking invitations include the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, The American Federation of Teachers, and the University of Jena (Germany). This fall Tressie joins the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University. She can be found at tressiemc.com and @tressiemcphd. Go #Havoc.
Antonia Darder is a distinguished international Freirian scholar. She holds the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles and is Professor Emerita of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Her scholarship focuses on issues of racism, political economy, social justice, and education. Her work critically engages the contributions of Paulo Freire to our understanding of social inequalities in schools and society. Darder’s critical theory of biculturalism links notions of culture, power and schooling, as well as cultural issues to the brain, testing, and inequality. In recent scholarship on ethics and moral questions of education, she articulates a critical theory of leadership for social justice and community empowerment. She is the author of numerous books and articles in the field, including Culture and Power in the Classroom (20th Anniversary edition), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, and A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power; co-author of After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism; and co-editor of The Critical Pedagogy Reader, and Latinos and Education: A Critical Reader.

Dána-Ain Davis

Dána-Ain Davis is Associate Chair, Graduate Program in Urban Studies at Queens College and serves on the faculty in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She also has degrees in Film Communication (BA) and Public Health (MPH). Davis is a feminist ethnographer who draws on the framework of participatory and activist research. Davis also serves as Executive Director of the Adco Foundation, which makes grants to community organizing groups. She is the former Board Chair of the New York Foundation. Davis’ scholarship focuses on how people live and are interpreted through, policy and ideology. She is specifically concerned about neoliberalism and it multiple manifestations. Davis is the author or co-author of three books: Black Battered Women and Welfare Reform: Between a Rock and Hard Place (2006); Black Genders and Sexualities with Shaka McGlotten (2012); and Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America with Christa Craven (2013). Davis and Craven are in the process of writing a textbook on feminist ethnography for undergraduates. In her life before the academy she worked in the non-profit industrial complex which was offset by writing plays, poetry, and performance pieces. Her artistic work has been performed at The Kitchen, Vassar College, Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center, and WOW Café. Davis is President of Aubin Pictures, Inc. a not-for-profit organization with the with a mission to develop, produce, and distribute documentary films and videos that promote cultural and social awareness and change. Currently, Davis is working on a project “Between Womb and Home: The Racial Politics of Neonatal Intensive Units.” This project examines the rise of NICUs in the United States, explores the representational politics of NICUs, and seeks to situate NICUs as an extension of reproductive technology.

Ejeris Dixon

Ejeris Dixon is an organizer and political strategist with 15 years of experience working in racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, and economic justice movements. She currently works as the Founding Director of Vision Change Win Consulting where she partners with organizations to build their capacity and deepen the impact of their organizing strategies. From 2010-2013 Ejeris served as the Deputy Director, in charge of the Community Organizing Department at the New York City Anti-Violence Project where she directed national, statewide, and local advocacy efforts on hate violence, domestic violence, and sexual violence. From 2005-2010 Ejeris worked as the founding Program Coordinator of the Safe OUTside the System Collective at the Audre Lorde Project where she worked on creating community based strategies to address hate and police violence. She speaks and trains nationally on issues of police violence, hate violence, sexual violence, and intimate partner violence as they impact LGBTQ communities and communities of color. Her writings and analysis have been featured in The New York Times, Huffington Post, SPIN Magazine, CNN, and The New Civil Rights Movement. In 2012 the White House recognized Ejeris as both an Emerging LGBT Leader and selected her as a featured speaker on violence against Black LGBT communities. She received a Bachelor’s Degree in African American Studies at Yale University and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy and Nonprofit Management at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service.

Tadashi Dozono

Tadashi Dozono teaches 9th and 10th grade global history at Lyons Community School in Bushwick, in Brooklyn NY. He is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s Social and Cultural Studies program in the Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on students of color in world history classrooms, addressing ontological, epistemological, and hermeneutic questions raised through interviews with 10th grade students. His work engages cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, critical theory, subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, and the organizing work being done by queer and trans people of color communities against institutional oppression. Tadashi received his BA in American Studies at Wesleyan University, and completed a MA at Columbia Teachers College in Secondary Social Studies Education in 2003.

