|
|
The State of the African-American Professoriate Conference:
"Environmental (In) Justice: Katrina and Beyond "
|
Conference Program Outline
| Thursday, April 20, 2006 |
8:30-12:00 Registration
|
9:00 - College Scholars Day
Location: 138
Facilitator: Tanya Washington
Note: Students from surrounding high schools will be introduced to a professional conference experience and the College. Ramapo College Students will populate a panel for the young scholars to question after which the scholars will participate in the morning professional sessions. After lunch, the students will return to their respective campuses. |
10:00 - Welcome and Conference Overview
Location: SC 136
Comments: Henry Vance Davis, Professor of History and Dean, School of Social Science and Human Services, Ramapo College of New Jersey. |
10:15-11:30 - Essays on Katrina: An American Laboratory
Location: SC 136
Moderator: Henry Vance Davis, Professor of History and Dean, School of Social Sciences and Human Services,
Ramapo College of New Jersey
Panel:
Derrick Boone, Director, Bergen County Relief Center
Mitch Kahn, Professor and Director of Social Work, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Marta Vides, Professor and Convener of Law and Society, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Vernon C. Walton, Vice Chair Board of Trustee, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Warner Wada, Professor of Painting, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Behzad Yagmaian, Professor of Political Economy, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Note The questions highlighted by Katrina continue to confound our nation. These questions inform our dialogue about the Criminal Justice System, the Social Services we deliver, and the educational materials we have at our disposal. They challenge our religious beliefs. They expose the politics of our economy, and they recall historic constructions of race, class, and gender. With Katrina, these questions took on profound graphic images. We saw pain that pierced the nation’s consciousness. We witnessed performance that painted a divide many thought long erased. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, Americans engaged a library of information that challenged out Nation to reconsider its promise and performance in ways that can not be ignored.
The Katrina: An American Laboratory (KAL) Project sought to capture a portion of that library, engage it, analyze it, develop it, and turn it into actions that contribute to change in our community; i.e., a change in knowledge, educational materials, research opportunities, information, and sensibilities.
This session will present comments from the report Essays on Katrina: An American Laboratory prepared by the seven member away team that traveled to New Orleans to undertake the above mentioned project. |
11:30-1:00 - By Executive Order: Environmental Justice in the Regulatory and Legal Realm
Location: SC 138
Moderator: Rachel Godsil, Professor of Law, Seton Hall School of Law
Panel:
Sheila Foster, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics, Fordham University
Veronica Eady, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest
Terry Wesley, New York/New Jersey Regional Environmental Justice Coordinator, EPA
Maria Franco-Spera, EJ Coordinator, New Jersey DEP
Note: President Clinton’s Executive Order 12898 serves as the primary government tool empowering legal and regulatory action to prevent environmental injustice. This session will consider the questions: How have environmental agencies used this tool and to what ends? Using the executive order and civil court strategies, have we moved significantly toward ending issues of environmental injustice? |
1:15-3:15 - Planning Committee Luncheon
Location: Pavilion
Mistress of Ceremonies - Kathy Zeno, Professor of Marketing, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Africana Institute Mission - Tilahun Sineshaw, Professor of Psychology, School of Social Science and Human Services, Ramapo College of New Jersey
National Board Introductions - Kambon Camara, Vice President SAP National Board and Professor of Psychology, Bloomsburg University
Awards and Recognition - Venus Hewing, Counselor Center for Health & Counseling Services, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Lunch
Introduction of Keynote Speaker - Mike Edelstein, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director Environmental Institute, Ramapo College of New Jersey
 “Environmental Injustice and Sustainability-New Challenges in a Post-Katrina World”
Robert Bullard, Ware Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University
Note: Dr. Bullard was described by Earth First: Journal as “one of the pioneering scholars and activists in the environmental Justice movement.” Many credit him with originating the phrase “environmental racism.” Dr. Bullard is the author or editor of three landmark texts, Confronting Environmental Racism (1993), Dumping on Dixie (1994) and Unequal Protection (1996). He has served on the Environmental Protection Agency's National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology, offering direction on complaints filed under the anti-discriminatory Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. |
3:30-4:45 - Dangerous Discussions, Homogenous Classes: How do you engage all students
Location: SC 136
Co-Facilitators:
Phil McLewin, Professor of Economics and Director Faculty Resource Center, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Professor of Sociology, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Contributors:
Jill Weiss, Professor of Law and Society, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Behzad Yaghmaian, Professor of Political Economy, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Note: Have you been in a situation where the topic involves a "dangerous discussion," say around racism in hiring practices, and where the one or two isolated black students in you class of 25 duck for cover? Or, have you brought up a current event involving fundamentalist Islam, and the one student with an Arab appearance shrinks down in her seat? The same might be said of Sexual orientation.
We have made progress in diversifying the college's student body, but the truth of the matter remains that many classes still have relatively few minority students. Rightly so, many are tired of being the spokesperson for "their" race, nationality, religion, class or even gender.
