Event Recap: Equity, Health, and Learning; Social Determinants of Academic Success
1311, 2018

Event Recap: Equity, Health, and Learning; Social Determinants of Academic Success

—On Thursday, November 1, the Futures Initiative hosted a discussion as part of its University Worth Fighting For series. My colleague, Adashima Oyo and I co-organized and moderated what turned out to be a high-energy discussion about disparities outside the classroom that impact student performance and success in higher education, including access to transportation, healthcare, housing and food, and the kinds of issues that students with disabilities face when trying

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Reflections on Trauma Narratives after Roxane Gay & Katia D. Ulysse
0911, 2018

Reflections on Trauma Narratives after Roxane Gay & Katia D. Ulysse

On November 8, 2018, members of the CUNY community gathered at the Graduate Center for “Roxane Gay in Conversation with Katia D. Ulysse,” moderated by Tami Navarro. In conversation, Navarro asked the authors to speak to writing about trauma. As Catherine Malabou theorizes in Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2009, trans. 2012), “We must allow for the impossibility of flight in situations in which an extreme tension, a pain

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Undergraduate Leadership 2018-2019 Motivation Playlist
2910, 2018

Undergraduate Leadership 2018-2019 Motivation Playlist

Since the Undergraduate Leadership is made up of students across the CUNY system, we build community through meet-ups and blogging. The activities that occur during the meet-ups vary. During our last meet-up, we highlighted one of the Leaders, Joseph Porticelli’s post about staying motivated. Joseph’s determination to succeed prompted him to discuss how he moves forward despite his challenges by listening to music. It’s one of those pieces that when

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2410, 2018

Leading by Example

As the co-director of the Undergraduate Leadership Program at Futures Initiative, it is important for me to have a certain level of transparency with the Leaders. Although I am a private person, I do lower my guard for the Leaders to let them know that they are not alone and not everything is alright. Last year, returning Leader, Cherishe and I had a heart-to-heart about balance and navigating racist situations

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Strategies for Time Management
1410, 2018

Strategies for Time Management

During a recent business meeting at the Futures Initiative, we spent 15-20 minutes sharing strategies for time management in a fishbowl activity. There are different ways to do a fishbowl: you can divide a class into discussants and listeners, where groups sit in different spaces in the room; or in a small enough group such as ours, you can go around the room and ask each participant to talk for 1

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1210, 2018

Equity, Health, and Learning: Social Determinants of Academic Success

Join us on Nov 1 at The Graduate Center, CUNY (Room 9204) for a collaborative discussion that will bring together students, faculty and administrators across CUNY to discuss challenges and opportunities that students face outside of the classroom that impact their success inside of the classroom including access to transportation, healthcare, housing and food. RSVP now, it’s free! This panel, moderated by Futures Initiative Fellows Jessica Murray and Adashima Oyo, is part

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0610, 2018

Cathy Davidson’s “The New Education” wins 2019 Frederic W. Ness Book Award

The Futures Initiative Team is thrilled (and proud) to announce that Cathy Davidson, Distinguished Professor at The Graduate Center CUNY and Founding Director of The Futures Initiative, is the winner of the prestigious 2019 Frederic W. Ness Book Award for her influential work The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, published in 2017 by Basic Books. The Ness Award was established by

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0610, 2018

Classrooms as a Sphere of Possibility: Workshopping Pedagogy and Social Justice

On September 13, The Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York hosted a public event entitled, Classroom and Social Justice: Why Start with Pedagogy. As an exit ticket, we asked the audience to briefly write about why they were interested in this topic. We received critical and impressive responses that were related to the participants’ personal experiences as students or teachers or that pertained

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Event Recap: Classroom and Social Justice: Why Start with Pedagogy?
0410, 2018

Event Recap: Classroom and Social Justice: Why Start with Pedagogy?

Notes | Photos | Video | #fight4edu On Thursday, September 13, 2018, the Futures Initiative hosted a pedagogical workshop on Classroom and Social Justice: Why Start with Pedagogy, the first event of this year’s University Worth Fighting For, a series of workshops that workshops that tie student-centered, engaged pedagogical practices to institutional change, race, equality, gender, and social justice. This workshop looks at the relationship between classroom participation and democracy, focusing on

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0410, 2018

Nov 15 — Writing for the Public: An Op-Ed Workshop

No matter what your field of research, you have expertise that is valuable to public discourse. But how do you connect with a broader audience? In this hands-on workshop, Tanya Domi, Director of Media Relations at the Graduate Center, will teach strategies for getting your ideas published in mainstream media outlets. Learn how to connect your research to the news and get started with op-eds, letters to the editor, and

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