Date: Friday, March 08, 2002 1:20 AM
From: Kristina Yoshida
Subject: Mixed Race Conference!!
Greetings!
This is a letter to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the location of the 6th Annual Pan-Collegiate Conference on the Mixed Race Experience. Earlier in this year there was some confusion as to who was going to hold the conference this semester. Both Cornell University and Smith College bid for the conference unaware of the other’s actions. Because both were interested in being hosts it was decided to continue to have two separate conferences.
The conference at Smith College in Northampton, MA is going to be held April 5th through 7th. The main goal of this conference is to take a different angle at how we see and think about the mixed race experience. We have been working to create a new and dynamic conference that will be to bring the mixed race community together and foster dialogue concerning leadership in both college environments and other communities. We feel strongly about the importance of a leadership component as it would serve to unite the growing mixed race community and would also prevent possible confusion surrounding future conferences.
Another major goal for our conference is to bring forth new topics for workshops and speakers. Although our conference will be offering traditional based workshops on the mixed race experience (e.g. trans-racial adoption and race passing), it will also introduce workshops dealing with topics less frequently explored (e.g. queer issues within the mixed community and issues of self-image). To build strong leadership ties within the mixed race community we are also excited to offer workshops geared towards coalition-building and ways to organize, both within the college environment and the outside community. And last but not least another one of our major goals is to create an atmosphere for people in the mixed race community to have open dialog. To ensure this we will be doing a number of things such as reconfiguring workshops to allow for more conversation, and arranging an interactive lunch to build strong connections between conference attendees.
Attendance is not limited to college students as we are trying to foster links beyond university settings. For further information and to register please visit our website at: www.smith.edu/misc
We Hope To See You There!
Sincerely,
M.I.S.C. (Multiethnic Interracial Smith College)