2025 Inclusive Excellence Symposium

Date: Friday, February 28, 9:00am - 3:00pm

Location: Center for the Arts, North Campus 

Registration Deadline: Wednesday, February 19

Intended Audience: UB Community 

Please join us on Friday, February 28 for the 2025 Inclusive Excellence Symposium: Charting a Path Forward for an Inclusive Future. At the University at Buffalo, we remain committed to exploring how we can contribute to building a better future for all, and we continue to celebrate the many programs and initiatives advancing inclusive excellence in our schools and colleges. 

The 2025 Inclusive Excellence Symposium will bring together faculty experts from across the University at Buffalo, as well as an outstanding keynote speaker, Professor Ruqaiijah Yearby, Kara J. Trott Professor in Health Law from Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Complementing the keynote will be a morning panel on Challenges to DEI and Social Justice with Professor Athena D. Mutua from the UB School of Law and Professor LaGarrett King from the Department of Learning and Instruction in the UB Graduate School of Education. The afternoon panel on Strategies for an Inclusive Future will include remarks from Professor Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr. from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the UB School of Architecture and Professor Mishuana Goeman from the Department of Indigenous Studies in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

We invite you to join us for a day of conversation, community and exploration of how together we can continue to build a better future for all.

Ruqaiijah Yearby is the Kara J. Trott Professor in Health Law at Moritz, Professor in the Department of Health Services Management and Policy at the College of Public Health, and a faculty affiliate of the Kirwan Institute at The Ohio State University. She is also Co-founder of the Institute for Healing Justice & Equity and one of the Co-Founders of the Collaborative for Anti-Racism & Equity.

Professor Yearby has received over $5 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study structural racism and discrimination in vaccine allocation as well as the equitable enforcement of housing laws and structural racism in the health care system. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Public Health, Emory Law Journal, Health Affairs, and the Oxford Journal of Law and the Biosciences.

Prior to joining the faculty at Ohio State, Professor Yearby held academic appointments at Harvard Medical School, University of Hawai`i at Mãnoa, Saint Louis University, Case Western Reserve University, University of Connecticut, University Buffalo, and Loyola University Chicago. She also worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as an Assistant Regional Counsel and served as a law clerk for the Honorable Ann Claire Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

In 2023, Professor Yearby was appointed to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP). She will serve a four-year term on the committee, which is tasked with developing recommendations to the Food and Drug Administration and the Office of Human Research Protections regarding institutional review boards and the use of human subjects in research. 

Seval Yildirim is UB’s Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence, focusing on UB’s efforts to create a culture of equity and inclusion university-wide to build campus diversity, enhance teaching and scholarship, increase cultural understanding, and foster a welcoming campus environment.

Professor Yildirim has extensive administrative experience related to equity, diversity and inclusion, including in the areas of recruiting and retaining faculty and students from underrepresented groups, promoting inclusive pedagogy and classrooms, and building high school to university pipelines. Prior to UB, Professor Yildirim was Vice President for Diversity Initiatives and Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Prior to UNLV, Professor Yildirim served as Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Development and Co-Chief Diversity Officer at California State University, San Bernardino.

An expert in international human rights, Professor Yildirim's scholarship focuses on secularism, religion and state relations, and individual rights in liberal democracies. Professor Yildirim has also held visiting faculty positions at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Villanova University, and New York University. In addition to her work in higher education, Professor Yildirim has served as pro bono counsel and legal consultant on individual rights cases across the United States.

Professor Yildirim holds a JD and LLM from New York University School of Law, an MA in international affairs from George Washington University and a BA in politics and women’s studies from Randolph-Macon Woman's College.

Athena D. Mutua is a professor of law and the Floyd H. and Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo, School of Law (SUNY). She specializes in the area of civil rights and the critical analysis of the role of law in both facilitating and hindering justice across the intersections of race, class and gender. Examples of this work include: The Attack on Higher Education (with others, 2024); An Exegesis of the Meaning of Dobbs (2024); Reflections on Critical Race Theory in a Time of Backlash (2023); Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications for Law (2022); Liberalism’s Identity Politics: A Reply to Fukuyama (2020). In addition to legal scholarship, Professor Mutua has written in other areas, such as those found in her edited collection on Progressive Black Masculinities (2006), for which she received the UB Exceptional Scholars Young Investigator’s Award.  