Melanie Kwon Duch

Melanie Kwon Duch is a Washington, DC-based social justice activist whose work focuses on increasing economic equality. Currently, she is a Senior Innovation Strategist at D2D Fund, where she bridges gaps between financial institutions, the government, and community-based organizations through policy and product innovation. She has extensive experience advocating for economic policy change at the federal,state, and local levels. Melanie is also a co-founder of Gosen Community Effort, a 501(c)3 non-profit that provides scholarships to secondary students in Onyati, Namibia. She holds a BA from Brown University where she double concentrated in Public Policy and Modern Culture & Media.

Cindy Gao

Cindy Gao graduated from Columbia University in 2012 with a BA in Comparative Ethnic Studies. At Columbia, she was a student activist working through the Asian American Alliance, the Intercultural Resource Center, and many other organizations. She is currently the Program Coordinator for the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, where she co-authored the report, Our Fair City: Blueprint for Sexual and Gender Justice in New York City in 2014. Her article, “The Virtuosic Virtuality of Asian American YouTube Stars,” was published in The Scholar & Feminist Online Fall 2012 issue.

Jamaica Gilmer

Jamaica Gilmer is the Founder and Co-director of the Beautiful Project and a brilliant example of dreams realized, translated and carried out in real life. Her work as a photographer allows her to capture vignettes of realities that are often overlooked and misunderstood. She is a storyteller who uses a camera to punctuate profundity and make lasting impressions. Her photographic portfolio includes special reports (Black Women for Black Girls and Five: Portraits of Extraordinary People among numerous noteworthy others), as well as events (the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Gathering of Leaders and the DNC Delegate Welcome Reception). When she is not behind the camera she takes every opportunity to enjoy her longtime sweetheart and their sweet baby boy. A graduate of Howard University’s John H. Johnson School of Communications, she is also a speaker, informing and sharing insight across the nation as a guest lecturer, keynote, and panelist. Jamaica is passionate, bold, and one to watch as a champion for Black girls everywhere.

Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein is a journalist and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (Doubleday). She is a staff writer at The Marshall Project, and a contributor to Slate, The Atlantic, and other magazines. Dana writes about education, social science, inequality, criminal justice, women’s issues, cities, and public health. Previously, Dana was an associate editor at The Daily Beast and The American Prospect. She graduated from Brown University and grew up in beautiful Ossining, New York, alongside the Hudson River. She lives in Brooklyn.

José Gonzalez

José Gonzalez is in his 24th year of teaching and holds a MA in Bilingual/Multiculural Education anda BA in Political Science and History. He is an educational consultant with XITO (Xican@ Institute for Teaching and Organizing) and currently works for Tucson Unified School District teaching 8th grade American History/Civics at Roskruge Bilingual Middle School. As a student advocate, José was one of the thirteen plaintiffs challenging the constitutionality of HB 2281(ARS 15-112), which makes the teaching of Chicana/o studies illegal in the State of Arizona. As an educator, José anchors his instruction on a Xican@ Critical Race Pedagogical lens, while simultaneously interweaving a human pedagogy which at its core is grounded in an indigenous epistemology. José works to foster and facilitate within his students a strong “ethnic” identity coupled with an strong academic identity which cultivate self-actualized, self-disciplined people.

Che Gossett

Che Gossett is a Black genderqueer archivist and activist who works to excavate queer of color AIDS activist and trans archives. They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association Women’s Committee, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University, and the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York. Che was a member of the 2013 Archivists and Librarians Delegation to Palestine and recently presented about legacies of black queer solidarity with Palestinian struggle at the Bodies in Public conference at the American University of Beirut. Che also was a presenter at the Black liberation workshop at the 2014 National Students for Justice in Palestine conference.

Karen Gregory

Karen Gregory, PhD, is a Lecturer in Sociology at the City College of New York, where she is also the faculty head of City Lab. Karen’s work explores the intersection of contemporary spirituality, labor, and social media, with an emphasis on the role of the laboring body. She is a founding member of CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Labor Working Group and is currently editing the forthcoming book Digital Labor: Essays on the Future of Work (OR books). Her writings have appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Women and Performance, Visual Studies, Contexts, The New Inquiry, and Dis Magazine. You can often find her online @claudiakincaid.

