Prof. Houbing Song, UMBC

11:15-12:45 EST, Tue Nov 25, 2025, UMBC ITE 325b and online

From the Center for Social Justice Dialogue Directors

For some, the holidays are a season of joy, connection, and shared traditions. For others, they can be emotionally demanding, a careful dance around long-standing tensions, lingering conflicts, polarizing political disagreements, or generational wounds. A friend once told me, "I love my family, but three hours is all I can manage." Many of us prepare strategies, invite "buffers," or brace ourselves just to get through the meal.

Holiday tables have always held complexity. This year, though, many of us are feeling the weight of that complexity more intensely than ever.

As directors of UMBC's Center for Social Justice Dialogue, we want to offer our Retriever community tools to navigate this season with grounding, compassion, and intentionality. Whether you're entering difficult conversations about identity, politics, justice, or family history, the competencies of dialogic community building—critical self-reflection, cultural storytelling, generous listening, and loving accountability—can help guide your steps.

Here are some tips, tools, and practices to consider. 

Care + Critical Self-Reflection

Before we enter dialogue, we begin with ourselves. Critical self-reflection calls us to look inward at our identities, experiences, triggers, the stories we carry, and the assumptions we bring to the table.

Ask yourself:

• What am I feeling in my body as I anticipate this gathering?

• What topics or comments tend to activate strong reactions in me?

• What boundaries do I need to hold to maintain my well-being?

• How can I show up in ways that contribute to community care?

Radical self-care reminds us: you can opt in to dialogue, and you can opt out as an act of protection and love. If a conversation becomes unsafe, dehumanizing, or overwhelming, it is valid to pause or walk away. Your well-being matters.

Community care reminds us: how we show up impacts others. Our presence, tone, boundaries, and choices can contribute to a safer, more compassionate environment, even when disagreements arise. Community care invites us to hold ourselves with compassion and to consider the collective well-being of those around us.

Cultural Storytelling: Sharing Truths and Lived Experience

Dialogue deepens when we share the stories that shape us, not to prove a point, but to build understanding.

Cultural storytelling invites you to:

• speak from your own experiences rather than speak about others,

• connect present tensions to personal and community histories,

• illuminate the values, traditions, and identities that shape your worldview.

This practice helps shift conversations away from abstraction and toward authenticity.
It also supports relational connection—"Here is where I come from, and here is how it shapes what I believe."

Generous Listening & Practicing Generous Questioning

Generous listening is the heart of dialogic community building. It requires vulnerability, patience, wonder, and the willingness to pause your assumptions to consider someone else's perspective truly.

This kind of listening sounds like:

• "Help me understand how you came to that belief."

• "What experiences shaped that view for you?"

• "I hear your intention. Can we talk about the impact?"

Generous questioning invites deeper reflection rather than defensiveness. It widens the possibility of connection, especially across difference.

Loving Accountability: Offering Truth With Care

Dialogue doesn't mean avoiding conflict; it means engaging conflict with compassion and clarity.

Loving accountability includes:

• naming harmful language or behavior with respect and honesty,

• recognizing when someone's disagreement denies your humanity,

• setting boundaries without shaming,

• aligning your tone and words with your values.

You can say:

• "I want to stay in this conversation, but I need us to slow down."

• "That comment felt hurtful to me. Can we talk about why?"

• "Your intention matters, and so does the impact."

As James Baldwin reminds us, we can disagree and still love each other—unless that disagreement denies our right to exist.

Loving accountability holds us all to a higher standard, not to win, but to grow.

When You Are Triggered: Return to Your Body

If you feel overwhelmed, flooded, or frozen:

1. Breathe deeply to reconnect.

2. Body scan: Where is tension showing up?

3. Name your reaction if you want:

• "I'm noticing I'm having a strong reaction right now."

This is part of loving accountability, to both yourself and the relationship.

After the Dialogue: Ground, Reflect, and Replenish

When the conversation ends, ask yourself:

• What emotions linger in my body?

• What did I learn about myself?

• What support or community care do I need now?

• What joy practices can help me reset?

Choose rest. Hydrate. Journal. Move your body. Connect with people who affirm your dignity and wholeness.

In Community, With Courage

As you move through this holiday season, remember that dialogue is not about perfection. It is about showing up with intention, curiosity, and heart. Whether you are leaning into connection or protecting your peace, you remain part of a community dedicated to justice, equity, and humanity.

May you find moments of grounding, clarity, and care wherever you gather.

In community,

Ciara and Jasmine
The Center for Social Justice Dialogue Directors
UMBC | Division of Institutional Equity
#UMBCtogether #SocialJusticeDialogue

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to share an upcoming IRS rule under the SECURE 2.0 Act that may impact how you make retirement contributions.

What is changing?
Beginning January 1, 2026, employees who are age 50 or older and who make catch-up contributions to the USM Supplemental Retirement Plans will be required to make those contributions on a Roth (after-tax) basis if they earned $150,000 or more in wages from USM during the prior calendar year. Roth contributions grow tax-free, and qualified withdrawals in retirement are tax-free.

Who is impacted?
You will be affected by this change if all the following are true:

• You will be age 50 or older in 2026, and
• You elect to make catch-up contributions, and
• Your 2025 wages from USM are $150,000 or more.

