Social Justice Conference

Friday, Nov. 10
In person | 8 a.m. - 3 p.m.

Upper School Campus | 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose

Harker's community will immerse itself in a transformative experience at our inaugural Harker Social Justice Conference, where Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) converge with the vital issues of social justice and human rights. We will engage with thought leaders, activists and experts as they delve into crucial conversations surrounding equality, equity, systemic change and advocacy.

Plan to be inspired while we learn and collaborate to pave the way for a more just and equitable world for all. The goal of this conference is to extend Harker’s mission and values in preparing our students, faculty and staff to take their place as global citizens.

Morning Keynote Speaker: Maria Hantzopoulous, Ph.D., Professor, Vassar College

Afternoon Keynote Speaker: Monisha Bajaj, Ph.D., Professor, University of San Francisco (and Harker student 1985-87)

Workshop Presenters

Courtney Morris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Martin Perna, Grammy-nominated producer, musician, writer and music scholar
Melissa Canlas, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco
Paul Barsky, Upper School Head, The Harker School
Darius White, English Teacher, St. Ignatius College Preparatory
Paul David Terry, Program Analyst for the University of California, Davis, Health Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Center

Participants in this conference will listen to morning and afternoon keynotes and then choose from eight different workshop options during the three workshop windows. RSVP to choose your workshops; locations on campus will be shared with attendees the day of the event.

Staff RSVP for This Event Today! Students RSVP for This Event Today!

Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Rodney Glasgow

Maria Hantzopoulos

Maria Hantzopoulos earned her B.A. in history from Boston University, her M.A. in social studies education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her doctorate at Teachers College in international educational development. Her work broadly considers how educational processes structure inequity in their contexts and beyond. Her research interests include school culture and climate, project-based assessment, peace and human rights education, migration and education, and social studies curricula. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals including Anthropology and Education Quarterly, TC Record, Social Studies Research and Practice, and Policy Futures in Education. She is the author of the book Restoring Dignity: Human Rights in Action (Teachers College Press, 2016), and co-editor of Peace Education: International Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Critical Small Schools: Beyond Privatization in New York City Urban Educational Reform (Information Age, 2012). She is also the co-author of the free web-based 9-12 curriculum "Rethinking the Region: New Approaches to U.S. 9-12 Curricula on MENA." Her research has been supported through the Spencer Foundation, the British Council, and the Social Science Research Council. Her forthcoming book is Education for Peace and Human Rights: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Before Vassar, she worked with pre-service student teachers at Columbia University’s Barnard and Teachers Colleges and conducted staff development for middle and high school teachers throughout New York City and nationally. She also taught and worked in New York City public schools, served on several public school planning teams, and continues to work with a variety of established youth organizations and professional educator organizations.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Monisha Bajaj

Monisha Bajaj

Monisha Bajaj is professor of international and multicultural education at the University of San Francisco. She is the editor and author of eight books and numerous articles on issues of peace, human rights, migration and education. Dr. Bajaj has developed curriculum and teacher training materials - particularly related to human rights, racial justice, ethnic studies, and sustainability - for nonprofit and national advocacy organizations as well as intergovernmental organizations, such as UNICEF and UNESCO. In 2015, she received the Ella Baker/Septima Clark Human Rights Award from Division B of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Dr. Bajaj attended Harker in 1985-86.

Workshop Presenter Bios

Courtney Morris, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/performance artist and an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching and research focuses primarily on Black social movements in Latin America, the geography of race, environmental racisms/climate change, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and Black visual culture and aesthetics. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (2023, Rutgers University Press), which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, NACLA, Current History, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and the Aster(ix) Journal. She is a regular contributing writer and editor-at-large for Stranger’s Guide, an award-winning magazine about place. Her research has received funding from the Fulbright, the Ford Foundation, The Hellman Fund and the Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship at UC-Berkeley.

As an artist, her primary mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Her artistic work is primarily concerned with ancestral memory, ritual work, ecology, climate change, death, mourning and funerary practice, erotics, and black feminist aesthetics. Her work focuses on examining ancestral narratives and everyday ritual aesthetics of communities throughout the African Diaspora.

She has shown work and performed at the National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston), the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery (Oakland, CA), the Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA), the San Francisco LGBT Center, Root Division (San Francisco), the Frye Museum (Seattle, WA), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, Spain), the Jordan Schnitzer Museum (Eugene, OR), Fototeca de Havana (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Slash SF, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), JACK (Brooklyn, NY), the San Francisco Public Library, SOMArts (SF), and C3A (Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba, Spain), A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Performance Space New York, and the Berkeley Art Center. She is a national member of the A.I.R. Gallery and an alumna of The Austin Project created by Omi Jones and facilitated by Sharon Bridgforth. Her work has appeared in and been writte about in Hyperallergic, e-flux, Stranger’s Guide, El Diario (Cordoba, Spain), Óptica, Atmos, Vogue España, Brooklyn Rail, and the East Bay Express.

Paul Barsky, Upper School Head, The Harker School

Darius White, English Teacher, St. Ignatius College Preparatory

With more than 12 years of teaching and youth advocacy experience, Darius White works as a full-time high school English teacher at St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco. Committed to the profession, Mr. White leverages his bachelor’s degree in African and African-American Studies from Stanford University to teach a college dual enrollment Ethnic Studies course through San Francisco State University, work as a high school ethnic studies course consultant, and serve as a board member for the San Francisco Education Fund, which provides literacy and financial support to the local public school district. Also, as a Fulbright recipient for this academic year 2023-24, Mr. White will be traveling overseas to learn how different school models embrace and implement communal understandings of equity, inclusion, justice and care. Lastly, when he is not lesson-planning or grading, this first-generation college graduate turned educator is building out his online platform, JustBlackThoughts.com, an information center and community for Black men in education.

