Several members of the CSU community will be presenters at the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity, being held May 31 to June 4 in San Francisco.

The conference, known as NCORE, is one of the most prominent and comprehensive national forums on race and ethnicity in higher education.

Susana Muñoz, an assistant professor in the School of Education who recently published a book on undocumented students’ activism, will help present a major workshop on June 1 titled, “Beyond the Surface: Problematizing Systemic Barriers for Undocumented College Students and Creating Action for Change.”

“Educating undocumented students is a topic that has elicited much response in recent years,” the conference program states. “Debates about the economic and moral issues often raise the discussion to a level that causes heated exchanges. While these discussions are important in addressing the issue, it is imperative to gain a deeper understanding of how xenophobia and racism are structurally institutionalized in order to more fully grasp the challenges undocumented students face on our college campuses.”

Muñoz joined CSU in 2015 as part of a cluster hire focused on diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Education. She will also be doing a book signing at the conference.

Stephanie Zee, coordinator of diversity and inclusion for Residence Life in Housing and Dining, will be one of the presenters of a “Supervising Staff of Color” concurrent workshop on June 1.

“Professionals of color may find themselves caught between a professional and personal response to offensive language, bias incidents or managing daily occurrences of microaggression,” the NCORE program says. “Supervision of racially privileged staff members can also contribute to the complex struggle. The same goes for staff of color supervised by a racially privileged person. This presentation offers a space where participants will gain insights into the successes and challenges of being a supervisor of color, supervising staff of color, acknowledge how being a supervisor of color may impact supervision styles and skills, examine possible connections between campus climate and professional development, and share personal reflections of best practices.”

And Carmen Rivera, director of student experience at INTO CSU and a faculty member for the Social Justice Training Institute, will help present two sessions at the conference. On May 31, she will co-present a pre-conference session entitled “Social Justice Training Institute: The Student Experience.” This day-long session will provide an intensive developmental opportunity for students to examine the complex dynamics of oppression and to develop strategies to foster positive change on campuses and communities. The goal of the session is to provide students with an intensive laboratory experience where they can focus on their own learning and development to increase their multicultural competencies as social justice change agents.

On June 2, she will co-present a concurrent workshop titled, “Queer Women of Color Engaging Self-Care as an Act of Leadership.”

“This session will examine the ways in which three self-identified queer women of color (QWOC) at predominantly white institutions engage in self-care as a form of leadership,” the program states. “Inspired by bell hooks’ Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self Recovery and Chicana Feminist Epistemology, this session will discuss the process of recovery, healing, and liberation for QWOC through personal narratives that illustrate strategies of personal and collective resistance and resilience.”

NCORE is a program of the Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies in the University of Oklahoma’s College of Continuing Education.