Angie Cruz- Keynote

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022) was a finalist for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, shortlisted for The Aspen Words Literary Prize, winner of the Gold Medal, Latino Book Award/The Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Book Award, longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize and chosen for The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022 and The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Fiction. Her novel, Dominicana was the inaugural book pick for GMA book club and shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, a RUSA Notable book and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee and the recipient of numerous fellowships, residencies and awards including the 2025 USA Fellowship, The Poets & Writers /Writers For Writers Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She’s the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the award winning literary journal, Aster(ix) and teaches at Columbia University.

Dr. Valentina Migliarini- Keynote

Dr. Valentina Migliarini is an Associate Professor in Education Studies in the School of Education in the Department of Education and Social Justice, University of Birmingham, UK. She is Department Research Lead for Education and Social Justice and a member of the Centre for Research in Race and Education (CRRE).

Her work, both in research and teaching, focuses on increasing access to equitable education for students from multiply marginalized communities, specifically disabled students from migrant and forced migrant backgrounds, in secondary education. She is at the forefront of researchers using the Disability Critical Race Theory in Education (DisCrit) framework as an intersectional lens to examine inclusive policies and practices in education systems in Europe and in the United States. Through her research agenda, she addresses mainstream conceptualizations of inclusion, highlighting how these reproduce micro-exclusions for students living at the intersections of multiple forms of oppression.

Dr. Django Paris- Keynote

Django Paris is the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Chair of Multicultural Education and director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice  in the College of Education at the University of Washington on Coast Salish homelands. His teaching and research focus on centering and sustaining Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander and all Global Majority youth and communities in the context of ongoing resurgence, decolonization, liberation, abolition, and justice movements in and beyond schools. Paris’s most recent collaborative books are Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World and Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square. He is also the editor of the Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies series with Teachers College Press. 

Dr. Jillian Báez-

Mentoring Session: Child and Youth-Centered Media Studies

Book Spotlight: Quinceañeras: Latina Girlhood and Popular Culture

Dr. Jillian Báez is a Full Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College. She is also an affiliated faculty member at the CUNY Mexican Studies Institute and the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Trained as a media studies and cultural studies scholar, her research expertise lies in Latina/o/x media, transnational feminisms, and issues of belonging and citizenship. She is the author of In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media and Citizenship (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Spanish Language Television: Cultural and Industrial Transformations (University of Texas Press, 2025), and Quinceañeras: Latinidades and Girlhood in Popular Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2026).

Kiana González Cedeño

Mentoring Session: Digital Childhood Studies

Kiana González Cedeño is Assistant Professor of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University. Her current book project, To Lament a Colony: Decolonial Feeling in Puerto Rican Culture, theorizes lamentation as a decolonial theoretical framework and analytic that reveals, archives, and resists the psychic and material violence of colonial modernity. Drawing from dance, music, literature, and visual media, her work foregrounds Black Puerto Rican cultural expression as both grief work and refusal. She also leads After the Storm, a transnational digital humanities collective that documents the testimonios of Black and Afro-descendant women surviving environmental catastrophe across the Greater Caribbean. Her writing appears in CENTRO Journal, and her broader work bridges cultural analysis, ethnography, and digital archiving.

Edwin Mayorga, Ph.D.

Mentoring Session: Community-Engaged Research with Youth

Edwin Mayorga, Ph.D. (he/el) is a parent-educator-activist-scholar, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies, and the Latin American/Latino Studies Program, at Swarthmore College. Edwin studies and writes about a number of things related to education, including racial-cultural inequality, urban school and neighborhood development, abolitionist teacher education, racial/ethnic studies and social movements. He is director and co-researcher of two major projects that work through the notion of abolitionist sanctuary as a praxis of freedom: the #BarrioEdProject, a participatory action research (PAR) collaborative and sanctuary-focused middle school after school club and the Cultivating Community Together (CCT) study which is an examination of community+school partnerships in Philadelphia. He organizes with Stand Up for Philly Schools (SUPS) and serves on the executive boards of the National Latino Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAP) and the Education Law Center (PA). While committed to research, teaching and activism, Edwin strives to prioritize his family, and as a result is often found at local parks with his spouse, Jen, and their sons Teo and Julian (Juju).