Nationally renowned speakers Zach Wahls and Samuel Freedman, along with other panels and workshops on issues from marriage equality to advocating against the marginalization of minority groups, will be featured at the upcoming Shepard Symposium.
The college of education will be hosting the 17th annual Shepard Symposium, a national conference dedicated to creating dialogue on social justice, this Wednesday through Saturday.
Dr. Angela Jaime, an associate professor at the college of education, has chaired the committee for the Shepard Symposium for the past three years. Jaime, a member of the Pit River and Valley Maidu tribes of northern California, wrote her dissertation focusing on the experiences of Native American women and is no stranger to social inequalities.
Jaime believes the symposium is an avenue to spread a message of love and affection to others.
“I feel like I’m doing something that is beneficial for everyone. It’s a way to teach being affectionate towards people,” she said.
“Shepard Symposium becomes a place where we can invite so many different perspectives,” she said. “We are fairly isolated here in Wyoming. The symposium allows us to bring these forward thinking people here. I don’t necessarily agree with what they have to say, but they make me think in different ways.”
“It’s important because it brings in speakers that talk on the ‘ism’s’: racism, sexism and so on,” Jordan Kaul, the SLCE Mule Project student coordinator, said. “It’s important to talk about this because, once the conversation stops, you stop the creation of solutions for problems and prejudices.”
Kaul volunteered and worked at last year’s symposium and is involved with the Social Justice Endowment Group, which has played a significant role in social justice events throughout the year.
The Shepard Symposium is named after Matthew Shepard, a gay UW student who was tortured and murdered in 1998, though it began as “The Symposium for the Eradication of Social Inequalities” in 1996.
“The issues his death has brought up is the reason why there’s always a piece on LGBT,” Kaul said.
“That happened here,” said Jaime. “It was a horrible thing, but we need to own it and move forward. The message we hope to pass on is one of love and respect. We need to teach that at a very early age and be consistent in our message.
“It’s easy to judge someone else’s life without living them,” Jaime continued. “We have to learn to respect one another, but we lose that somewhere in our development phase. I don’t have to agree with you or be around you, but that doesn’t mean I can’t love or care for you.”
