KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Act Locally – Engage Globally
Matthew Mazzotta, Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture + Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Matthew Mazzotta works at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism, focusing on the power of the built environment to shape our relationships and experiences. His community-specific public projects integrate new forms of civic participation and social engagement into the built environment and reveal how the spaces we travel through and spend our time living within have the potential to become distinct sites for intimate, radical, and meaningful exchanges. Through his process, each project starts by creating temporary public spaces for listening – ‘Outdoor Living Room’ – as a way to capture voices from local people that might not attend more formal meetings. Stemming from this approach are experiences that involve people from a range of backgrounds working together to create new models of living that contribute to local culture beyond the economic realm. Mazzotta received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Masters of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology, a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University, and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow.
DAY-LONG DEEP DIVE: Creating a More Inclusive Climate Through Microresistance
Dr. Cynthia Ganote, Assistant Dean for Diversity and Community Engagement in the College of Arts and Sciences, faculty member in the Department of Sociology, University of Louisville
Whether an observer, the target, or the unintentional perpetrator of microaggressions, we often don’t know how to respond to them in the moment. This deep-dive session will offer participants an understanding of microaggressions and their impacts on students and colleagues, considerations to make when responding to microaggresssions, and microresistance strategies to use when they occur. The goal of the workshop is for participants to feel more comfortable responding to microaggresssions with microresistance. We will provide examples of and opportunities to practice microresistance, which includes individual or collaborative efforts that empower targeted people and allies to cope with, respond to, and/or challenge microaggressions to disrupt systems of oppression as they occur in everyday life, and thereby create more inclusive institutions. Microaggressions, though they usually unfold in small interactions, are firmly situated in broader systems of oppression; they are micro-level manifestations of these systems. For that reason, we believe that employing microresistance to counter microaggressions can not only contribute to individual well-being, but also serve as one part of a systemic approach to transforming oppression on our campuses.
Dr. Cynthia Ganote is the Assistant Dean for Diversity and Community Engagement in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Louisville, and a faculty member in the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on ways to address microaggressions in higher education with microresistance; diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom; race, class, gender, and sexual inequalities; critical and feminist pedagogies; and critical approaches to community-based research. She formerly served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, and later as Director of Faculty Development, at Saint Mary’s College of California in the San Francisco Bay Area. She serves as a national consultant on diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education and has published in such areas as microresistance in the classroom, critical and feminist pedagogies, the roles of power and action in critical community psychology, and ways to connect classroom learning with democratic citizenship.
THINK TANK: The State’s Role in Place and Space – invitation only
Liz Walker, Director of Strategic Initiatives & Convenings, Indiana Commission for Higher Education
Jarod Wilson, Director of Postsecondary Outreach and Career Transitions, Indiana Commission for Higher Education.
Indiana’s strategic plan Reaching Higher in a State of Change calls for a renewed focus on community engagement as a key strategy to increase postsecondary attainment and close achievement gaps. In this session, Commission staff will engage attendees in a discussion of how the state can partner with colleges and universities to create a culture that values lifelong learning, develop partnerships that strengthen a sense of place and space, and improve the economic health and vitality of all Hoosier communities.
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