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Initiative for Race Research and Justice

Jumpstart Conference

The Initiative for Race Research and Justice 2024 Jumpstart Virtual Conference

Date: Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Time: 9 a.m.- 4:00 p.m. CT

Click Here to Register

Keynote Speakers:

Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States. He has spent the past 25 years speaking to audiences in all 50 states, on over 1500 college and high school campuses, at hundreds of professional and academic conferences, and to community groups across the country. From 1999-2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute here in Nashville. Wise has also trained corporate, government, entertainment, media, law enforcement, military, and medical industry professionals on methods for dismantling racial inequity in their institutions, and has provided anti-racism training to educators and administrators nationwide and internationally, in Canada and Bermuda.

Wise is the author of nine books, including his latest, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights Books). Other books include Under the Affluence, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority and Colorblind (all from City Lights Books); his highly-acclaimed memoir, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, (recently updated and re-released by Soft Skull Press); Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White; Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male; and Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama.

Venus E. Evans-Winters is an author, researcher, and policy scholar. She is the Black Girls & Women’s Research Initiatives Coordinator at the African American Policy Forum and a Visiting Professor of Education at The Ohio State University in the Department of Educational Studies.

She is also the Founder of Planet Venus Institute and creator of The Planet Venus Mental Wealth Academy as well as the Write Like A Scholar program. She has also served as an expert on the state of Black school girls’ psychosocial development and mental health on Pushout: A Documentary (Morris, 2019). ​Dr. Evans-Winters researches and teaches in the areas of Black feminist thought, critical race theory, educational policy, and qualitative inquiry. Her Publications can be found here.

Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of education and faculty affiliate in the Department of African & African American Studies at Harvard University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he specializes in 19th and 20th century African American history, history of education, and theories of race and power in education.Professor Givens’ work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the William F. Milton Fund, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. From 2016 to 2018, he was a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

He has authored two books, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, published in 2021 by Harvard University Press, and School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness, published by Beacon Press in 2023.