Ileana Jiménez

Ileana Jiménez has been a leader in the field of feminist and social justice education for eighteen years. In an effort to inspire teachers to bring women’s and gender studies to the K-12 classroom, she launched her blog, Feminist Teacher, in 2009; she is also the creator of the #HSfeminism and #K12feminism hashtags. Since then, Feminist Teacher has become recognized by educators nationally and globally. Based in New York, Ileana teaches innovative courses on feminism and activism that have gained the attention of education and activist circles. In 2010, she was named one of the 30 Women Making History by the Women’s Media Center; later that year, she was named one of the 40 Feminists Under 40 by the Feminist Press. She is also the 2011 recipient of the Distinguished Fulbright Award in Teaching, for which she traveled to Mexico City to create safe and inclusive schools for LGBT youth. In 2012, she appeared on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show to talk about teaching feminism to high school students and to advocate for safe schools. Sought after for her insight on education, she has written for Feministing, Gender Across Borders, The Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, On the Issues, the Smith Alumnae Quarterly, and the Women’s Media Center. A frequently-asked speaker on feminism in schools, she travels nationally and globally to speak to educators in both secondary and higher education. She received her B.A. in English Literature at Smith College, and an M.A. in English Literature at Middlebury College.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji

Shenila Khoja-Moolji is a research fellow and doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University. She investigates the public pedagogies in and through which the categories of ‘muslim women/girls’ and ‘muslim men’ have emerged as sites of ordinary concern since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Prior to Columbia University, Shenila attended the Divinity School at Harvard University, where she graduated with a Master of Theological Studies focusing on Islamic studies and gender. Shenila’s recent work has appeared in Gender and Education, Feminist Teacher, and Journal of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education.

Soo Ah Kwon

Soo Ah Kwon is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Human and Community Development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Uncivil Youth: Race, Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality (Duke University Press, 2013) and co-editor of South Korea’s Educational Exodus: The Life and Times of “Early Study Abroad” (University of Washington Press, forthcoming). She is also a co-Principal Investigator of the American University Meets the Pacific Century project that examines the rapid Asian internalization of the undergraduate student population and its implications for higher education.

Victoria Law

Victoria Law is a freelance writer and editor. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, the co-editor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities and a mother to a NYC public high school student. She has written for various publications about the intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. You can find her work at victorialaw.net or by following her on twitter: @LVikkiml.

Liz Losh

Elizabeth Losh is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009) and The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014). She is the co-author of the comic book textbook Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013) with Jonathan Alexander. She is currently working on a new monograph, tentatively entitled Obama Online: Technology, Masculinity, and Democracy. She writes about gender and technology, the digital humanities, distance learning, connected learning, media literacy, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices. She has written a number of frequently cited essays about communities that produce, consume, and circulate online video, videogames, digital photographs, text postings, and programming code. The diverse range of subject matter analyzed in her scholarship has included coming out videos on YouTube, videogame fan films created by immigrants, combat footage from soldiers in Iraq shot on mobile devices, video evidence created for social media sites by protesters on the Mavi Marmara, remix videos from the Arab Spring, and the use of Twitter and Facebook by Indian activists working for women’s rights after the Delhi rape case. Much of this body of work concerns the legitimation of political institutions through visual evidence, representations of war and violence in global news, and discourses about human rights. This work has appeared in edited collections from MIT Press, Routledge, University of Chicago, Minnesota, Oxford, Continuum, and many other presses. She is Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College at U.C. San Diego, where she teaches courses on digital rhetoric and new media. She is also a blogger for Digital Media and Learning Central, and a Steering Committee member of HASTAC and FemTechNet.

Bettina L Love

Bettina L. Love is an award winning author and Associate Professor of Educational Theory & Practice at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on the ways in which urban youth negotiate Hip Hop music and culture to form social, cultural, and political identities to create new and sustaining ways of thinking about urban education and social justice. Her research is focused on transforming urban classrooms through the use of non-traditional educational curricula and classroom structures. Dr. Love is one of the field’s most esteemed educational researchers in the area of Hip Hop education for elementary aged students. She is the founder of Real Talk: Hip Hop Education for Social Justice, an after school initiative aimed at teaching elementary students the history and elements of Hip Hop for social justice aligned with core subjects through project-based learning. Dr. Love also has a passion for studying the school experiences of queer youth, along with race and inequality in education. Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker on a range of topics including: Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, Hip Hop feminism, art-based education to foster youth civic engagement, and issues of diversity. In 2014, she was invited to the White House Research Conference on Girls to discuss her work focused on the lives of Black girls. She is the inaugural recipient of the Michael F. Adams award (2014) from the University of Georgia. She has provided commentary for various news outlets including NPR, The Guardian, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Dr. Love is one of the founding board members of The Kindezi School, an innovative school focused on small classrooms and art-based education. She conducts workshops/professional development seminars for educators and students for educational entities of all kinds. She is the author of Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. Her work has appeared in numerous books and journals, including The English Journal, Urban Education, The Urban Review, and Journal of LGBT Youth. She is currently editing a special issue of The Journal of Lesbian Studies focused on the identities, gender performances, and pedagogical practices of Black and Brown lesbian educators.

Jessica Luther

Jessica Luther is a freelance writer and investigative journalist living in Austin, Texas. She is under contract with Akashic Books to write a book on the intersection of college football and sexual assault. Her work appears in The Texas Observer and The Austin Chronicle, and at VICE Sports and Bitch Magazine. She’s also a community activist and a prolific tweeter, sometimes both at once.

Jacob McWilliams

Jacob (Jenna) McWilliams is a postdoctoral researcher in the Learning Sciences program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Jake’s research focuses on issues of gender and sexual diversity in education, and recent work involves developing queer pedagogies for supporting new media literacies practices in the elementary classroom and, most recently, drawing on queer and transgender theory for understanding the dominant discourses of engineering education and how those discourses marginalize and exclude people from traditionally vulnerable gender, sexual, and ethnic groups.

Jennifer C Nash

Jennifer C. Nash is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women’s Studies at George Washington University. She is the author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014), and of articles appearing in journals including GLQ, Social Text, Feminist Review, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and The Scholar and Feminist Online. Her new book project is tentatively titled Black Feminism Remixed.

Vani Natarajan

Vani Natarajan is a Research and Instruction Librarian in the Humanities and Global Studies at Barnard Library. Her interests include critical pedagogy and fiction writing.

Tami Navarro

Tami Navarro is the Associate Director of BCRW and Managing Editor of the Center’s online journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. Her research interests include Neoliberalism, Capital, Gender and Labor, Development, Identity Formation, Globalization/Transnationalism, Race/Racialization and Ethnicity, and Caribbean Studies. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Anthropological Association, and the Ford Foundation. Before coming to Barnard, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Virgin Capital: Financial Services as Development in the US Virgin Islands.

Miriam Neptune

Miriam Neptune is Manager of Instructional Media Services at the Barnard College Library, as well as a media maker, educator, and activist whose work interrogates the possibility of creating transnational historical narratives to foster solidarity and dialogue among Haitians and Dominicans in the diaspora. Her short film, Birthright Crisis has been used in a variety of educational settings to initiate discussion about race, immigration, human rights, and citizenship. Before coming to Barnard worked with youth producers and teachers from New York City public high schools to examine social issues through video production and critical media studies. Miriam earned her BA in Media Studies from Pomona College, an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University, and a Master’s of Library Science from St. John’s University.

Emily Owens

Emily Owens is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in the Department of African and African American Studies, with a primary field in History and a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Emily’s research sits at the intersection of the history of sexuality and black feminist and black queer theory. Her dissertation, entitled “Fantasies of Consent: Black Women’s Sexual Labor in the 19th Century,” is a cultural history of racialized sexual commerce in New Orleans from the late antebellum era through the rise of Jim Crow. She is also co-editor, with Jennifer Nash, of the upcoming special issue of Feminist Formations, “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University.”