Professor Mutua is a founding member of the Critical (Legal) Collective, an organization meant to safeguard and advance critical studies in the wake of attacks on critical knowledge and multiracial democracy; and co-founder of ClassCrits, a network of scholars exploring issues of law and political economy. Professor Mutua recently served as vice chair to the New York Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which published the reports: Examining the New York Child Welfare System and Its Impact on Black Children and Families (2024) and Racial Discrimination and Eviction Policies and Enforcement in New York (2022). She also recently chaired the University at Buffalo’s Presidential Review Board (tenure review body). Professor Mutua teaches in the areas of business law, constitutional law and critical race theory. In 2017, she received the Jacob D. Hyman Award for her work with students of color. Professor Mutua holds law degrees from Harvard Law School and The American University, Washington College of Law.  

LaGarrett J. King is an award-winning professor of Social Studies Education and Director of the Center for K12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo. His new book, Teaching Black History for 6-12 Grades: An Introduction to the Black Historical Consciousness Principles to Teachers, will be published in February 2026.

He joined the University at Buffalo’s Graduate School of Education in January 2022 as an associate professor of social studies education. He was previously the Isabella Wade Lyda and Paul Lyda Professor of Education at the University of Missouri. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin after an eight-year teaching career in Georgia and Texas. His primary research interest examines the teaching and learning of Black history in schools and society. He also researches critical theories of race, teacher education, and curriculum history.

An internationally recognized award-winning scholar of Black history education, he received two early career scholar awards from the Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies special interest group of the American Educational Research Association and the College and University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies. He was also awarded one of the prestigious Emerging Scholar of the African Diaspora Awards by the Comparative and International Education Society Special Interest Group.

With over 60 scholarly articles and book chapters, his research has been published in leading academic journals, including Theory and Research in Social Education, Race, Ethnicity, and Education, Journal of Negro Education, Teaching Education, and The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

John Harland Giammatteo researches the intersections between civil procedure, federal courts, and administrative law. His scholarship engages with two primary areas. First, he studies access to courts and rights claiming, with a particular emphasis on barriers to federal litigation. Second, he undertakes ethnographic studies of court-like procedures used by mass adjudicatory agencies. Giammatteo’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in the California Law Review, New York University Law Review Online, and the International Journal of Refugee Law, among other academic journals and periodicals.

Giammatteo joined the School of Law faculty following a clinical teaching fellowship at Georgetown University Law Center, where he taught in the Civil Litigation Clinic and supervised students in a wide range of civil litigation matters. Before teaching at Georgetown, Giammatteo represented asylum seekers and noncitizens at Lutheran Social Services of New York’s Immigration Legal Program as a Justice Catalyst and Liman Fellow. He also clerked for the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Honorable Victor A. Bolden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.

Giammatteo is a 2017 graduate of the Yale Law School. He holds master’s degrees from SOAS and City University in London, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. Giammatteo graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Magazine Journalism.

Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. is an internationally recognized urban planner, historian and full professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo, founding director of the Center for Urban Studies, and Associate Director of the UB Community Health Equity Research Institute.

Taylor’s research focuses on Black social movements, and the interplay among race capitalism, metropolitan city-building, and the underdevelopment of Black neighborhoods. He has written and/or edited five books and over 100 articles and technical reports. He has been cited in many national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and Time Magazine. He has appeared on ABC’s Nightline, CBS Morning News, CNN, and MSNBC. Taylor is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2018 Marilyn J. Gittel Activist Scholar Award by the Urban Affairs Association and the “Community Healer Award,” by the National Community Healing Network. Taylor is developing a model of neighborhood transformation in collaboration with a network of community organizations in Buffalo, and he is completing a study on neighborhood change in Buffalo and a book, From Harlem to Havana: The Nehanda Isoke Abiodun Story (SUNY Press).

Mishuana Goeman, daughter of enrolled Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Hawk Clan, is currently a Professor of Indigenous Studies at University of Buffalo. Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Settler Aesthetics: The Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021) which won the Choice award in 2021 and now is part of a Podcast series of the same name. Her community-engaged work is devoted to several digital humanities projects, including participation as Co-PI on community-based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities.  Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019) is a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. She is the PI of the University of California President’s office multi-campus Research Grant for Centering Tribal Stories in Difficult Times. She also headed up the Mukurtu California Native Hub (2021) housed at UCLA through an NEH sub-grant, which supports local tribal organizations and nations to start their cultural heritage and language digitally sovereign sites through the Mukurtu platform. She is also a co-pi on the Haudenosaunee Archival Research and Knowledge (Hark, 2023), a Mellon funded project at University at Buffalo. She publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and books, including guest-edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Her work from 2018-2022 included holding the Inaugural Special Advisor position at UCLA, where she worked across campus to better Indigenous relationships. From 2020-2021 she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University at Buffalo, located in her home territories. She is the current President of the American Studies Association.