On behalf of the Social Justice Education, Division of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, and the Center For Translating Research Into Practice, we are delighted to welcome you to our Social Justice Symposium. This year’s theme is "Social Justice in Action: Interrogating the Landscape and Igniting Passion," through exploring social justice through the arts, environment, culture, and health. We thank you for attending and want to express our sincere gratitude to every sponsor and partner who has made this possible!
IUPUI acknowledges our location on the traditional and ancestral territory of the Miami, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people. We honor the heritage of Native peoples, what they teach us about the stewardship of the earth, and their continuing efforts today to protect the planet. Founded in 1969, IUPUI stands on the historic homelands of Native peoples and, more recently, that of a vibrant Black community, also displaced. As the present stewards of the land, we honor them all as we live, work, and study at IUPUI In keeping with its commitment to advancing social justice and equity, IUPUI endorses Native acknowledgment as a best practice for event organizers using space within the school.
The mission of the Social Justice Scholars (SJS) programming on campus is to provide peer-to-peer educational programs for the IUPUI campus community that raises awareness and promotes inclusivity and understanding of oneself and others. In this we hope to create a positive, supportive, and welcoming community for all. Additionally, SJS provides students with the awareness, knowledge, and skills to develop their leadership identity through a social justice framework in order to empower students to create inclusive solutions to address societal inequities
Powerful Conversations on Race is a community-based initiative that utilizes the arts and humanities to create space to have difficult conversations about race. This session will be an immersive demonstration experience utilizing the Civic Reflection Dialogue methodology to showcase how to use this process to create space for difficult and intense community conversations that cross sectors.
In this workshop, participants will use sustainable art-making practices found in “junk journaling” to confront their discomfort and explore ways in which they are complicit regarding their chosen social justice issue. The instructor will provide examples of their explorations of Whiteness as an Art Educator, as well as how they’ve used this strategy with their students. Resources around Anti-Racism and Art will be presented and available for participants to engage with during the workshop. Participants will be guided from the initial stages of idea generation through completing a small junk journal. Participants should be able to fold, tear, and write, but no further visual art skills are required.
F h h d i k h i h b h ll h i
This workshop will center around the importance of creating youth-led spaces and platforms where young people guide the direction of the narrative around the challenges that impact them the most Too often, especially in education and youth work, adults spend the majority of the time crafting policies and programs FOR youth instead of working WITH youth. This workshop will focus on critical theoretical highlights from Healing-Centered Engagement, which incorporates advocacy and collective organizing as a way to heal from interpersonal and institutional trauma; and Critical Hope Theory, which includes aspects of audacious engagement and authentic connection. The foundational example of this will be Tru Dialogue, a youth-led forum that takes place in Indianapolis on an annual basis, with dozens of young people leading discussions with adult stakeholders on creating more relevant solutions.
Learn about Applied Theatre on campus. Explore key concepts with hands-on activities and exercises about Boal's Forum Theatre. Connect with a faculty member's personal journey in this work and the immersive experiences hosted at IUPUI in the summer of 2023 via the international NO BODY ALONE Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference. Interrogate and activate personal uses of Forum Theatre to deepen dialogue and perspective around social justice Issues you care about.
The session will start with a brief presentation about Frederick Douglass's career as a runaway enslaved person, abolitionist, and human rights reformer. The audience then will select from six options which topic they would like to learn Douglass's opinions. The audience then will collectively read excerpts from Douglass's speeches on that topic. The session will conclude with a discussion of how Douglass's ideas for advocacy on that topic is still relevant today.
This session is about the actions the presenters took when they discovered a health disparity in a BIPOC community. The session will include a conversation with the audience, where presenters explain the problem/health disparity, the solution they arrived at as a team in 2014, and how their work has evolved with the times and challenges these youth have experienced.
Engage in conversation capturing the experiences, perspectives, and recommendations used for focus groups led by members of the IUPUI Black Men’s Experience Task Force. The IUPUI Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion established the Black Men’s Experience Task Force in Spring 2023 to study and better understand the climate, challenges, and successes of IUPUI Black men staff and faculty.
The Living Tradition is a critical humanities mission to locate, excavate, interrogate, re-remember, and reinscribe the lost-found sacred epistemologies of Africana peoples. The presentation involves deep, qualitative exploration, interpretation, and renegotiation of memory and meaning that crystalizes at the nexus of transformative art, imagination, aesthetics, education, and activism. The Living Tradition explores the rich, complex, prodigious, and sentient epistemologies (ex., histories, expressive forms, imaginaries, creative legacies, folklore, cultural lifeways) of Africana peoples and situates them as sites of memory critical pedagogy and cultural production The presentation interprets and situates
This session features a panel discussion that will offer discourse on the Africana experience within the framings of Environmental Sustainability and Justice.
This breakout session features two to three brief presentations on how social justice, culture,