Addressing Intersectionality to Transform Leadership at Penn State

We invite you to a symposium organized by LEAADS@psu on Addressing Intersectionality to Transform Leadership at Penn State. Please reserve time on your calendar to attend and feel free to share this email with others in your unit. We look forward to your attendance and participation!  

When: Friday, February 19, 2:00-5:00 pm and Friday, February 26, 2:00-5:00 pm, via zoom (details to follow)

Who Should Attend:  All academic leaders and faculty interested in academic leadership who seek to broaden and deepen their understanding of intersectionality and its relationships to leadership within academia

Symposium Topic:  We will engage in interdisciplinary dialogue within our Penn State community in order to build understanding of the effects of intersectionality on success and leadership in academia with the goal of identifying pathways for transformational action and informing future initiatives.

Intersectionality asks us to unveil the structures of privilege and power that maintain systems of discrimination and marginalization of minority groups and to particularly examine how simple, one-dimensional categorization of discrimination and bias can hide these patterns. By calling attention to the ways in which laws, policies, structures, and biases can focus on particular groups and ignore others, the concept of intersectionality is a call to action to identify how systemic barriers maintain systems of exclusion, marginalization, or oppression. Within academia, the interface among race, gender, economic class, sexuality, and other categorizations is poorly examined yet continues to stifle calls for diversity, inclusion, and the advancement of historically marginalized groups. Recent experiences with COVID-19 and anti-racist reckoning have concomitantly revealed and heightened some of these vulnerabilities. How do we address intersectionality while transforming institutional systems? How do we incorporate intersectionality into considerations of academic inclusion, advancement, and leadership?   

Who We Are: LEAADS@PSU is a network of women faculty committed to LEading Advocacy and Action for Diverse LeaderShip at Penn State. We are exploring and acting on issues that impact willingness and preparedness of faculty to engage in leadership.