SPEAKERS

Wanda Swan Founder & CEO of Start By Talking LLC

Wanda Swan is a nationally-recognized thought leader in survivor advocacy, anti-oppression work, restorative justice, and violence prevention. A speaker, scholar-practitioner, antioppression coach, and Research Fellow for the University of New Hampshire’s Prevention Innovations Research Center, she has been deeply embedded within the anti-violence movement for over 15 years.

Wanda’s work has spanned across higher education, local and state agencies, and nonprofits dedicated to survivor resiliency and sustaining antioppressive environments. As both a curator and co-conspirator of systems disruption and research that informs her field of practice, she is co-founder of, and currently holding co-leadership roles in, professional organizations like Campus Advocacy and Prevention Professionals Association (CAPPA) and NASPA’s Sexual and Relationship Violence Prevention Education and Response Knowledge Community (NASPA SRVPER KC).

As founder and CEO of Start By Talking, Wanda supports clients through individual and group coaching, organizational assessment, and virtual learning on the strategy of Whiteness and how those messages reverberate across policy, procedure, and practice.

Her research project, now nine years old, on identifying and reseating the Black founders of the anti-violence movement serves as the vehicle that first allowed her to birth a company with the audacious goal of liberation for all through 1:1 conversation. Today, Wanda’s vision has expanded beyond her ancestor’s wildest dreams.

Jennifer S. Hirsch, a medical anthropologist and Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University, works at the intersection of public health and social science, with a research agenda that examines gender, sexuality and migration, the anthropology of love, social dimensions of HIV, and undergraduate well being, including sexual assault. Hirsch co-directed the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), a research project on sexual assault and sexual health among Columbia undergraduates. With Shamus Khan, she is coauthor of Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (WW Norton), which draws on SHIFT’s ethnographic research to examine sexual assault and consensual sex among undergraduates in relation to the broader context of campus life. Hirsch co-directs the Columbia Population Research Center, which brings together faculty from schools across the campus who work on population health and inequalities.

A 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2015 Public Voices Fellow, and a 2018-19 Visiting Research Scholar with Princeton’s Center for Health and WellBeing, Hirsch’s published work includes both scholarly and popular writing on health and social inequality. She is author of A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families, the award-winning coauthored The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV, two edited volumes on the anthropology of love, more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, 15 book chapters, and many op-eds in venues such as Time and The Hill. Hirsch also just completed six years of service as a board member for Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, including the last two as board chair. Hirsch earned her A.B. from Princeton University in History, with a certificate in Women’s Studies, and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in Population Dynamics and Anthropology.

Shamus Khan is a professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W.W. Norton, with Jennifer Hirsch). He co-directed the ethnographic component of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directed the working group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia University Press, and served as the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, Washington Post, and has served as a columnist for Time Magazine. In 2016 he was awarded Columbia University’s highest teaching honor, the Presidential Teaching Award, and in 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize from Uppsala University in Sweden for “the best sociologist under 40.”

The Safe Office is available for confidential support related to past or current experiences of interpersonal violence, and/or confidential processing needs related to the climate survey results. Contact: 336-758-5285 (follow the prompts), or safe@wfu.edu (non-urgent).