Building Inclusive Communities: Deja Knight
October 15, 2020
We held the second seminar of the year in our virtual speaker series, “Building Inclusive Communities,” with speaker Deja Knight. The series features a selected guest speaker each month to discuss the roles that we can play on our campuses to make learning and research more inclusive for everyone. The title of Deja’s talk was “Creating Inclusive and Safe Spaces for Minority and First-Generation Students That Effect Measurable Change.”
The presentation began with an introduction to an overview of NE GWiSE given by Roya Huang, an executive co-chair of NE GWiSE, before introducing our speaker Deja Knight. Upon beginning the workshop, Deja presented her background and her journey to becoming a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. She discussed the differences and overlap between equity, diversity, and inclusion: equity is the recognition and redistribution of power, diversity is who is sitting at the table, inclusion is who gets a voice at the table, the belonging is the central overlap of all of these. She raised pressing points about the links between racism, ableism, and success of students on all levels, and how imperative it is that we support students by building inclusive communities, and fight the loneliness that so many of us might feel in STEM. Throughout the remainder of her presentation, Deja spoke about her experiences and gave insight on the need for graduate students to work together to welcome students of all backgrounds and have conversations about the diverse identities that all students hold, regardless of what might be most visible on the exterior. Following her presentation, she answered questions from the audience that touched on topics of privilege, pushing back the idea of STEM as an objective discipline, where to start in building inclusive spaces, and collaboration to break barriers across groups. All in all, Deja gave a wonderfully thought-provoking workshop, and we are grateful that she joined us and shared her experiences for this important discourse.
About the Speaker
Deja Knight was born and raised in Baltimore, MD where she currently resides for school. Knight is a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the International Health Department, where her research interests focus on HIV, substance use, gender-based violence, social determinants of health, and health equity. At Hopkins, Knight is currently a scholar in The C. Sylvia and Eddie C. Brown Community Health Scholarship Program. She recently graduated from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with her MPH in Social and Behavioral Sciences, and from The University of Iowa, with her MA in Psychology. Knight prides herself on being a social justice warrior who aims to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities, both domestic and abroad, through means of formal research, community-based interventions, health education, and advocacy.At U IOWA, she co-founded and co-directed Our Collective Brains, an organization that helps minority and first-generation students who are majoring or minoring in psychology and/or neuroscience to excel academically and professionally at the university. Most recently, at Harvard, Knight served as an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Fellow in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion where she planned and attended events holding spaces for diverse identities and voices. Lastly, Knight is an alumna of the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Fellow at Wesleyan University, where she received her BA in African American Studies and Neuroscience & Behavior.
