2022 Speaker Books

A Black Woman's Guide to Earning a Ph.D. Surviving the First 2 Years

Nicole A. Telfer

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More Black women are needed in the academy. More Black women may want to join the academy, but the academy has not always been accepting of us. Black women who are currently in academia or in doctoral programs face a wide array of social challenges, from racial discrimination to sexism to anti-Black women experiences. Many Black women have hesitated on applying to or starting their doctoral programs to avoid such social challenges. A Black Woman’s Guide to Earning a Ph.D. provides Black women with tips and resources on how to navigate and survive as a doctoral student at a predominantly white university or program. This book focuses primarily on the first two years of graduate school as years 1 and 2 are typically the most challenging. In this book, Black women will read personal stories related to mental health, the impostor syndrome, racial discrimination experiences, and much more. Lastly, this book was written to encourage more Black women to write about their experiences in their doctoral program for others who will come after them. We are all we’ve got.

A More Radical Elsewhere Foundations, Understandings, and Practices For Our Freedom

Wendi Williams & Wanda Watson

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Black women are subject to restrictions in economic, social, health, and education systems, subject to racism, sexism, and classism. Black Women in Leadership, discusses the impact of leadership positions on Black women, including their physical, and spiritual health, creativity, and innovation. The book reviews the conceptions of how Black women lead and why they make the choices they do, examining actual case studies.

A Tensioner for the Belt-Driven Integrated Starter-Generator

Adebuloka O. Olatunde & Jean W. Zu

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A Tensioner for the B-ISG System presents the design and analysis of a Twin Tensioner for a Belt-driven Integrated Starter-Generator (B-ISG) system. The B- ISG is an emerging hybrid transmission closely resembling conventional serpentine belt drives. Models of the B-ISG system’s geometric properties and dynamic and static states are derived and simulated. The objective is to reduce the magnitudes of static tension in the belt for the ISG-driving phase. A literature review of hybrid systems, serpentine belt drive modeling and automotive tensioners is included. A parametric study evaluates tensioner parameters with respect to their impact on static tensions. Design variables are selected from these for an optimization study. The optimization uses a genetic algorithm (GA) and a hybrid GA. Results of the optimization indicate that the optimal system contains spans with static tensions that are significantly lower in magnitude than that of the original design. Implications of the research on future work are discussed in closing.

Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability

Leigh Patel

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Decolonizing Educational Research examines the ways through which coloniality manifests in contexts of knowledge and meaning making, specifically within educational research and formal schooling. Purposefully situated beyond popular deconstructionist theory and anthropocentric perspectives, the book investigates the longstanding traditions of oppression, racism, and white supremacy that are systemically reseated and reinforced by learning and social interaction. Through these meaningful

Freed Book of Poems

Nicole Telfer

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Freed covers a personal and vulnerable journey about abuse, healing, love, Blackness, and womanhood into three chapters. Freed also has a fourth chapter that invites five poets to share their amazing pieces. The poems in this book are intended to inspire others to share their story. Everyone has thoughts in their mind that are worth acknowledging. Indeed, Freed speaks to the life experiences of various people from various backgrounds, but in the voice and story of a Black woman.

How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection: Using Psychology to Optimize Healthcare Interactions

Christine J. Ko

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How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection offers actionable steps for improving communication between health professionals and patients based on visual, auditory, and emotional understanding from the principles of cognitive psychology.

Drawing on the author’s personal experience as both a healthcare professional and a mother of two children, How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection explores communication between doctors and patients as well as bias in healthcare. This how-to text includes several practical applications that can be applied to healthcare encounters, enabling readers to form habits based on visual analysis of body language, auditory information from language and tone of voice, and logical emotion perception that will allow for improved doctor-patient connection.

By integrating the perspectives of both doctors and patients and applying a psychological lens, this text is invaluable to healthcare practitioners, students of medicine, healthcare, biology, and related fields, and anyone looking to improve their own or other’s quality of doctor-patient interactions and overall healthcare experience.

Marabou

Ashley Odilia Armand

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Marabou guides the reader into a portal centered on the intricacies of falling in admiration with yourself by first recognizing the tenderness of being covered by your skin and the beauty that saunters underneath its surface. Armand guides you on a journey through her delicate lens as she infuses her rich Caribbean culture into each section of this collection in an exceptionally vivid way. In Marabou, the stories, melodies, and cadences steer the reader into going within to track, identify, and hold their feelings accountable while feeling as if they were within these poems. Armand’s poems grapple with expressions that manifest through explorations of sentimental intimacies like foaming hot chocolates and paint strokes that birth nations while utilizing an in-depth understanding of spirituality’s transformative power Armand’s poems bring you to feel, in a chilling, playful way. The reader goes on a healing journey through a dynamic narrative that allows these poems to feel like medicine, rhythm, and movement.

No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education

Leigh Patel

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Examines how student protest against structural inequalities on campus pushes academic institutions to reckon with their legacy built on slavery and stolen Indigenous lands

Using campus social justice movements as an entry point, Leigh Patel shows how the struggles in higher education often directly challenged the tension between narratives of education as a pathway to improvement and the structural reality of settler colonialism that creates and protects wealth for a select few. Through original research and interviews with activists and organizers from Black Lives Matter, The Black Panther party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Combahee River Collective, and the Young Lords, Patel argues that the struggle on campuses reflect a starting point for higher education to confront settler strategies. She reveals how blurring the histories of slavery and Indigenous removal only traps us in history and perpetuates race, class, and gender inequalities. By acknowledging and challenging settler colonialism, Patel outlines the importance of understanding the relationship between the struggle and study and how this understanding is vital for societal improvement.

Pearl Cleage and Free Womanhood: Essays on Her Prose Works

Aisha Francis

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This collection of essays examines popular writer Pearl Cleage’s work, including her novels, short stories and plays. It is the first book-length consideration of a writer and activist whose bold perspectives on social justice, race and gender have been influential for several decades. While academically critical, the essays mirror Cleage’s own philosophical commitment to theoretical transparency and translation. The book includes an in-depth interview with the author and a foreword by former Cleage student and acclaimed novelist Tayari Jones in addition to essays from contributors representing an interdisciplinary cross-section of academic fields.