The fifth annual Critical Social Justice explored opportunities for building individual and collective resistance and resilience. Events throughout the week, the theme of Rise, challenged us to think about how we can do better, do more, and persist in doing it when it comes to working towards positive social change and activism. Take a look back at some of highlights from throughout the week and catch up on anything you missed!

Leading up to the week, we were SUPER PUMPED for Critical Social Justice to get started – and so was the rest of UMBC!

You can see many of the other “I rise for…”

We kicked of CSJ on Monday with Chalking for Change on Academic Row before CSJ 101.

While people were writing what they rise for outside, CSJ 101 was taking place directly inside where students, faculty, and staff were encouraged to learn about Resistance and Resilience in social change and activism.

Those who attending brainstormed what they resisted for and how they can practice resilience.

Tuesday brought our keynote speaker, Dr. Adrienne Keene of the Cherokee nation to UMBC!

Her first stop was the Women’s Center for an intimate lunch and discussion with students and staff.

After lunch, Dr. Keene presented a workshop entitled, Responding to Campus Racism,  that covered her work with racism and cultural appropriation. Using a case study of a themed party that relied on harmful stereotypes of Native Americans, Dr. Keene encouraged students to think about how they would respond to the incident from an individual and institutional perspective. Through brainstorming, students learned from each other about campus resources and departments that could be helpful in responding to the issue, in addition to working on ways to prevent an incident like this happening in the future at UMBC.

Later that night Dr. Keene gave her keynote presentation entitled, “Native Appropriations, Indigenous Social Media, and Responding to Racism,” to a standing-room only crowd in the UC Ballroom.

To conclude her presentation and with Halloween quickly approaching, Dr. Keene gave us all some homework to help reduce cultural appropriation through the call to “don’t dress as (or let your friends dress as)  an “Indian” for Halloween.”

On Wednesday, faculty and staff participated in a panel and discussion called “Rising Tensions and Teachable Moments” that explores the ways in which faculty and staff could talk about hard issues both in and outside the classroom with not only students but their colleagues.

Later that evening, the Mosaic Center hosted “Rising in Times of International Tragedies: The Impact of Oppressive Symbols,” which was a panel of faculty and staff centering European, Jewish and African-American voices discussing their shared, intersectional perspectives connected to historically oppressive symbols.

Panel members from the Rising in Times of International Tragedies: The Impact of Oppressive Symbols event. 

Although the threat of rain meant the Monument Quilt Display was cancelled on Thursday, the Women’s Center still hosted two workshops surrounding sexual violence and support for survivors. During the quilt making workshop, participants spent time talking about the #metoo movement and how the online activism and story telling surrounding the hashtag showed up for them in their own lives.

Friday concluded CSJ with the Baltimore Walking Tour led, for the third year in a row, by Dr. Kate Drabinski from Gender + Women’s Studies.

Thanks again to all our partners and everyone who attended CSJ last week – You all made the fifth year of Critical Social Justice: Rise possible! We’re excited for next year, but let’s be sure to keep the momentum going. Critical Social Justice isn’t just a week but a year long commitment!

So to keep that momentum going:

• Follow the Women’s Center and Mosaic Center via myUMBC and our social media accounts to stay up-to-date about all of our social justice programming throughout the year. The Women’s Center is on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
• A great round-up of diversity and inclusion resources can also be found at UMBC’s Diversity and Inclusion website and the Race, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice myUMBC page.
• Tell us what you think! Participate in the CSJ: Rise survey. Your feedback is important to us.

Dr. Yi Lu

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Department of Biological Sciences

November 3rd, 2017 – Fall Seminar

Time and Location: Noon in Meyerhoff Chemistry, Room 120

Host: Dr. Aaron Smith

Metalloenzymes play important roles in numerous biological processes. Designing metalloenzymes is an ultimate test of our knowledge about metalloenzymes and can result in new biocatalysts for practical applications such as in alternatives energies. We have been focusing ways to design heteronuclear metalloenzymes involved in multiple electron redox processes, such as heme-copper oxidase, heme-non-hem iron nitric oxide reductase and heme-[4Fe4S] cluster sulfite reductase. In the process, we demonstrate, while reproducing the primary coordination sphere may be good enough to make structural models of metalloproteins, careful design of the non-covalent secondary coordination sphere interactions, such as hydrophobicity and hydrogen bonding interactions, including those involving waters, are required to create functional metalloenzymes with high activity and turnover numbers comparable to those of native enzymes.

(Click figure to enlarge)

While metalloproteins have been the major focus of metalloenzyme research for decades, metallo-DNAzymes, DNA molecules containing metal ions at the active site and displaying enzymatic activities, have emerged as a new class of metalloenzymes. We have been using in vitro selection to obtain from a large DNA library DNAzymes that are specific for metal ions and use spectroscopic methods to elucidate how and why DNAzymes can recognize metal ions selectively. We have also converted these DNAzymes into highly sensitive and selective sensors for metal ions, including those metal ions that are difficult to design using other methods, and demonstrated their applications in environmental monitoring, food safety, and medical diagnostics. The use of these metal-DNAzymes for imaging metal ions in living cells has also been demonstrated.                                                       

The Office of Undergraduate Education would like to thank all of those who attended our New Student Book Experience event with Sheryl WuDunn, co-author of “Half the Sky” on November 1.

We would also like to especially thank our partners in this event whose assistance made this program possible: the Office of Institutional Advancement, the Social Sciences Forum, Student Life and the Division of Undergraduate Academic Affairs.

A special thank you to Professor Emeritus Dr. Mary Rivkin for sharing Half the Sky bookmarks with our attendees.

We also would like to thank Ms. WuDunn who stayed afterwards to sign her book for all students, faculty and staff.