Pamela Phillips

Pamela Phillips is a single mother of two, is active in her community and is a strong advocate for impoverished communities of color. With one child pursuing a master’s degree and the other awaiting college acceptances, she understands all too well what it takes to navigate the educational system to ensure that she and her children are well educated. She currently works at BCRW while pursing a master’s degree in Urban Policy Analysis and Management at The New School of Public Engagement. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Business Administration from CUNY-Lehman College as a non-traditional student. Her interest is in urban poverty as it impacts housing, education and quality of life.

Andrea Ritchie

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian police misconduct attorney who has engaged in extensive research, writing, litigation, organizing and advocacy on profiling, policing, and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women, girls and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people of color over the past two decades. She was recently awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship to engage in documentation and policy advocacy around the experiences of women of color of profiling and policing, and is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Over the past 5 years Andrea helped found and coordinate Streetwise & Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative aimed at sharing “know your rights” information, strategies for safety and visions for change among LGBT youth of color who experience of gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing and criminalization, and now serves as the organization’s Senior Policy Counsel. As such, she serves on the steering committee of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), a city-wide campaign to challenge discriminatory, unlawful and abusive policing practices in New York City led by grassroots community groups, legal organizations, policy advocates and researchers from all five boroughs. As a member of the national collective of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence from 2003–2008, Andrea coordinated the development of the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Organizer’s Toolkit on Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color and Transgender People of Color. Her original piece, Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color appeared in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (2006, South End Press). Andrea also served as expert consultant, lead researcher and coauthor for Amnesty International’s 2005 report Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the United States, was a consultant for Caught in the Net, a report on women and the “war on drugs” published by the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Break the Chains, and co-author of Education Not Deportation: Impacts of New York City School Safety Policies on Immigrant Youth, published by Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM).

Maria Rivera

Maria S. Rivera Maulucci is Assistant Professor of Education and joined the faculty of Barnard in 2004. She combines expertise in science pedagogy and teacher education with experience at the elementary, secondary and postsecondary levels. Her accomplishments include both excellent teaching and original scholarship on the art of teaching in general, and science teaching in particular. Her courses include Contemporary Issues in Education, Urban School Practicum, Multicultural Secondary Pedagogy and Science in the City: Science Content and Pedagogical Methods. She is also affiliated with Barnard’s Urban Studies Program. Professor Rivera is the Principal Investigator for the Barnard College Noyce Teacher Scholars Program funded by the National Science Foundation. Professor Rivera also serves as the Evaluation Consultant on the Bridge Program, a joint project with Teachers College to prepare mathematics and science teachers and teacher leaders for New York City Public Schools.

Sarah Rodriguez

Sarah Rodriguez is a critical, feminist, anti-racist educator and activist in the movement for social and economic justice. Sarah has taught in California public schools for eleven years. From 2001-2006, she taught English at Crenshaw High School, a traditional comprehensive high school in Los Angeles, while also organizing as a member of the teachers’ union and community based educational justice groups. Since 2009, Sarah has taught 11th grade Humanities at High Tech High Media Arts (HTHMA), a project based learning charter school in San Diego. She has a dual California teaching credential in Social Sciences and English. At HTHMA Sarah is responsible for autonomously designing and implementing project based curriculum in her classroom. She does so with the recognition that schools are critical sites for the development of the critical consciousnesses of both young people and adults. Sarah’s approach to designing US history curriculum is grounded in Andrea Smith’s analysis of the “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy” (2006) as well as in analysis and critique of the rapaciousness of modern capitalism. Sarah is active in the burgeoning movement to bring feminism into K-12 classrooms, and she also hopes to bring the power of feminist analysis, activism, and scholarship to bear in movements for educational justice. In addition to work in the classroom, Sarah considers herself a dissident voice within her school who challenges institutional racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism and consistently agitates for more culturally democratic structures and practice. Sarah received her J.D. from Harvard Law School (’09), her M.A. in Secondary Education (’02) from Loyola Marymount University, and her B.A. in Anthropology from UCLA (’01). In addition to teaching and her work for educational justice, Sarah is a licensed attorney and has been an activist at the intersections of the prison abolition, reproductive justice, and environmental justice movements.