Under these circumstances, how do we engage all our students, including the few and isolated minorities in such dangerous, yet important, discussions? |
6:30 - Board Reception
|
|
| Friday, April 21, 2005 |
9:00 - 12:00 Concepts of Environmental Justice and Their Place in the
Curriculum:
A discussion and sharing about applicability of EJ to curricular
contexts, appropriate resources, and different success stories in
examining EJ.
Room: Pavilion I
Michael R. Edelstein, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Institute for
Environmental Studies and School of Social Science and Human Services,
Ramapo College of NJ.
Sharing and discussion by faculty participants |
9:30 - 10:45 - Considering the Implications of Katrina
Location: Pavilion I
Moderator
Ronald Dorris, Drexel Class of 58 Professor of English and African American Studies, Xavier University
Panel:
Carol M. McClain, Director of Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness, Allen University
Marcella McCoy, Professor of American Studies, Philadelphia University
Peter Heinze, Professor of Psychology, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Note: Director McClain's paper "South Carolina's Schools Respond to the Children of Hurricane Katrina," addresses questions related to the treatment of evacuees from Louisiana in South Carolina. In particular, it looks at how the education system responded and was impacted by the evacuees.
Professor McCoy's paper is titled "A Case Study in Experiential Learning about Class, Gender, and Ethnicity." This presentation details projects in three courses where students interacted in varied economic, gender separate, and ethnic environments to bring broader course concepts to life. Learn how riding city buses, collecting oral histories, teaching in underserved schools, and teaching poetry impacted students' perspectives.
Professor Heinze’s papers is titled “Why White People Love kanYe west and George Bush: A psychoanalytic group relations analysis of racism post-Katrina.” This paper will describe principles of group relations theory as they apply to the events surrounding rapper kanYe West’s pronouncement that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” |
11:00-12:15 - Environment and Intellectual Context
Location: Pavilion I
Moderator: Ben Wilson, Professor of Black Studies, Western Michigan University
Panel:
Henry Vance Davis, Professor of History, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Kassahun Berhanu, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Addis Ababa University
Alma J. Carten, Professor of Social Work, New York University
Note: Professor Davis’s paper, “The Africana Professoriate and Katrina: Obligations, Tradition, and Value,” will address the Katrina disaster and the challenges and opportunities for the Africana professoriate.
Professor Berhanu's paper, “Towards the Africanization of the African Curriculum," considers the post-colonial school curriculum in Africa that is characterized by its decidedly European nature since the so-called modern school was introduced into the continent a century or so ago. In other words, both the content and pedagogy of the curriculum in African schools are defined by an Eurocentric philosophy. The purpose of this study is to pointedly provide evidences for the above claim from what transpires within African schools and suggest steps that would lead to Africanize the curriculum. |
12:15-1:30 - Brown Bag Lunch
Location: SC136
Facilitator: Warner Wada, Professor of Painting, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Note: Participants can bring their lunch and have the opportunity to view and discuss the rough cut of the Ramapo Katrina Away Team Video produced and directed by Professor Wada. |
1:30-2:45 - The Legacy of Ford’s Waste Disposal: Paint Sludge and the Ramapough Lenape Indians
Location: Pavilion III
Moderator
Sue Scher, Professor of Social Work, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Panel
Anthony Jay Van Dunk, Chief, Ramapough-Lenape Nation
Walt Van Dunk, Former Chief, Ramapough-Lenape Nation (invitation)
Pat Osterhoudt
Cynthia Fountain (invited)
Robert Spiegel, Executive Director, Edison Wildlife Association, Inc. (Invited)
Note: A panel discussion on the Ramapough Lenape Indians’ experience living in an environment contaminated with waste products from the former Ford Mahwah Plant. |
3:00-5:00 - Environment, Erasure, and the Katrina Disaster: From Destruction to Development and Survival
Location: Pavilion 1& 2
Moderator: TBA
Panel
Ronald Dorris, Drexel Class of 58 Professor of English and African American Studies, Xavier University
Jerry Persaud, Lecturer Department of Communication and Media, State University of New York, New Paltz
Karl Johnson, Professor of History, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Nekeisha Bugges, Katrina Survivor
Note: Professor Dorris’s paper looks at the question of the human condition and experience of hurricane Katrina as a man-made disaster compounded with elements of nature. The central focus is to see Katrina in historical, human and natural terms and not nearly as an act of nature.
Professor Persaud’s paper examines the environment in urban America as an extension of the material conditions of existence with racial consequences. Hurricane Katrina, the social and economic conditions of the urban poor in New Orleans and other cities and the ongoing environmental disaster in many inner-cities are not treated as isolated events but as structural consequences of a long history of racial ecology. Katrina made visible these conditions.
Professor Johnson will facilitate a round table discussion on Katrina. This session will be used as an avenue to discuss other issues regarding the State of African Americans in the United States. The session will be open to students, scholars, and the community.
Katrina survivor Nekeisha Bugges, will share her story of survival and relocation. |
Friday Night in New York - “TBA” (35.00 admission)
Transportation provided from Friends Circle
Dinner and entertainment to follow |
| Saturday, April 22, 2005 |
10:00 - Break Out sessions
Location: Pavilion 1
|
12:00 - Woodbury Commons Shopping Trip
|
|
|
