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Building and Maintaining Inclusive BIPOC Spaces: Talk Excerpt I want you to imagine walking into a room and feeling your whole body unclench; not because it’s quiet, not because you’re alone, but because you know this space was built with you in mind. Now imagine what it would mean for every BIPOC client, student, or community member to feel that exhale. Today, we’re talking about how to build that kind of space and what it takes to keep it safe. The task of building a BIPOC

Course: Introduction to Social Justice Frameworks Instructor: Stephanie Jean-Baptiste, Ph.D. Time: MWF Course Description This course introduces students to critical race theory, decolonial theory, and critical class analysis as main Social Justice Frameworks. Through case studies, media, and community-based examples, students examine the roots of inequality and explore strategies for collective liberation. By the end of the course, learners will be able to apply these framew

Foundations of Social Justice Week 1 | Online, Asynchronous Module Overview This module introduces students to foundational concepts of social justice and establishes a shared analytical language for understanding power, inequality, and structural oppression in the United States. Students will examine how social justice frameworks emerge from lived experience, and social movement. This module lays the groundwork for applying frameworks throughout the course. Learning Objecti

Supporting a PhD Student Managing Academic and Business Demands Client Scenario: A PhD student completing his dissertation in Chicago while simultaneously running a growing business in Philadelphia asked for guidance on structuring his time. His main concern was balancing the intellectual demands of dissertation writing with the day-to-day responsibilities of entrepreneurship. He was unsure how to create a schedule that honored both commitments without burning out. Advising S

There are certain questions that follow Black people wherever we go. Questions such as: “Where are you from?”, often followed by “No, where are you really from?”. It’s an interrogation that communicates a disbelief or denial of citizenship, and that coerces the person to prove themselves as a worthy citizen. It is a not so harmless demand to participate in a test of legitimacy. Though every person of color is expected to participate in this test, no answer is ever satisfactor

Conversations about inequality often oversimplify Black life into numerical outcomes that frame communities as perpetual victims rather than people with power, agency, and cultural resilience. These conversations tend to fixate on poverty, incarceration, health disparities, and graduation rates, yet deeper engagement with peer-reviewed research shows these outcomes are not reflections of cultural deficit or individual failure. Instead, they are predictable consequences of his

How can you explain diaspora? Is it simply what comes from knowing what it feels like to leave home behind, and build it elsewhere? Is it in the communities we form? Is it in the people we find along the way of our travels? Or is it being connected through webs of culture? There’s a particular feeling that washes over me when I step into a place I’ve never been…but somehow recognize. When the air of a country I've never been to smells familiar like my body recognizes being so