Ithaca College

Come and hear Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of CSCRE, Dr. Belisa Gonzalez, with April Carroll, Class of '19, School of Communications, talk about their work and experience with her presentation titled: "Black Girl Black Girl What is Your Song: and other confessions from centering blackness at a PWI" on Tuesday, April 2, at 11:10 AM in Emerson C, Campus Center.

Drawing on our experience conducting research for Black Girl Black Girl What is Your Song: and other confessions from bleeding women, a play depicting the experiences of four black women at a Predominately White Institution, our presentation will explore how race permeates the research process. By walking the audience through our process, we will discuss how research conducted for creative works both mirrors and diverges from “typical” research methods. We will also highlight the ways in which race is not only a variable in our research but a dynamic factor that can affect critical stages of the research process. We find that this is particularly true when attempting to center blackness in predominately white spaces.

Belisa González is an associate professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture Race and Ethnicity at Ithaca College. Belisa earned her PhD in Sociology from Emory University in 2006. While in Atlanta, she was a member and co-chair of the Atlanta Organizing Committee (AOC) for Undoing Racism. It was her experience with the organizers on the AOC that formed the basis of her dissertation “Increasing Collaboration or Conflict,” which focused on sustainable cross-racial coalitions between African Americans and Latina/in the South. She currently engaged in two research projects. The first “Discrimination, Boundary Negotiation and Mobility Strategies Among Middle Class Latino Immigrants in the Nuevo South” co-investigated with Irene Browne, Emory University, uses data collected from a four-year NSF-funded study to explore how middle-class Dominican and Mexican immigrants living in Atlanta experience discrimination. The second, “When Protest(ers) Graduate,” investigates the similarities between the campus protests of the late 1960s and those of 2015. This project, which is co-investigated with Sean Eversley Bradwell, seeks strategies for translating student demands into institutional level change. In addition to her research and teaching, she also co-created and conducts a series of workshops on achieving equity in higher education. These include: inclusiveness and excellence in the hiring process, micro-aggressions in the classroom/workplace and having difficult dialogues in the workplace.

Support your classmates, fellow students, and colleagues. Come and see 390+ students present their work by attending from 8:50 AM – 4:00 PM in the Campus Center. The noon-hour session will feature finalist presentations for the Whalen Symposium Awards. There will also be a closing session, featuring the awards ceremony which will begin at 4:00 PM.

For more information, go to the Whalen Symposium website.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Omar Stoute at ostoute1@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3113. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.