Employees who earned less than $150,000 in the prior year may continue to make catch-up contributions on either a pre-tax or Roth basis, depending on plan options. This change applies only to catch-up contributions. Your regular retirement contributions are not affected and may continue to be made on either a pre-tax or Roth basis, depending on plan options.

Eligibility for the 2026 Roth catch-up requirement is based on wages earned in the 2025 calendar year.

2026 IRS Contribution Limits:

Contribution Type and 2026 Limit

• Standard Employee Contribution (Under 50)-$24,500
• Catch-up Contribution (Age 50+)-$8,000
• Enhanced Super Catch-Up (Age 60-63)-$11,250

What are catch-up contributions?

Catch-up contributions allow employees age 50 or older to save additional money for retirement above the regular annual IRS limits.

What do impacted employees need to do?

If you are affected, beginning in 2026, your catch-up contributions will automatically be treated as Roth (after-tax) contributions.

• No action is required at this time. Your Roth catch-up contributions will be identified separately within your retirement account.
• Because Roth contributions are made after taxes, impacted employees may see a difference in take-home pay.

If you wish to make a change to your deferral because of this update, you can review or change your contribution elections at any time through the Retirement@Work portal.  Your elections can be updated at any time during the year and will apply to future pay periods.

Contribution changes apply only to future pay periods and cannot be applied retroactively.

Participants in the Maryland State Employees Supplemental Retirement Plan (MSRP)
If you also participate in an MSRP plan, you will receive additional information directly from Empower, the plan's recordkeeper, explaining how SECURE 2.0 will apply to your MSRP contributions.

Why is this happening?
This change is required by federal law (SECURE 2.0 Act, Section 603) and applies to all employers that offer 401(k), 403(b), 457(b), and similar retirement plans.

We will keep you informed
Please look for additional information about this change from TIAA, Fidelity or Empower. If you have questions about catch-up contributions or your retirement plan elections, please contact HRBenefits@umbc.edu

This tribute is based entirely on reporting from Disability Scoop.

Alice Wong, the groundbreaking disability rights activist known for her wit, creativity, and willingness to shock systems into accountability, has died at the age of 51. Disability Scoop reports that she passed away following an infection at UCSF Hospital.

Wong was widely recognized for her radical imagination and her fearless approach to justice. She called herself a "cyborg oracle" and used technology, storytelling, and political strategy to confront ableism. Her national profile rose in 2013 when President Obama appointed her to the National Council on Disability. She later attended a White House reception through a telepresence robot, a moment that symbolized both her ingenuity and her insistence on access.

Disability Scoop highlights her influence as an author, podcaster, editor, and founder of the Disability Visibility Project. Her #CripTheVote initiative shifted political conversations, and her advocacy helped thousands of high risk Californians gain earlier vaccine access during the COVID pandemic. She also challenged policies like plastic straw bans that ignored disabled people's needs.

Wong received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 2024 for exposing systemic prejudice and expanding public understanding of disabled lives.

After her passing, a prewritten message was released. In it she wrote: "Hi everyone, it looks like I ran out of time. I have so many dreams that I wanted to fulfill and plans to create new stories for you." She reflected on her childhood, internalized ableism, and the power of storytelling. She urged the world to create more space for disabled culture, saying "You all, we all, deserve the everything and more in such a hostile, ableist environment."

Friends, leaders, and organizations described Wong as a visionary. Sandy Ho called her a "disabled oracle" who could see the future. San Francisco's mayor praised her courage. The American Association of People with Disabilities wrote that she made the "complexity of disabled experiences visible to the world."

Born in 1974 to immigrants from Hong Kong, Wong grew up in Indianapolis. She lived with a rare form of muscular atrophy, used a wheelchair from grade school, and relied on a BiPap ventilator. She wrote powerfully about her relationship to technology, calling her devices "bits of hardware" that grounded and liberated her.

Her writing explored how painful labels like "defect" and "abnormal" became sources of power and resistance through creativity. Her memoir, Year of the Tiger, blended vulnerability with cultural critique, imagination, and her belief in collective liberation through art and storytelling.

Disability Scoop notes that Wong was known for her red lipstick, black power chair, and gray ventilator. She wrote for Teen Vogue, The New York Times, and many other outlets. She addressed issues ranging from medical crowdfunding to national health policy. She spoke about the danger that political shifts posed for disabled people and insisted on a world where disabled joy and survival are prioritized.

Her final message, released by her family and shared by Disability Scoop, ended with words from Year of the Tiger: "The real gift any person can give is a web of connective tissue. If we love fiercely, our ancestors live among and speak to us through these incandescent filaments glowing from the warmth of memories."

Rest in power, Alice Wong. You changed the world and expanded what is possible. Visit the Disability Visibility website she created here.

Code Switch (NPR) Podcast (12/6) Honoring Alice Wong

Read her work: 

• Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire
• Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life
• Disability Visibility: First‑Person Stories from the Twenty‑First Century
• Disability Visibility (Adapted for Young Adults): 17 First‑Person Stories for Today
• Resistance & Hope: Essays by Disabled People
• Visit the Society of Disabled Oracles - a creation of Alice Wong, Aimi Hamraie and Jen White Johnson.