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https://www.careereco.com/Fair/EventDetails?fairId=cec1973e-6ef6-4926-9546-ab1a0155395b
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Dear Colleagues,
I am grateful to work at UMBC, with its commitment to equity and inclusion. Our leaders issued a superb statement about the inequality that videos of police and community violence and the disproportionate harm to Black, Indigenous, People of Color from COVID19 have made so visible. Grief and rage are our immediate responses. The continued centuries of racial inequality in the United States take a toll. We hope you are taking care of yourselves, and that those you love are as well as can be.
Events affect us unequally. Some of us see our loved ones in Ahmed Arbery, Chris Cooper, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or in ill family members and those working on the front lines of the pandemic. Others know someone like Amy Cooper, or wonder whether we do. Unequal access to housing, loans, schools, health insurance, sick pay and too-frequent, dangerous encounters with police are daily life for Black, Indigenous, People of Color. White people in the United States can often choose whether to recognize inequality, and what to discuss with friends and family. White people can choose to be too uncomfortable to discuss racism, and avoid it. Black, Indigenous, People of Color can’t. Ignoring racism allows benefits of whiteness to appear as if from nowhere.
The United States political system is much more than one elected official. Myriad civil servants and people in civic organizations and businesses have opportunities to find ways to improve what we do. Anne Arundel County has just declared racism a public health issue. We want the study of public policy to enable hope, and to include our grief and rage in our hope. At its best, hope is a practical emotion: we expect better outcomes when we take steps to bring them about. Taking steps requires recognizing racism and inequality. Inequality--recognizing it, ameliorating it--is at the heart of studying public policy. We thank you for your work and commitment.
We invite you to continue to work with Nancy Miller and Zoë McLaren, who work on health disparities; with Pam Bennett and Jane Lincove who work on schooling, race and inequality; with Usman Ali and Lauren Edwards, our colleagues who work on policing and accountability; Yusuke Kuwayama who works on valuing environmental benefits; John Rennie Short, Fernando Tormos Aponte and myself, who work on inequity, disaster, social movements, and the politics of law. Multiple affiliate faculty are also committed to anti-racist work, including in Sociology, Anthropology and Public Health; History; Economics, Education, and Geography and Environmental Systems.
Please don't hesitate to write to share thoughts or concerns.
My very best wishes.
Susan Sterett
]]>Black lives matter. Everywhere. On the street, in the home, in the academy. While racism manifests in different ways in different places as it intersects with other forms of oppression, we believe that every instance is a manifestation of the same structural and systemic problems. Universities are not insulated from them. Our university is not insulated from them. We see them, and will work continually to make them visible to those who don’t.
Although the current structure of the affinity groups compartmentalizes faculty and staff into single identity categories, we believe that the issues of inequality and marginalization in the university must be thought, and addressed, intersectionally. In our advocacy work and in the programming we sponsor, we will insist on this approach.
The CAHSS Women’s Faculty Network was formed, initially, to help recruit women faculty to UMBC. We have always believed that model is insufficient, in part because it implies that the work of inclusion at the university is complete in the process of hiring. It is not.
We will continue to expand the purpose of this network by centering its programming around mentorship and community-building. We will strive to create a space on our campus where faculty of color, women faculty, and LGBTQ faculty feel safe, supported, and inspired. And we will work to build an environment where all women faculty can chart the intellectual, professional, and personal paths that are meaningful to them.
Our work is far from done, and we believe that UMBC has much work ahead of it to redress problems like harassment, overwork, undercompensation, burnout, tokenization, isolation, and professional frustration that faculty of color, women faculty, and LGBTQ faculty so regularly encounter. It has been and will continue to be our primary commitment to insist that we must confront these issues and to bring them to the attention of those in positions of power at our university, to remind them that these are signs of systemic problems rather than individual misfortune.
We write to let you all know that the WFN will remain committed to resisting models of success that amount to hacks of the neoliberal logic of the university, as this kind of individual advancement may ultimately perpetuate the systems that disenfranchise everyone who isn’t white, male, cis, straight, able-bodied, and well-resourced. And we write to thank each one of you for helping us to build this network of care and support, and to affirm our collective commitment to push UMBC to rise to its guiding principles of equity and inclusive excellence.
In partnership and respect,
Tamara and Rebecca
Investigators identified as “key personnel”, in Public Health Service funded research (e.g., NIH) are reminder they are required to complete the CITI training in Conflict of Interest (COI) prior to
UMBC receiving funding from a PHS awarding agency. COI training is valid for four years.
For more information, go to https://research.umbc.edu/conflict-of-interest-training-2/,
The annual MCC Career Fair is your best chance to meet and network with more than 100 employers from various industries including the government, private, and non-profit sectors.
Students will have the capability to: