You are invited to attend:

Race and Its Futures: Teach, Research, Imagine

Tuesday, April 9, 2019 from 3:30PM-6:00PM — The Graduate Center, Skylight Room
Join us for a mini-conference exploring race, education, democracy, aesthetics, and other imagined futures. The event will feature sessions organized by Futures Initiative faculty and students, including Profs. Cathy Davidson, Racquel Gates, Jonathan Gray, Joy Sanchez-Taylor, and more.

Free RSVP is required to attend in person, and the event will also be livestreamed. Access now the event’s public agenda on this Google Doc, and use the hashtag #fight4edu to tweet your questions/comments during the event. After the conference, all are welcome to join us in room 3317 for a wine and cheese reception.

This event, co-sponsored by CUNY Humanities Alliance, is part of the The University Worth Fighting For, a series of workshops that tie student-centered, engaged pedagogical practices to institutional change, race, equality, gender, and social justice.

Participants:

Tatiana Ades is an American studies student in the MALS program interested in the strange entanglements between literature and science. When not in school, she works in an adult literacy program at CUNY to support HSE students as an academic advisor.

Jenny Perez Bruno is an alumna of The City College of New York, a former Futures Initiative fellow, and a Student Success Mentor and Spanish tutor at LaGuardia Community College. She has also been part of the Biomedical Research team at Rockefeller University.

Solange Castellar is a Master’s student in the Women’s and Gender Studies MA program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Solange is interested in media and film studies, pop culture, and representation. In her spare time, she writes the column, Bra-ometer: Women’s News in Brief, for BUST Magazine, and loves to talk all things Cardi B.

Dave Cazeau is a social worker who practices medical social work in the emergency department at NYU Langone Medical Center.  He is also an adjunct professor for social work at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, and a Ph.D. student in the social welfare program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Deirdre Hollman is a doctoral student in social studies education at Teachers College, Columbia University. As an afrofuturist educator she takes a transdisciplinary and social justice approach to curriculum development for learning in communities and schools.

Tahamina Hossain is a student in her junior year at City College majoring in Sociology and minoring in Arabic, and she is currently a Futures Initiative Undergraduate Leadership fellow. Her research interests include the subject of race relations, urban landscapes, health disparities as well as immigration in the U.S.

Kashema Hutchinson is a doctoral student in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center (CUNY). She is currently the Co-Director of the Undergraduate Leadership Program and Doctoral Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center at The Futures Initiative. Her research interests include restorative justice, the school-to-prison pipeline, the socialization of Black girls and women, zero-tolerance policies, mattering and marginalization, mindfulness and hip-hop pedagogy.

Z. Ingram is a world traveling, book reading Buddhist. Z loves all things language and seeks ways to be more inclusive than exclusive with language on a global scale.

Christina Katopodis is a doctoral candidate in English and Futures Initiative Fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the winner of the 2018 Dewey Digital Teaching Award from the New Media Lab, and manages a Progressive Pedagogy Group on HASTAC.org [hastac.org]. Christina has taught 19 courses across three different colleges. She currently teaches as an adjunct at Hunter College, CUNY.

Diana Melendez is currently a 2nd year PhD Social Welfare student at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also a fellow with Social Change Agents Institute and working towards a Certificate in Interactive Pedagogy and Technology Certificate at the Graduate Center. Diana’s professional background is in social work. Her interests include expanding on liberation-based scholarship and practices that move towards systemic equity. Central to her work are critical consciousness-raising and collective-building processes across intersectionality.

Lauren Melendez is Director of the Futures Initiative Undergraduate Leadership Program and Administrative Specialist at the Graduate Center (CUNY). She is a graduate student pursuing a Master of Science in Education degree at Hunter College (CUNY). Her research interests include leadership, mentorship, social justice and restorative practices, systemic discrimination, person centered, holistic, integrative, and solution focused counseling.

Stephanie Mercedes is an International Studies grad student who specializes in colonialism, international economy and migration. She is also a Spanish tutor and translator focused on the Romance Languages.

Casandra Murray has been teaching composition and literature courses in English at Hunter College for the past six years. She is currently in her second year as an English PhD student at The Graduate Center, and her research interests center on postcolonial texts, human rights literature, and film studies.

Jourdan Sayers is a doctoral student in environmental psychology, a QTPOC organizer, and a metalworker. Their work focuses on the spaces and futures of queer and trans people of color.

Chandni Tariq is a History PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. She studies issues of race and childhood in the late nineteenth century with a focus primarily on the United States.

Kia Thomas is a student at City College majoring in Black Studies and minoring in Journalism. She is a multi-faceted creator. A lover of literature and justice, she aspires to pursue investigative journalism. She is passionate about the arts, specifically music. Kia is a classically trained singer and is apart of the BMCC Downtown Chorus. She hopes to develop a career where she can utilize all of her passions, interests and talents.

Tiffany Younger is the founder of the Social Change Agents Institute, a project that brings scholars, professionals, and educators to developing countries to offer Free mental health services and social change workshops in developing countries of the African Diaspora such as South Africa, Brazil and Haiti. In addition, she is piloting the Social Changes Agents Institute (SCAI). Prior to running the institute, Tiffany worked as a Policy Fellow for United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand where she focused on issues of criminal justice, gender and race equity.

and Monami Nagai.