This semester's Culture Conversations are designed to bring staff and faculty together to reflect, share experiences, and explore how relationships shape campus culture. Through facilitated conversations, this series will create spaces for collective sensemaking around connection, care, and belonging in our everyday work.
Session Descriptions
1. Engaging Digital Spaces: Join us for an interactive, conversation-driven exploration of how digital environments can strengthen community, expand access, and support more affordable and inclusive engagement on campus.
Facilitated by Dr. Olivia M. Copeland
Olivia M. Copeland (she/they) is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Kansas. She has worked across higher education contexts, from residential curriculum to LGBTQ+-centered work. Their scholarship centers on the role of identity, power, privilege, and digital spaces in the lives of undergraduate students, using critical interdisciplinary frameworks. View event details here: https://my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/doie/events/149150
2. Sustaining Transformative Relationships: Join us for a facilitated conversation on cultivating relational practices that strengthen connection, reduce harm, and support more sustainable ways of working together.
Facilitated by Janine Silvas
Janine Silvas (they/them/theirs) is imagining what abolitionist praxis looks like in higher education and in daily life. A fat, queer, nonbinary Pilipino American doctoral candidate in Higher Education at the University of Arizona, they write from over a decade in residence life and student affairs, alongside commitments to care, relationality, and justice. Their current work illuminates how student affairs professionals navigate carceral logics and seek more just ways of being with one another. View event details here: https://my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/doie/events/149151
Register for sessions here: https://umbc.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9YzNS55VsUBvkuG
To request accommodation(s) or to inquire about event accessibility, please get in touch with each program office directly. All sessions are open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal or state law and the University's nondiscrimination policy.