The Women Of Color In The Academy Conference this year is being hosted by Northeastern University, in Boston, MA. Northeastern University is a research university built on a tradition of engagement within the world. This tradition leads to a distinct approach to both education and research. It also makes a perfect location for this prestigious conference.
The Women of Color in the Academy Conference offers faculty women of color the opportunity to learn, and share strategies for career advancement. The conference facilitates a more diverse academy by enhancing the timely career progression of faculty, but also of post-doctoral scholars and graduate students. Attendees have the opportunity to participate in a variety of interactive and hands-on workshops. Additionally, networking with other women of color throughout the Greater Boston region.
This year’s workshops include topics such as Intersectionality, The Power of Effective and Authentic Mentoring Relationships, Align your Vision with your Voice, Mentoring for Resistance and Resilience, and Re-strategizing Career Advancement.
The conference planning committee is led by co-chair Professors Nicole N. Aljoe and Shalanda Baker. Together, they guide the concept and theme for the yearly conference, as well as orchestrate other yearly events.
Professor Aljoe is an associate professor of English and African American Studies. Her fields of specialization are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black Atlantic Literature. This includes the Slave Narrative, Postcolonial Studies, and the eighteenth-century British Novel. Professor Aljoe’s recent publications include “Caribbean Slave Narratives” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Slave Narratives.
Professor Shalanda Baker also recently joined the Northeastern faculty in 2017. She works closely with colleagues in Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute, linking it to the School’s Center for Law, Innovation, and Creativity. She teaches courses at the law school in addition to the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Professor Baker served as an Air Force officer prior to her honorable discharge under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. She also became a vocal advocate for the repeal of the policy.
The conference keynote speakers, panelists, and workshop leaders were carefully selected for their varied experience and expertise. The goal is for participants to walk away with new strategies and practices. This education will allow for the implementation of the participants own action plans.
Professor Woo, a leading expert on the Anglo-American legal system and the Chinese socialist legal system, teaches Civil Procedure, Administrative Law, and Comparative Law at Northeastern University. She has received many prestigious grants from a variety of organizations. In particular, the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, and is on the Senior Scholar Roster for the Fulbright Scholars Program.
Under the Fulbright auspices, she is partnering with faculty at the University of Florence in Italy to develop a series of comparative law seminars. Professor Woo is the co-editor of East Asian Law: Universal Norms and Local Culture and Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China. Additionally, she is also co-author of Litigating in America: Civil Procedure in Context. Moreover, as a member of the prestigious American Law Institute and the American Bar Foundation. Participants can look forward to her remarks as the day begins.
France Winddance Twine is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, an ethnographer, a feminist race theorist and a documentary filmmaker. Chiefly, this research focuses on multiple dimensions of inequality. Twine’s research has depth and breadth. Her research interests include girlhood, racism and anti-racism, sociology of the body, assisted reproductive technologies, and occupational discrimination. Furthermore, Twine has conducted extensive field research in countries including Brazil, Britain, and the United States.
The concept of racial literacy is one of Twine’s major theoretical contributions. In her earlier research on British interracial families, Twine examined how white English and Irish women developed racial literacy as they negotiated and conceptualized racism (and anti-racism). Uniquely as members of interracial families and as the parents of children fathered by Black men. This research was published in A White Side of Black Britain: interracial intimacy and racial literacy (2010).
Currently, she is the author and editor of 10 books and has more than 72 publications including single-authored books, journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, essays, and reviews. Twine is currently writing a series of articles about women of diverse backgrounds employed in the San Francisco Tech industry. She is now working on a new project that focuses on the experiences of Asian workers in Silicon Valley with Meeta Rani Jha.