Martín Perna, Producer, Musician, Writer, Music Scholar

Martín Perna is a culture worker: A Grammy-nominated producer, musician, writer and music scholar, he has performed over two thousand concerts in 43countries on five continents.

He began his music career on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label in 1995, and helped build the soul revival movement as a founding member of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings and associated Desco and Daptone bands. As founder/bandleader of the group Antibalas, he has served as musical director at Carnegie Hall for several all-star homages honoring Paul Simon (2014), David Byrne & Talking Heads (2015) and Aretha Franklin (2017) as well as The Music of Billie Holiday at the Apollo Theater (2017).

He has lived and worked in diverse locales, from the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, where he arranged and co-produced an album with Creole Palo de Mayo music legend Mango Ghost, to Sicily where he helped produce and arrange work by Palermo troubadour Fabrizio Cammarata. In 2017, he travelled to Benin, West Africa, to collaborate with Angelique Kidjo and student musicians at the CIAMO arts academy to produce the “Kids Against Malaria” PSA song and video. In 2018, he served on the faculty of African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He was named director of the SF Jazz / Oakland Public Conservatory’s youth jazz orchestra for the fall 2019 season.

As a writer he has authored the children’s book Blackout, illustrated by NY Times bestselling illustrator Ricardo Cortes. He composed the liner notes for the 2018 Grammy-nominated Orquesta Akokan and liner notes/bios for several contemporary global music artists including Cochemea Gastelum and Okuté. In July 2020, he scored and performed music for Daveed Diggs’s performance of the poetry polemic “Fourth of July.” He is a contributing editor at the literary travel magazine Stranger's Guide winner of 2021 ASME Awards (Ellies).

Musical collaborators in recent years include: Toro y Moi, Khruangbin, Dos Santos, Coldcut, Adrian Quesada (Black Pumas), Santigold, Quantic, Angélique Kidjo, Jose James, Zara McFarland, Nona Hendryx, Mark Ronson, Jeff Bhasker, Greg Phillinganes, Willie Weeks, Dr. John (RIP), Michael McDonald, Ledisi, Anthony Hamilton, Gregory Porter, Valerie Simpson, Eric Harland, Ed Sheeran, The Roots, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Brian Jackson, Steven Bernstein, Saul Williams, Miguel Zenón, William Bell, Ricki Lee Jones, Bettye Lavette, Lizz Wright, Zap Mama, Santigold, The Roots, Lorenzo "Jovanotti" Cherubini, Sam Moore, Don Bryant, Kenny Loggins, Salami Rose Joe Louis, Chris Gabo, Moonrun, Sarah Dash, Taj and Deva Mahal, Todd Rundgren, Cee-Lo Green, Alice Russell, Melissa Etheridge, Ruthie Foster, Living Colour, Medeski, Martin and Wood, Mike Dillon and many others.

Melissa Canlas, Professor, University of San Francisco

Melissa Ann Canlas is assistant professor in international and multicultural education at the University of San Francisco. Her work focuses on ethnic studies, issues of educational equity, critical leadership, critical pedagogies, and human rights, particularly for immigrants and refugees and students of color. She has more than 15 years of work as an educator, and her work experience includes teaching a wide variety of ethnic studies and Asian American studies classes at the undergraduate level, and serving as the director of APALU (Asian Pacific American Leaders United), a social justice leadership development program at City College of San Francisco. Dr. Canlas’s experience also includes working with middle and high school students through federally funded TRIO programs, teaching and serving as a mentor teacher with Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP), and building collaborative partnerships between community organizations and educational programs in San Francisco. In addition to teaching with IME, Dr. Canlas teaches undergraduate courses with USF’s Critical Diversity Studies program and the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good.

Paul Terry, Assistant Director, University of California, Davis

Paul David Terry (he/they) is a doctoral student in the University of San Francisco International and Multicultural Education program with an emphasis on human rights education and racial justice & education. He supports the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Center at UC Davis Health and has served as chair for the Chancellor's Committee on LGBTQIA+ Communities and vice-chair of the Vice Chancellor's LGBTQ+ Health Advisory Council, the first group to add SO/GI into an electronic health record in the country. He is DEI faculty with the Impact Foundry and has taught with the University of California, Davis Human Rights Studies program, Rise for Racial Justice, University of San Francisco and consults across nonprofit and educational institutions on critical and transformative leadership, race theory and gender and sexuality. His research centers on the long-term adoption of health equity education in healthcare and large-scale organizations.

Event Schedule

Agenda
7:30 a.m.	Check-In Begins	Rothschild Performing Arts Center (RPAC)
8:10 a.m.	Morning Speaker	Zhang Gym
9:10 a.m.	Workshop 1	Locations will be shared with attendees
10:35 a.m.	Workshop 2	Locations will be shared with attendees
11:50 a.m.	Lunch	Manzanita Hall
12:45 p.m.	Workshop 3	Locations will be shared with attendees
2:05 p.m.	Afternoon Speaker	RPAC
3 p.m.	Closing

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Harker

Diversity, equity and inclusion is at the core of our mission and philosophy at The Harker School. We are firmly dedicated to building, sustaining and retaining a safe, loving and inclusive environment for all students, faculty, staff, families and alumni, and expect all members in the Harker community to participate and engage in this work collectively. Through our educational opportunities for students, and development opportunities for faculty, staff and parents, we embrace the conversations needed so that our students are equipped to be the changemakers needed in our country and throughout the world.

Learn More about Harker's DEI Efforts