UMBC Library's Spotlight! Series

The Spotlight! Guest Instructor Workshop series from our UMBC LIbrary presents accessible talks from UMBC faculty, staff or students. This is an amazing series of scholar spotlights, kicking off with graduate student and Black Graduate Student Organization founder Nicole Telfer! We hope you can make these talks. Register at the links below. 

Nicole Telfer: Ethnic-racial Socialization Practices, Gender, and Academic Achievement Among High School Students
Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2021 (12pm)
Description: Parents of color, specifically, engage in ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) practices to increase youth's self-esteem, as well as protect them from racial bias and discrimination. Studies have found that ERS practices have implications for youths' academic achievement outcomes, and these outcomes may also vary by gender. In this presentation, Nicole Telfer will talk about a study done under the supervision of Dr. Nicole Else-Quest that examined the relationship between ERS practices and academic achievement with gender as a moderating variable.
Register: Online 


Jodi Kelber-Kaye and April Householder: Baltimore’s Radical Feminists: Community Empowerment and Urban Communes in the 1970s
Date: Friday, March 5th, 2021 (12pm)
Description: In the early 1970s, some young female academics moved to Baltimore to teach and to organize what they hoped would be the socialist feminist revolution, in addition to other revolutions they planned to inspire. In the city, they found peace activists, feminist therapists, students and young wives eager to connect with women in the varied activities of second-wave feminism. Many of these newcomers gravitated to the cheap rents in the neighborhoods of Charles Village and Waverly, where they established institutions of a vibrant counter-culture: urban communes and collectives, women’s therapy groups, a feminist bookstore, a child-care center, a people’s free medical clinic, a food co-op, a coffee house, and Women: A Journal of Liberation, a national radical feminist publication which flourished for the next fourteen years. These radical and socialist feminists created a local community that was revolutionary then and many of those women remain politically active in Baltimore today. This lecture will explore neighborhood and community histories and examine the unique radical feminist collectives, communes and organizations in Charles Village and Waverly in the 1970s and the historic attempts made by these activists at creating a living model for social change. Given the deeply embedded structural inequalities of today’s Baltimore, we contemplate how these histories are reflected in a vibrant city capable of building radical and intersectional social movements and a collective consciousness based on the concept of equity.