2019 Inclusive Leadership Conference

The Inclusive Leadership Conference is designed to help our academic communities create an understanding and appreciation for multiple identities through self-awareness while encouraging them to be free of misconceptions and prejudices through social justice education. Through interactive workshops and guided group discussions, participants will be able to:

• Articulate principles of social justice
• Recognize how their own experiences inform their leadership style and perceptions
• Understand the importance of diversity in leadership
• Identify dynamics of power and privilege when working in groups

CONFERENCE THEME

The conference theme for the 2019 Inclusive Leadership Conference is "This Is America." Inspired by Childish Gambino, This Is America challenges us to examine the fore and background of our lives, to pose questions that address how are “all men are created equal” depicted in our society. This year’s conference theme will help us to be transparent and redefine what does liberty and justice for all mean through the inequities that impact various aspects of our identity.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Michael Benitez, Ph.D., is a nationally-acclaimed activist-scholar, practitioner, and educator with extensive experience with diversity issues in higher education.  Dr. Benitez has served higher education in different capacities over the last two decades, including academic and student affairs, equity and inclusion, Title IX, and teaching. Currently, he serves as the Dean of Diversity and Inclusion/Chief Diversity Officer and Title IX Officer, at the University of Puget Sound.

Dr. Benitez is co-editor of the anthology, Crash Course: Reflections on the Film “Crash” for Critical Dialogues About Race, Power and Privilege (2007).  His most recent work on supporting faculty of color can be found in AACU’s Liberal Education (2017) ,and his work on creating campus community participatory frameworks for difficult conversations and institutional action, in New Directions in Institutional Research (2017). Benitez has appeared on talk shows such as Worlds Apart, Hard Knock Radio, and Speak out with Tim Wise.

Part of his success lies in his ability to speak heart-to-heart while bridging theory and scholarly inquiry with everyday life and peoples’ lived realities, his use of accessible language that multiple audiences can relate to, and his deep knowledge and practice of innovate equity and inclusion based strategies and approaches to address some of higher education’s more pressing campus climate issues of today, while providing multi-context and -issue frameworks for empowerment and transformation.

Submit your workshop proposals by Friday, December 14, and register to attend by Friday, January 25.