Black Student Alliance hosts first-ever Conference on Social Justice in Education

Black Student Association members pictured with the speakers, Ghislaine Lewis ’05 and Noliwe Rooks

Randolph College’s Black Student Alliance (BSA) hosted its first-ever Conference for Social Justice in Education on Saturday. The theme was “Being Black in the Diaspora,” and the program featured panel discussions, workshops, and a keynote by Noliwe Rooks, an Africana studies professor at Cornell University.

The conference was designed to provide an opportunity for educators, students, parents, and other community groups to have a conversation about the challenges and solutions to achieving social justice in education.

As the keynote speaker, Rooks offered her interdisciplinary expertise in race and gender, and discuss how both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history, and political life in the United States. Most recently, she has worked on a book project about the profit-driven connections in the education sector, and has published the book, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (The New Press, 2017).

Other speakers included Ghislaine Lewis ’05, a professor at the University of Lynchburg, and Steve Willis, special assistant to the president and secretary to Randolph’s Board of Trustees.