Graduate Education Counterspaces: Imagining America and Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE)

Thursday, May 11, 2023

10:00 am – 11:00 am PT

Zoom (virtual event) 

Register here: https://ucdavis-ocp.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqd-Crqj8uG9OYMryrF2KFMvAK9siTHzdI

Join us as we examine challenges and barriers that engaged/public graduate scholars and practitioners experience both inside and outside of higher education institutions and the potential power of counterspaces, such as the Imagining America network and Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) program, to support graduate scholars’ identity development, acts of resistance to higher education norms, and growing engaged/public scholarship and practice. 

Counterspaces also include supportive spaces inclusive of family, friends, and community that center kinship, relationality, responsibility, and accountability to one another. These important sites of resistance to the norms/traditions of academia move engaged/public scholars and practitioners forward in their efforts to enact change in higher education and in their communities.

We will conclude with time for feedback and discussion with attendees on the research and the importance of counterspaces in their own trajectories within and beyond higher education. 

Presenters: 

Trina Van Schyndel is the Membership Director for Imagining America (IA), and she also serves as the PI for and manages IA’s Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Fellows Program. She comes to IA with extensive experience in higher education settings, including community-engaged learning and community-campus partnerships. She also has been responsible for supporting networks of publicly-engaged practitioner-scholars, including as a Board Member and Chair of the Graduate Student Network for the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement. Previously, Van Schyndel worked in the community engagement offices at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and the Medical College of Wisconsin. She is also a prior director of Campus Compact for Wisconsin. Van Schyndel recently completed her Ph.D. in the higher, adult, and lifelong education program at Michigan State University, where she is also earning her graduate certificate in community engagement. Her dissertation focused on the identity development of community-engaged practitioner-scholars through their participation in community engagement professional associations while in graduate school. Her recent publications and presentations focus on understanding and supporting community-engaged graduate students and community-engaged boundary-spanners in higher education.

Romo is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Foundation of Education at Syracuse University. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles they worked on publicly engaged scholarship initiatives in their neighborhood through the Pico Neighborhood Association and Pico Youth and Family Center to address issues of access to affordable housing and overdevelopment, unequal educational resources, and culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogies. It was within academic and community spaces that their interest in social justice education and activist-scholar identity emerged and they have continued to do this work in Syracuse, NY. Romo has worked with the high school/university partnership as a co-facilitator at a local alternative high school in the Syracuse City School District (Cultural Voices & Lit Arts). Cultural Voices is an English course that provides youth a space to analyze their individual experience as related to structural systems of power and privilege and Lit Arts is an after-school program bridging art-based social justice education and intergroup dialogue to promote youth activism and civic engagement. Romo is affiliated with Imagining America (IA), a consortium that brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to strengthen and promote public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change. They served a two-year term in IA National Advisory Board and are working on a three-year action research project, IA’s Mellon Foundation-funded Leading and Learning Initiative.

Dillon Sung is a multimedia artist and community organizer based in Southern California. Her doctoral research is on the question of migrant self-determination and the conditions of possibility for full participation for stateless peoples, with emphasis on diasporic Korean statelessness. She informs and engages her work with an art practice through discourses of fine art—namely social practice in how it informs politics and aesthetics—performance studies, and creative writing. She was a 2019 – 2021 Imagining America PAGE Co-Director and is project lead for the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition Archive, receiving support for the archive as a 2020 – 2021 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam. Dillon is a Ph.D. candidate and Provost Fellow in the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.