Plenary Session Speakers

Dr. Kate Beane (Flandreau Santee Sioux Dakota and Muscogee Creek) holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the Executive Director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and serves as adjunct faculty in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is chair of the board for Vision Maker Media, a national organization based out of Nebraska, chair of the board for Wakan Tipi Awayankapi in St. Paul (Imnizaska), is a board member at the Jerome Foundation, and in 2020 was appointed by Governor Walz to serve on the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board (CAAPB), which oversees Capitol complex preservation and development (including public art) in downtown St. Paul. Previously, Dr. Beane served on the leadership team as director of Native American Initiatives at the Minnesota Historical Society. In 2018 Dr. Beane and her father Syd Beane completed a documentary film, Ohiyesa: The Soul of an Indian, which shares the story of their grandfather, writer, reformer, and physician Charles A. Eastman and in 2019 she presented a Minneapolis TEDX talk titled "The Lasting Legacy of Place Names,” which spoke to her family’s work restoring the Dakota name to Bde Maka Ska in south Minneapolis (Bdeota). She lives in Dakota makoce with her partner, and three daughters.

Delegard is a public historian and one of the co-founders of the award-winning Mapping Prejudice project. Her team has worked with more than 10,000 volunteers to identify and map racial covenants, which barred people who were not White from buying or occupying land. Mapping Prejudice seeks to empower community changemakers to translate awareness about these racist property deeds into reparative work. Delegard is a graduate of the Minneapolis Public Schools, Wesleyan University and holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University.

Commissioner Irene Fernando was elected to the Hennepin County Board in November of 2018. She is the first Filipino-American elected in Minnesota, and she is the youngest women to serve on the Hennepin County Board. In January of 2023, she began her second term in office and was also elected as the first Board Chair of color since Hennepin County’s founding in 1852. Before joining the County Board, Irene worked in not-for-profit and corporate settings, and instructed college courses. Irene has earned her undergrad and grad degrees from the University of Minnesota, and she is currently a PhD candidate in the Organization, Leadership, and Policy Development department. Irene lives in the Harrison neighborhood in North Minneapolis with her partner Kent and their dog Mimi.

Lee Pao Xiong is currently the founding Director of the Center for Hmong and East Asian Studies and Professor of American Government/Political Science as well as Hmong history, culture, and language at Concordia University, St. Paul. Throughout his distinguished career, Xiong served as the Director of Housing Policy and Development for the City of Minneapolis, President and CEO of The Urban Coalition, Executive Director of the State Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotan, Hmong American Partnership, and the Hmong Youth Association of Minnesota. He has also previously served on the staff of Minnesota State Senator Joe Bertram, United States Senator Carl Levin of Michigan in Washington, DC, and was an appointee of President William Jefferson Clinton, and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. Lee Pao received his Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science from the University of Minnesota and his Master of Arts degree in Public Administration from Hamline University. He completed his Doctorate in Public Administration coursework at Hamline University and is ABD.

Council Member Robin Wonsley represents Ward 2 on the Minneapolis City Council, which has the highest student population of any jurisdiction in the state. Originally from Chicago, Wonsley attended Carleton College and completed a Watson Fellowship before moving to Minneapolis. Wonsley has led local organizing around a variety of racial and economic justice campaigns. She was elected to the Minneapolis City Council in 2021 as an independent democratic socialist and is currently serving her second term on the Council.

Dr. Mitchell is the inaugural associate provost for community engagement at the University of Maryland. She previously served as the Rodney Wallace Professor for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and chair of the department of organizational leadership, policy, and development at the University of Minnesota. Mitchell holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and communication from Baylor University in Texas, a master’s in higher education and student affairs from Indiana University, and a doctorate in student development from the University of Massachusetts.

