AERA Lecture: The Inevitability of Racial Bias and Exclusion
Racial/ethnic identity groups have endured racial profiling, are targets of hate crimes, and are often viewed not as individuals but as a faceless mass on a daily basis—even in classrooms. In this American Educational Research Association (AERA) Distinguished Lecture, Sylvia Hurtado at the University of California, Los Angeles will discuss the need for identity-based education, re-humanizing practices, and increased specificity to target racial equity aims in higher education. Hurtado’s work aims to personalize “facelessness” using research on campus racial climates and Latinx experiences, articulating how our tendencies for recognition bias are perpetuated and reinforced at the individual and institutional levels in education.
The lecture, “The Inevitability of Racial Bias and Exclusion: Implications for Identity-Based Education and Practice,” takes place on Thursday, September 30, at 6 p.m. ET. (The event was rescheduled from AERA’s virtual annual meeting in April.)
Attendees can register for this event here.
Hurtado, a longstanding AERA Fellow and a professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, grew up in San Antonio, Texas. As a first-generation Latina college student, she pursued sociology of education. Influenced by these experiences, her scholarship focuses on student educational outcomes, campus racial climates, and equity and inclusion in higher education.
She served as director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA for over a decade and is past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. Hurtado served on the Board on Higher Education and Workforce of the National Research Council and was on study panels that produced several National Academy Press reports on STEM, student success, and mentoring. In addition to being inducted as an AERA Fellow in 2011, she was elected to the National Academy of Education and to AERA Council in 2019. Her current research includes case studies of departments that implement culturally aware mentoring among faculty with the University of Wisconsin; university organizational change after the replication of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and another Spencer-funded project on organizing for student success at Hispanic-serving institutions.
The lecture will include a welcome from AERA President Na’ilah Suad Nasir and an introduction from AERA Past President Shaun R. Harper. It will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the virtual attendees. The event will be closed captioned and have ASL translation.
