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Lecture series to explore strategies for achieving racial justice

Credit: Penn State. Creative Commons

The Penn State College of Health and Human Development's fall 2020 Dean's Lecture Series will focus on the impact of structural racism on human health, development and well-being.

The next lecture in this iteration of the Dean’s Lecture Series, The Impact of Structural Racism and Racial Discrimination on Health, Wellness and Well-Being, will be “When The Goal is Racial Justice: Learning from Youth, Families, and Educators” at 4 p.m. Nov. 12 via Zoom. The talk will be presented by Deborah Rivas-Drake, professor of education and psychology at University of Michigan.

In this talk, Rivas-Drake will provide an overview of how racism permeates the everyday interpersonal experiences of youth in schools, among peers, and in their communities. The talk will cover the psychological, academic, and health implications of these experiences. Rivas-Drake will outline strategies that families and schools use to build adolescents’ capacities to navigate, challenge, and disrupt racism and xenophobia. Racism can be disrupted in daily life through the construction of social justice and civically oriented identities. Rivas-Drake will use examples from her quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research to illustrate how developmental science can be used to advance racial justice.

Rivas-Drake is professor of psychology and education at the University of Michigan. Together with the Contexts of Academic + Socioemotional Adjustment (CASA) Lab, she examines how school, peer, family, and community settings can support adolescents in navigating issues related to race and ethnicity, and how these experiences inform young people’s academic, socioemotional, and civic development.

The overarching goal of Rivas-Drake’s work is to illuminate promising practices that disrupt racism and xenophobia and that help set diverse young people on trajectories of positive contribution to their schools and communities. She is the principal investigator of the School and Community Pathways to Engagement (SCoPE) project, funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation, which examines the connections between social-emotional learning, ethnic/racial identity, and civic and sociopolitical development in early adolescence. Her book, "Below the Surface: Talking with Teens about Race, Ethnicity, and Identity" (Princeton University Press), received the Social Policy Book Award from the Society for Research on Adolescence and the Eleanor Maccoby Award in Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

Participants are encouraged to participate in the question-and-answer sessions. All lectures will be recorded and available for viewing at a later date.

Launched in spring 2020, the Dean’s Lecture Series features nationally recognized researchers who share their work and commentary on important issues of the day to catalyze conversation, new thinking and advancement of scholarship.

Additional information, future lectures and recordings of previous lectures can be found at hhd.psu.edu/Deans-Lecture-Series.

Last Updated October 28, 2020