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The main objective of this workshop is for participants (faculty, students, administration, and staff) to develop a personal connection with the plight of racial-ethnic and sexual minorities in institutions of higher education. This work is needed for the advancement of individual and institutional empathy so that we can move from tolerating to accepting to celebrating underrepresented minorities in academia. This will be achieved by encouraging workshop participants to identify instances: in their own lives in which structural prejudice and bigotry and individual-level macroaggressions hampered their career development; in which they intentionally and/or unintentionally contributed to advancing structural prejudice and bigotry and/or perpetrated individual-level macroaggressions that may have hampered the career of underrepresented faculty, students, administration, and staff; and in which they were bystanders who did not intervene to dismantle structural prejudice and bigotry and/or address individual-level macroaggressions that they witnessed.

Format: This hands-on workshop will include:
A. A short lecture whose content will include Pinto’s personal experiences and personal examples of the dynamics listed above. This will be reinforced with statistics (e.g., disparities in tenure and promotion), and anecdotes from other minority individuals.

B. Following the lecture, Pinto, in collaboration with other actors, will use Theater of the Oppressed (Port: Teatro dos Oprimidos) techniques to model skits reflecting each of the instances listed above. Skits will be scripted such that the ending of each story will be decided by participants in small groups with an eye toward actions they can take to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academic space. (Boal A. (1979). Theatre of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Theater Communications Group).

C. Following small group discussions, all participants will reconvene to discuss strategies for welcoming underrepresented minorities into their social networks. This portion of the workshop will help participants to understand how they can help underrepresented minorities develop social capital by lending their social support: emotional, concrete, and informational.

Rogério Pinto accepting on behalf of the Faculty Allies for Diversity Committee: Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Rogério M. Pinto is a professor and associate dean for research at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. He is the co-chair of the Faculty Allies for Diversity Committee. In his work, Pinto focuses on finding academic, sociopolitical, and cultural venues for broadcasting voices of oppressed individuals and groups. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, his community-engaged research focuses on the impact of interprofessional collaboration on the delivery of evidence-based services to marginalized racial/ethnic and sexual minority individuals. Funded by the University of Michigan Office of Research, as a new scholarly pursuit, he is building an art installation, The Realm of the Dead, to investigate his own personal marginalization as a gender non-confirming, mixed-race, and Latinx immigrant. This installation will serve as the stage set for Pinto’s award-winning theatrical performance, Marília, a one-person play, in which Pinto further explores the tragic death of his 3-year old sister, Marília, and how such loss haunts and inspires the lives of the family members she left behind. Marília won the 2015 United Solo Festival Best Documentary Script and it will be performed again at the University of Michigan as part of the centennial celebration of the School of Social Work.