Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Ignite with our What You Need to Know series. Written by Women’s Center student staff member Shrijana Khanal.
Critical Social Justice has always served as a platform to bring the UMBC community together to share ideas, spark creativity, and shine the light of truth on the challenges and injustices of our world. For 2018, Critical Social Justice: Ignite will focus on how we can catalyze passions and inspiration to create a better future for our community. With as many things going on around our nation (and reverberating throughout UMBC’s campus) in terms of sexual violence, trauma, and survivorship, we hope to create space for imagining a future that embraces healing and liberation.
Inspiring us and helping us organize our way into this future will be Deanna Zandt, our CSJ: Ignite keynote speaker (speaking on Tuesday, 10/23 at 6pm in UMBC’s Fine Arts Recital Hall).
Deanna Zandt is an award-winning media technologist, the co-founder of and partner at LUX (a consulting agency that allows leaders to spread ideas, causes, stories, and brands in an emotional and meaningful way through sharing information and social media). Zandt collaborates with different groups to design and enact effective web strategies towards civic engagement and cultural agency. Her technological expertise along with her background in linguistics, advertising, telecommunications, and finance gives her a cutting edge.) In addition to her leadership in marketing and technology, Deanna is the author of Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking. She also writes and illustrates graphic stories and comics and hosts a podcast on mental health and emotional wellness called The League of Awkward Unicorns.
We bring Deanna, because she embodies the feminist idea of, “the personal is political.” She has been a powerful voice in the #MeToo movement, a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault. Her story was publicly aired on This American Life’s “Five Women” episode, and met with both admiration and criticism. In response, Deanna has openly spoken about how important it is to bring justice to survivors and empower their stories and healing process, while also being mindful of privileges that makes some stories easier to share than others. She describes gendered harassment and abuse as “a lifetime of socialization that we take with us through every experience, the mental acrobatics we perform to get through things, to make them normal, to have our lives make sense” in her blog piece on life post-This American Life.
As a social activist warrior, who is fluent in how technology and design can ignite a social justice movement, we are proud to host Deanna as our CSJ: Ignite keynote lecturer. She will be delivering her Keynote Lecture on Tuesday, October 23 at 6:30 PM in Fine Arts 118. This event is free and open to the public. Following her lecture, we will have a Q&A session and a reception. RSVP via myUMBC and/or Facebook. We are excited to learn about how we as individuals can improve our community through technology and more!
More Resources on Deanna:
Deanna Zandt: What Would Kermit Do?
Personal Democracy Forum 2015: Imagine All the Feelz
For her 40th birthday, this woman ‘married’ her community
Deanna’s Social Media
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deannazandt/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/deanna
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deannaz