Amina Tawasil

Amina Tawasil is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Middle East and North African Studies program at Northwestern, where she holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Anthropology. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and has been honored with a fellowship from the American Association of University Women. She co-organized “The Power of Women’s Islamic Education” workshop for the Women Create Change project at Columbia, and “The Future of Anthropology in Schools of Education” seminar at Teachers College in 2013. She has recently taught courses entitled “Gender in the Middle East: Challenge, Accommodation and the In-between,” “Peoples of the World: the Middle East,” and “The Middle East, Modernity and Identity,” and is set to teach “Women’s Empowerment & Islamic Education in the Middle East” this Spring. Her interests are in heterology, social practice, women’s Islamic education, gender and identity in the Middle East, labor migration, and human/sex trafficking.

Michell Tollinchi-Michel

Michell Tollinchi-Michel is a Puerto Rican woman and native of the Bronx, New York, who has dedicated her career to supporting minority and women students who are striving to achieve their full potential. She has a BA in Psychology and Spanish from the State University of New York at Albany, a Master’s Degree in Social Work at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a PhD in Social Work from Fordham University, where she researched college persistence among Latina undergraduate students. Michell has worked at her local community center as the Director of the After School Program, developing academic, educational, and cultural programming for the young people in the neighborhood, and the CSTEP/STEP program at Fordham University, where she was part of the creation of the CSTEP Summer Program. Michell currently works at Barnard College as the Associate Dean for Academic Enrichment and Community Initiatives where she oversees the HEOP, CSTEP/STEP and other academic support programs. She works in collaboration with various college departments, Barnard faculty and the local Harlem Community to continue to provide opportunities that will enrich and complement the lives of all students with a particular emphasis on underrepresented minorities and first generation students.
Cally L. Waite is Associate Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, where she coordinates the History and Education Program. Waite is an authority on the transformation of higher education in the late 19th century and has written extensively about the history of African Americans in U.S. higher education. In her book Permission to Remain Among Us: Education for Blacks in Oberlin, Ohio, 1880-1914, Waite details the history of a community that demonstrated a rare commitment to the education of blacks during the antebellum period, only to turn toward segregation as Reconstruction drew to a close – a progression, she argues, that prefigured events nationwide. Waite also serves as program director of the SSRC-Mellon Mays Fellowship Program – part of the Social Science Research Council. Waite’s current book project, The Journey Thus Far: Black Southern Scholars and Northern Institutions, 1896-1954 (with Margaret Smith Crocco), considers the experiences and challenges of southern black scholars who earned their doctoral degrees at northern research universities during legalized segregation in the United States.

Bianca C Williams

Bianca C. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. As a feminist cultural anthropologist, Williams’ research examines the racialized and gendered experiences of Black American women in the U.S. and Caribbean, specifically their pursuits of happiness and strategies to maintain emotional wellness. In her book, tentatively titled Exporting Happiness, Williams examines how African American women use international travel and the Internet as tools for pursuing leisure, creating intimate relationships and friendships, and critiquing American racism, sexism, and ageism.

Nicci Yin

Nicci Yin is the Post Baccalaureate Fellow at BCRW and a multimedia artist. She is a graduate of Barnard College with a degree in Art History with a concentration in Visual Arts and in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Wazina Zondon

Wazina Zondon is a sexuality educator and trainer, working in a variety of communities with a focus on intersectionality and sexual self-determination. Alongside her creative counterpart, Terna, Wazina is the co-writer and co-performer in Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love, capturing the stories and experiences of the intersections of Islam and queerness and its relationship to family, lovers, one’s sense of self and relationship with our faith. The storytelling performance which premiered in NYC in October 2011, shares the tales about other people’s theories about where queerness comes from, the gifts of being queer and Muslim, the tension between one’s culture and religion, and love—romantic and spiritual. More information on the show can be found at comingoutmuslim.com. Currently, she teaches high school Sex Ed at a public all-girl high school in downtown Brooklyn, NY. She and her friend, Alyssa Robbins also have a silly sexuality podcast, called Follow that Flannel.