Conference organizers invited flexible proposals (approximately 45-60 minutes in length) for workshops, discussions, and other interactive focused sessions that help participants explore the following conference tracks in greater depth.
Track I: Making Meaning
This track seeks to explore and inform our understanding of the meaning and purpose of our lives and work, what motivates us, and the spaces we move in and care about as we learn and enact new ways of supporting ourselves and others within and beyond the pandemic.
- How do we make meaning for ourselves and our communities through joy in affirming environments and struggle with challenges like those we have faced in these past few years? How does this play out at our college or university?
- How do we make meaning for ourselves and our communities by re/connecting with community and (inter)personal relationships in the face of challenging events? How does this play out at our college or university?
- How do we cultivate and sustain community-based approaches to enable us to not just survive, but thrive?
- How can we re/focus meaning making on an asset-based framework rather than a deficit- or scarcity-based framework?
Track II: Nurturing Our Bodies and Minds
This track seeks to explore and inform our understanding of the stressors placed on historically underrepresented students, faculty and staff at historically and predominately white institutions by re/centering, initiating/invoking, and embodying a pause. Pause, in its verb form, is defined as interrupting action or speech briefly. The work of caring for our communities and ourselves is the work, and embracing the practice of pausing allows us to reconceptualize how we can contribute to our individual and collective success in both good and challenging times.
- What has been your journey/experience especially during the pandemic in understanding the need for a pause? How has the pandemic made clearer the inequalities that exist from pausing?
- What is your experience of pursuing or initiating a pause in your life? How has it been beneficial or critical?
- What are practices you engage in to embrace care and pause?
Track III: Facing Forward Together
Pandemic and endemic disruptions have shown us just how valuable access to resources is for people of color. This track explores ways that current frameworks of support can be transformed into innovative approaches to community support that best resist endemic disruptions, increase resource accessibility and build new investments in students and professionals of color.
- How are we actively creating liberating spaces for people of color within and outside of academia while navigating structural inequities often exacerbated by pandemic and endemic disruptions?
- What possibility making can happen that affirms and resources the wholeness of communities of color?
- How do we continue to utilize mentorship and collective support to nurture the growth of the students and staff who come after us?