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Keynote Speaker

Jasmine A. Lee

Workshopping Radical Love and Belonging

Collective trauma, loneliness, anxiety, and hopelessness are plaguing our institutional landscapes. More than just students- staff, faculty, and administrators struggle to show up for themselves even as they work to show up for others. Academic and human resource interventions do not always hold space for our humanity and don't often recognize our inherent interconnectedness. Moving beyond traditional academic interventions or focusing on cognitive variable interventions, this session calls us to consider ways we bring love back into the academy. By focusing on radical love and belonging, we will explore considerations and practices that create environments where all who enter feel loved, seen, and held. During this interactive keynote, participants will engage in sharing and collaborative planning for centering radical love and belonging in their own practice.

About Jasmine A. Lee

Dr. Jasmine A. Lee is a diversity, equity, inclusion and justice scholar, practitioner, trainer and coach. She currently serves as the Vice President of Equity and Inclusive Excellence at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. In this capacity, she works with students, staff and faculty to create inclusive campus environments through direct programming and strategic Divisional leadership. Dr. Lee’s background encompasses campus climate studies and crisis response, inclusive hiring and supervision best practices, teaching and inclusive classroom pedagogy, diversity action planning and equity assessments, strategic student success outreach and academic advising, as well as traditional diversity and inclusion programming.

Beyond a 15-year career in higher education, Dr. Lee also works with k-12 institutions, non-profit organizations, and faith-based communities to provide training, consulting, coaching and organizational change services; partnering with clients to curate unique and engaging solutions that lead to sustainable and measurable change. Dr. Lee is a qualified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory® (IDI), a certified diversity trainer with the National Coalition Building Institute, Restorative Practices trainer, and a certified Mental Health First Aid instructor, and uses these skills to ensure human dignity, love, truth, honesty and empathy are a part of all approaches to organizational change.

As a social worker, Dr. Lee holds a BSW from Eastern Michigan University and a MSW from the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. at Michigan State University, where she used Critical Race Theory as a framework to study the experiences of Black, first-generation, low-income college students pursuing degrees at a Predominantly White Institution. She is a published author with work focused on academic advising for students of color, intergroup dialogue, and social justice education, with forthcoming work on radical love in the academy and cultivating belonging in first year seminars.

Dr. Lee is whole human who loves cartoons, traveling, laughing at corny jokes, hanging out with her puppy, and spending time with family and friends. She is an active member of many organizations, including NACADA – National Association for Academic Advising, ACPA – Student College Educators International, and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. More than anything Dr. Lee wants people to know that she believes in the world changing and redeeming power of radical revolutionary love, and asks you to consider the words of Valerie Kaur: “revolutionary love is the choice to enter into wonder and labor for others, our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us.”