Fromm Hall bustled with fierce female energy on March 29. The Women of Color Leadership Conference showcased thought provoking presentations and fostered connection between the women in attendance. There was a focus on community building with fellow conference attendees to both resist and persist, which went with this year’s theme of Community as Resistance.
The theme was chosen by the conference’s planning committee. “We just think about what does the world need right now? What are the experiences of women at this moment? What are the gendered, racialized, perspectives that are very present and what do those different communities need?” said D. Perez-Sornia, the assistant director at the Cultural Center.
The conference additionally had many interactive elements from activities during sessions to the zine making session titled “The Power of Storytelling within our Collective Communities.” Attendees utilized magazine cut outs to tell their own stories through these mini zines. “It was really great that during the session folks shared about what they made and the symbolism behind it, some of the words that stood out to them,” conference-goer Lorena Campos said.
While half the conference was focused on sharing their stories through art, the rest were listening to doctoral student Poonam Kakodkar teach on “The Power of Words: Interrupting Gendered Language.” The presentation was created out of Kakodkar’s research for her dissertation and focused on workplace language directed towards women that tends to be more vague and personality based. Listeners learned how gendered words affect feelings of belonging and ultimately dictate who gets opportunities for growth.
“It’s just really pointing out and giving proof to a lot of biases and issues that we see in reality and in professional development. It’s always a thing that you hear people above you still saying these are issues and they haven’t been solved yet, even though it’s in progress,” said junior engineering and physics major Celeste Heberer. The solutions to this, according to Kakodkar, are actionable guidance, interrupting biased language and dismantling problematic systematic scripts.
Intersectionality was at the forefront of the conversations highlighted by the conference, and one presentation that showcased this was Nida Liftawiya’s “Understanding Women’s Role in Palestine.” Liftawiya utilized spoken word poetry in between sharing stories from her childhood in Lifta, repeating “this is what Palestinian love looks like.” She demonstrates that poetry is resistance, as well as clothing and art.
Women’s dresses, or thobes, hold deep historical roots and cultural significance. The different patterns on thobes can show a woman’s heritage, if she is married, her class, social status and regional background. They carry stories or family history and are passed down through generations. Liftawiya additionally named Palestinian women who were revolutionary in the liberation movement to show that women are not passive, but active agents of change.
The Asian American Pacific Islander Center’s AAPI Leadership Fellows Program is a year-long program where participants are required to take a leadership course in both the fall and spring. The program supports students who are AAPI identifying to become passionate leaders for social change. This year’s cohort presented at the Women of Color Leadership Conference, sharing the key ideas they have learned in their course taught by associate professor Melissa Ann Canlas.
The session began exactly like each of their class meetings: with an ancestral invocation. This time it was to Chinese American activist Grace Lee Boggs who just like the presentation title asked “what time is it on the clock of the world?” Boggs believed that the way to build the world we want is by starting small, local and relational. This is why she was deeply involved in helping create community gardens in Detroit, her home town. Much like Boggs the class created a metaphorical garden with their key concepts.
Sophomore politics major and conference presenter Rina Gallano shared what being a woman of color leader means to her: “It means everything to me. It has been driven by not only my identity as a woman, but also my intersectional lived experience as being someone who is a Filipina, someone who is queer and an immigrant, someone who came from a lower social economic class, someone who represents being a resident of Hawaii,” said Gallano.
The Women of Color Leadership Conference builds community and knowledge, providing women of color with their own space. “It’s definitely about owning our stories and knowing what that could mean for other people to share them. The best way to do that is really connecting with folks, whether it’s in person or in other ways and I feel like this conference really allows that time and space,” said Campos.
