Equity Conference One Week Away! Register Now.

CFA’s Equity Conference 2024, “Waves of Resistance: Merging Waters as Pathways to Justice and Healing,” will be held virtually from March 13 to 16. The Equity Conference is a project of the Council for Racial & Social Justice and an opportunity for CFA members to connect for co-liberation.

You can register here. When registering, please indicate whether you need any Zoom accommodations.

Melissa Cardenas-Dow, CFA Sacramento’s Council for Racial and Social Justice representative and Sacramento State Librarian, explains what she looks forward to at the conference.

“One session in the conference I am especially excited about is the presentation from a panel of academic librarians who will discuss intellectual freedom and book banning,” said Cardenas-Dow. “While it is a topic of particular interest to librarians and the field of library and information science, I do think the topic is very relevant to us in higher education. The students we see in the CSU are formed by K-12 education, which is greatly affected by censorship and book banning occurring in school and public libraries, even in blue states like California.

“Social justice unions like the California Faculty Association are used to ‘collaborating for the common good’ – a theme of the 2024 Equity Conference. Librarians, too, collaborate regularly. Issues involving intellectual freedom, censorship, and book bans are more effectively addressed when they are engaged in a cooperative fashion – when students, parents, librarians, and teachers from different levels of the education system come together to discuss concerns at stake and develop plans for action for the betterment of everyone.”

Mark Allan Davis, CFA San Francisco’s Council for Racial and Social Justice representative and San Francisco State Professor, emphasizes the incredibly timely and relevant work of Isabel Wilkerson, one of the keynote speakers at the conference.

“I most look forward to the keynote talk given by the extraordinary Isabel Wilkerson! Her phenomenal research that went into her bestseller, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,is so urgent and pressing especially in this unfortunate era of emergent cultural erasure of our true American history. The ‘relitigation’ of LGBTQIA+ rights, the attack on transgender youth and adults, on Black History, and the perpetual gatekeeping by the media to normalize bothsidesism, places Wilkerson’s book in a very important location.

“America’s love of its myth of inherent goodness is dismembered with scalpel like precision by Wilkerson’s theories involving centuries of European theocratic pure blood doctrines which in turn explains America’s centuries old own caste structures. They exist in academia with everything from degree hierarchies, the two-tier systems of tenure track and lecturer faculty, management and union, to the UC and CSU status graphs. I’m certainly looking to garner some relevant insights as we as faculty, coming out of several months of empowered actions, strive to grow together,” he added. 

This year’s conference will focus on solidarity and healing through connectedness and collaboration. It will highlight the benefits and challenges of anti-racism and social justice liberation and collaboration for the university community and beyond. The themes for the Equity Conference are:

• Collaborating for the Common Good: Trouble the Water
• Care and Healing: Ebb and Flow
• Living Joyously and Free: Jubilee

Keynote speakers and workshops are indicated in the registration form. For the full conference narrative and information about videos from past Equity Conferences, please visit the conference website.