2025 CONFERENCE

“Disruptive Praxis: Transcending Boundaries and Building Bridges”

As campuses worldwide witness and take part in collective actions such as sit-ins, encampments, and hunger strikes, reflecting on the right history of student activism provides valuable insights for our ongoing discussion about the effectiveness of various organizing strategies and the precedents set by students. Our conference focuses on

  • Upholding the vitality of the growing momentum in student activism and action, emphasizing the importance of community care and uplifting voices of those whose survival is tied with the liberation of others

  • Confronting the multifaceted challenges encountered by student organizers by prioritising the establishment of meaningful relationships and effectively addressing the boundaries and capacities we often confront along the way.

We believe that true liberation and transformative change stem from fostering connections rooted in empathy, solidarity, and shared vision. This conference is designed to strengthen the foundations of community organizing by leveraging insights from historical and contemporary movements. It will foster critical inquiry and fuel the capacities of student organizing through a series of workshops, training, and panels. Join us for this engaging experience on February 21-23, 2025. More information is to come on specific speakers and panelists!


Applications are now closed! Thank you to all those that applied, and we look forward to seeing you on Northwestern’s campus soon. Be on the lookout for an email from NUCHR in the upcoming months!

Keynote 1, Demita Frazier: The Practice of Creating Capacity in the Crisisworld

Opening Keynote (Friday, 7:00 pm — 8:45 pm)

Demita Frazier, J.D., has more than 50 years’ experience as an activist, radical thought leader, educator, and organizer, and as a Black feminist theorist and community builder. She is a co-founder of the Black radical feminist Combahee River Collective, and a co-author of the Combahee River Collective Statement, considered a ground-breaking Black feminist treatise that introduced the innovative analytical concept of intersectionality and has, since its publication in 1977, laid the foundation for the emergence and development of global Black feminist movements. She is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law, and has subsequently worked as a lecturer and educator on issues of cultural competence in the professional spheres of law, medicine, environmental advocacy, and other fields. Frazier has lectured widely on Black intersectional feminism, in numerous settings, nationally and internationally.

Her interest in mentoring and coaching Black women and girls evolved from her experiences as a young working class Black woman given the opportunities to assume leadership roles in a number of community based organizations, notably in the non-profit organizations she served. The lack of mentoring, and the challenging and frustrating encounters with structural racism and misogyny inspired her to apply her analytical and organizing skills to the project of essentially creating a mentoring model based on a Black feminist ideas of mutual aid, empowerment and the centrality of the role of Black women as community leaders.

Frazier began developing her mentoring and coaching models in earnest in the 1990s, while working for numerous woman-owned and led diversity consulting groups in the greater Boston area. Studying organizational development and systems analysis while working with clients exploring the burgeoning diversity, equity and inclusion programs, in both for- and non-profit spheres, gave her ample opportunity to collaborate with clients who saw the value of mentoring as they attempted to diversify their organizations. Ultimately she began designing innovative coaching models based explicitly on Black feminist precepts aligned with approaches coming out of political cross-cultural organizing groups. In relational collaboration with her clients, she created a model that is practical, open sourced and constantly evolving to meet the varied needs of Black women in the diaspora. Her work has been recognized by the clients she served as innovative and affirming in ways that supported their growth, leadership and their capacity to live and thrive as whole people.

Keynote 2, Eman Abdelhadi: What’s Next for the Palestine Solidarity Movement on US Campuses?

Closing Keynote (Sunday, 4:00 pm — 5:30 pm)

Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer and writer based in Chicago. She is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States, and has been cited by NPR, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and other outlets. She co-wrote the revolutionary sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 (Common Notions Press 2022), and she writes a regular column on Palestine and politics for In These Times Magazine. She is a long-time organizer in the movement for Palestinian liberation and is currently active through Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine at UChicago.

Panel, Past and Present of Activism

(Saturday, 10:00 am — 12:00 pm)

Moderator

As a learning scientist and ethnographer of education, Shirin Vossoughi is concerned with understanding the social, cultural, political and ethical dimensions of human learning in ways that contribute to projects of educational justice. To this end, she studies the forms of pedagogical mediation, thinking, relationality and development that take shape within settings that cultivate transformative learning, particularly with migrant, immigrant, diasporic and other non-dominant youth. Her work seeks to understand micro-interactional processes of human learning as tied to broader forms of social change, and the potentials of learning environments as lived arguments for the possible.his program of research requires conceptual, methodological and artistic tools that treat educational inequity as a social and historical problem, illuminate the empirical texture of expansive pedagogies, and construct a wider view of learning as tied to students’ life-worlds and cultural ways of knowing. She draws on ethnographic and interactional approaches to examine the specific qualities of learning environments that support young people to develop complex forms of disciplinary practice while questioning and expanding disciplinary boundaries, often through learning interactions that embrace their full personhood. Her current projects look closely at student and teacher learning in the context of reading, writing and STEAM domains, with a particular focus on the possibilities and complexities of political education. She has taught in a range of educational settings and take a collaborative approach to research and design, partnering with teachers, families, and students to study the conditions that foster educational dignity and change.

