The College of Information and Communications will host the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Research Symposium on March 18 in the Hollings Program Room at Thomas Cooper Library. The annual event highlights the collaboration between faculty from the School of Information Science and School of Journalism and Mass Communications on the latest diversity-related research.
The symposium kicks off at 10:30 a.m. with a panel on diversity, equity and inclusion issues and issues facing library and information science. Panelists include:
- Jason Broughton, director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled
- Cearra Harris, iSchool doctoral student, Presidential Fellow
- Andrea Hickerson, director, SJMC, whose research interests include media literacy, deepfakes and misinformation.
- Jenna Spiering, assistant professor, iSchool, whose research includes the exploration and representation of gender and sexuality in young adult literature.
Michelle Martin, Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor in Children and Youth Services in the Information School at the University of Washington, will deliver the keynote address at noon.
From 2011 to June 2016, Martin was the inaugural Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy at the University of South Carolina. While at South Carolina, Martin and teen author/humanitarian Katie Stagliano co-wrote Katie’s Cabbage, a picture book about a 40-pound cabbage Katie grew that fed 275 people at a soup kitchen.
Martin publishes widely on issues of diversity in children’s literature and reviews dozens of children’s books annually. She is working on an grant called Project VOICE to create a toolkit to help librarians plan outreach with — not for — their communities with a social justice lens and through participatory design activities.
“We are excited to welcome back Dr. Michelle Martin, the iSchool’s inaugural Augusta Baker Chair, as the keynote speaker for the fourth CIC DEI Research Symposium," says Shirley Staples Carter, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion. "Ironically, our inaugural symposium keynote speaker in 2018 was Nicole Cooke, the current Augusta Baker Chair."
Previous keynote speakers include Andrew Billingsley, University of Alabama professor and nationally known sports identity scholar, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Magazine contributor and Pulitzer Prize winner, last year’s keynote speaker for the combined CIC DEI Research Symposium and SJMC Media and Civil Rights History Symposium.
The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Research Symposium is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required for lunch.