Dr. Joan Morgan (she/hers) is the Program Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. She is an award-winning cultural critic, feminist author, Grammy-nominated songwriter, and a pioneering hip-hop journalist.  Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999 when she published the groundbreaking book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down which is taught at universities globally. Regarded internationally as an expert on the topics of hip-hop, race and gender, Morgan has made numerous television, radio, and film appearances — among them HBOMax, Netflix, Lifetime, MTV, BET, VH-1, CNN, WBAI’s The Spin, and MSNBC. She has written for numerous publications including Vibe, Essence, Ms., and British Vogue.

Dr. Morgan has been a Visiting Scholar at The New School, Vanderbilt and Duke Universities. She was a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University’s Institute for the Diversity of the Arts where she was awarded the prestigious Dr. St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She is the first Visiting Scholar to ever receive it. Dr. Morgan is also a recipient of the 2015 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the 2015 Penfield Fellowship, the 2016 American Fellowship Award, and a 2020 finalist for the ACLU Emerging Scholars Fellowship.

Dr. Morgan’s dissertation, It’s About Time We Got Off: Claiming a Pleasure Politic in Black Feminist Thought interrogated black feminist theory’s historical scripting of black female sexuality as a site of ongoing racial and sexual trauma through the lens of a pleasure politic. For black women, the gendered manifestations of the “afterlife of slavery” include the trauma instigated by sexual and domestic violence, reproductive violence, and state-sanctioned violence. Pleasure politics acknowledges this trauma but reframes the existing narrative about black female sexuality by positioning desire, agency, and black women’s engagements with pleasure as a viable theoretical paradigm. Dr. Morgan argued that black women’s broad engagement with digital technologies, social media, communal viewing practices, gender queerness, and current ethnic diversity contest the ubiquity of the “politics of silence” to disrupt a master narrative that is static, heteronormative, and mono-ethnic in its approach to blackness.

“Pleasure Politics” is a multi-pronged effort that includes Dr. Morgan’s public-intellectual work and several years of critical intellectual labor with “The Pleasure Ninjas” — a collective she founded during her tenure at Stanford. Both Dr. Morgan’s public intellectual work and dissertation research on pleasure politics have been generative. In addition to national and international panels with “The Pleasure Ninjas”, she was a co-editor and contributor for a two-part special issue of The Black Scholar on the future of Black feminism. Her piece, “Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure” was selected by the journal as one of the best articles of 2015. The article was subsequently reprinted in the New York Times bestseller Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Her piece “Controlled Images and Cultural Reassembly: Material Black Girls Living in an Avatar World” was published in the collection Women in Migration: Responses in Art History. In 2018 Simon & Schuster published her critically acclaimed book She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the acclaimed and influential debut album.

Dr. Morgan is a mentor for Unlock Her Potential and is on the Board of Trustees for the National YoungArts Foundation. She is currently working on a screenplay adaptation of her first book, which has been optioned for screen rights.

Jamaican-born and South Bronx-bred, Dr. Morgan is a proud native New Yorker.

Dr. Davis is a Clinical Full Professor and Associate Dean for Student Belonging at the University of Houston. Dr. Davis' scholarship addresses two major strands: (1) issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion within postsecondary contexts and (2) socialization and professional pathways for the higher education profession. Through these lenses, she has been able to explore a range of topics including college access, the experiences of Black students, intercollegiate athletics, student affairs graduate preparation, self-care, supervision, institutional diversity, and faculty experiences and career development within the academy, particularly among minoritized faculty.

Dr. Jeni Hart (she/her/hers) is the Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Studies at the University of Missouri. She is also Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (ELPA). Dr. Hart joined ELPA as an assistant professor in 2003. She completed her PhD in Higher Education Administration at the University of Arizona. Prior to becoming a faculty member, she worked for 9 years as a student affairs educator at a number of colleges and universities, and one year as a faculty member at Southeast Missouri State University. Dr. Hart’s scholarship centers on three mutually reinforcing themes: faculty work, gender and feminisms, and campus climate. Specifically, she is interested in how organizational structures in academe mutually shape the experiences of those in higher education, particularly women and feminist faculty. Dr. Hart serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education and the NASPA Journal about Women in Higher Education.