This talk brings together all of the SLLC community to spark a dialogue around how we can cultivate anti-racist spaces and practices so that we can truly achieve a space of equity and justice for all. We are dedicated to fostering a community in which every SLLC member is heard, valued, and appreciated as well as - we are working to "be the change" and hope that Dr. Méndez's presentation can help to spark this important conversation!

Dr. Xhercis (Sir-Sis) Méndez, is the Vice-Chair and an Associate professor in Women and Gender Studies and Queer Studies and an affiliated faculty of African American Studies at Cal State University Fullerton. She is a popular educator, organizer, decolonial feminist philosopher, and founder of The Campus Transformative Justice Project (www.campustj.com), a project started in 2017 in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University and committed to abolitionist and intersectional approaches to addressing sexual assault and gender-based violence in universities and institutions of higher learning. She also serves as a consultant, facilitator, and strategist to organizations seeking to address systemic harm, racism, and anti-blackness, and invested in building life-affirming and healing options for a diverse range of survivors. A founding member of the Lansing TJ Collective, Dr. Méndez is a Boricua (Puerto Rican) child of factory workers, and a bruja by ancestry, who lives to inspire the next generation of “troublemakers” and believers that a better world is possible.

We kindly thank the following units for making this intervention possible with their generous support: Arabic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, French and Italian, Germanic Studies, Persian Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.