Panelists

Cameron PajYeeb Yang's (they/them/nws) is a second-generation Southeast Asian HMoob American Queer, Trans and Non-Binary educator, community organizer and advocate. They live with their partner and their two cats on the occupied lands of Mni Sota Makoce (Minnesota), where the original Indigenous stewards of these lands are the Dakota people. Due to the HMoob communities' complex political positioning and relationship with the US empire, Cam feels a deep responsibility to organize and stand in solidarity with other communities to abolish the pol(ICE) and all forms of US militarism. Most recently, Cam worked closely with HMoob elders to strategically advance the #JusticeforYiaXiong campaign, which sought justice for the police murder of Yia Xiong, a 64-year-old HMoob elder who had a hearing disability. Their organizing, direct action, and relationality skills have been generously shaped and cared for by Minnesota and Wisconsin's Black and Southeast Asian Queer and Trans communities. Additionally, Cam is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities in Education Policy and Leadership, where their research interests meet at the intersections of Critical Race Theory, Black Radical Traditions, Decolonial Scholarship, and Critical Refugee Studies. They hope to co-create knowledge and future possibilities with other HMoob educational community organizers, where HMoob youth and their families' educational needs, wants, and dreams are met.

Dr. Sumun L. Pendakur, founder of Sumun Pendakur Consulting, is a seasoned, national expert and sought-after speaker on diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has served as a thought partner, capacity-building trainer, and speaker for over 300 higher education institutions, associations, and corporations. Sumi began her journey as an undergraduate student 30 years ago, involved in and eventually leading the successful, multi-year struggle for Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Sumi’s work and research over the last two decades focus on helping organizations build capacity for social justice and racial equity by empowering individuals at all levels to be transformational agents of change in their spheres of influence. A former Board member of NADOHE (the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education), Sumi has been recognized as one of the top 35 women in higher education by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine. Sumi is the multilingual daughter of immigrants, a wife and a mommy of two little firecrackers, was raised in the Midwest, and now calls Los Angeles, CA, home.

Victor Goode earned a B.A. from Northwestern University in 1970 and a J.D. from Rutgers Law School in 1973. He later became the National Director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers from 1978 to 1982. NCBL was the legal arm of the Black Revolutionary Movement and brought a radical perspective to the pressing legal issues of the day. He was one of the founders of the Affirmative Action Coordinating Center and worked on the legal team that filed amicus briefs in three landmark affirmative action cases (Bakke, Weber, Fullilove and Grutter.) In 1983 he was a founding faculty member of the CUNY School of Law and taught there until his retirement in 2020. He also taught in the Urban Legal Studies Program at the City College of New York and as Visiting Clinical Professor at Columbia University Law School where he taught in the Fair Housing Clinic. He has given congressional testimony on police misconduct and racially motivated violence and created a unique course called “Contemplative Practice and the Law” where he trained lawyers to integrate meditation into their practice.

Workshop, Art and Activism

(Sunday, 10:00 am — 12:00 pm)

Guest Biography

Mx. Yaffa (They/She) is a disabled, autistic, trans, queer, Muslim, and Indigenous Palestinian. As Executive Director of the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), they have earned multiple awards for their transformative work on displacement, decolonization, and equity. Yaffa is also an engineer, peer support specialist, death doula, birthing doula, and yoga teacher. They are the author of Blood Orange, a poetry collection on displacement and colonization; editor of Inara: Light of Utopia, an anthology by queer and trans-Palestinians; and author of Desecrated Poppies a poetry and essay collection about the connections between anti-trans and anti-Palestinian politics. Their new book, Letters from a Living Utopia, will be released in 2025. Yaffa is also a visual artist, showcasing their work worldwide at festivals and art galleries.

Workshop 2, Practicing Tatreez

(Sunday, 1:30 pm — 3:00 pm)

Tatreez is a traditional Palestinian embroidery that utilizes colorful stitchwork with symbols and motifs depicting different parts of Palestinian life and culture. Tatreez is the art of Palestinian embroidery, integral to the identity and history of Palestinians. Tatreez was originally a form of inspiration for many Palestinians who wove it in their clothing and fabric, with motifs unique to different regions and villages. However, during the forced displacement of Palestinians beginning in 1948, tatreez would become a pivotal part of resistance and an expression of heritage as the Palestinian flag was declared illegal for display. During the workshop, delegates will have the opportunity to practice this art, and understand the preservation of tradition and the language of symbols within these living archives.

The workshop and accompanying presentation will be led by NUCHR’s programming co-chairs.