The School of Education will host the seventh annual Conference on Equity and Social Justice (ESJ) on Saturday, March 1, at the Sheraton Syracuse University Conference Center. The theme of the 2014 conference is Social Justice Education Out of Bounds: New Frameworks and Alliances.
The ESJ Conference is open to any interested faculty member, staff person, student or community member. The fee is $75 for faculty and $25 for students and community members, which includes all conference sessions and keynotes, onsite garage parking, breakfast and lunch, and the evening reception (with cash bar).
“The conference is an excellent opportunity to discuss, network and organize to democratize education in the U.S.,” says Derek Ford, a doctoral student in Cultural Foundations of Education who is serving as a conference director this year. “There will be a diverse range of pressing educational topics addressed from a variety of critical perspectives.”
Conference keynote speakers are Peter McLaren and Brian Jones. Professor McLaren is a scholar and activist recognized as a representative of social justice education and critical pedagogy worldwide. He is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Jones is a teacher, actor and activist in New York. He has taught elementary grades for almost a decade in New York City’s public schools, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Urban Education at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
The lunch will feature a performance from Debangshu Roychoudhury and Lauren M. Gardner from hip hop group The Movement. Together, Roychoudhury and Gardner have authored a book chapter on misdiagnosis as it relates to the hip hop community entitled “Taking back our minds: hip hop psychology’s (HHP) call for a renaissance, action, and liberatory use of psychology in education” (Peter Lang, 2012).
The conference is co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Intergroup Dialogue, Democratizing Knowledge, Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee and Cultural Foundations of Education.