2023 Imagining Community Symposium

Aaliyah Baker is a community-engaged scholar and faculty member in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Dayton, School of Education and Health Sciences. Her research interests include critical pedagogy, anti racist leadership, the experiences of students of color, and the education of homeless children. As an education ambassador and cultural exchange delegate, she traveled to Cuba with an interdisciplinary group of members from the National Association for Multicultural Education to foster a commitment to social justice.

Lawrence Brown is an equity scientist, urban Afro futurist, and the director of the Black Butterfly Academy, a virtual racial equity education and consulting firm. Dr. Brown has served at Morgan State University as an assistant and associate professor in the School of Community Health and Policy. In June 2018, he was honored by OSI Baltimore with the Bold Thinker award for sparking critical discourse regarding Baltimore’s racial segregation. In 2020, he directed the US COVID-19 Atlas work and response for the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps program in partnership with the University of Chicago Center for Spatial Data Science.

Tim Thomas is the Research Director at U.C. Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project, Director of the Eviction Research Network, and academic advisor to the White House, Treasury, and HUD on the severity and disparities of eviction. He specializes in urban sociology, demography, and data science, with a research focus on how neighborhood change, housing, and displacement affect household socioeconomic stratification by race and gender in the United States. His work has provided empirical evidence to improve tenant protection laws across the country and helped inform local, state, and federal agencies on the drivers of eviction.

Ernesto Rosen Velásquez is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton. He specializes in decolonial thought, Latinx and Latin American philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and political philosophy. He is editor and contributor to a collection put together with Ramón Grosfoguel and Roberto D. Hernández, "Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education" (Lexington Press, 2016).

Faheem Curtis-Khidr is a tenured faculty member in Sinclair Community College’s History and AFS programs. Faheem’s local research project covering West Dayton’s now-defunct Hog Bottom neighborhood has been recognized and showcased at the REACH Conference, National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center, and by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Faheem is co-lead of the Ubuntu Study Abroad program with Furaha Henry-Jones. Black thought, Black academia, and Black excellence are very much at the forefront of Faheem’s socio-academic nexus.

Guy Jones is a Hunkpapa Lakota and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. He is one of the founding members of the Miami Valley Council for Native Americans and served as an advisor to the Minority Arts Task Force of the Ohio Arts Council and the Bias Review Council of the Ohio Department of Education.

Shelly M. Corbin (Takóni Kókipešni) is Itazipco/Mnicoujou Lakota and a member of the Cheyenne River Reservation. She has served over 15 years in the military and continues to serve in the Ohio Air National Guard. Currently, as the Campaign Representative for the Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign at Sierra Club, she focuses on oil and gas infrastructure and waste-related issues of the fracking industry across Ohio. Shelly is committed to creating physical and virtual spaces that will reconnect people with the land, each other, and themselves.

Taylor Curtis was recognized at the age of 25 as the Youngest African American Female to be tenured at an institution of higher education in the history of the United States, which is now commemorated on Dec 1st as Taylor Curtis Day. She was a professor of General Psychology, Social Psychology, Black Psychology, and Black Studies, and the former Director of Black Studies at her previous institution of higher education. Taylor left the institution of education riddled with structural racism to engage hands-on in the community as the YWCA Greater Cincinnati Director of Racial Justice and Equity, working strategically to eliminate racism, empower women, and promote peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all.