Closing Plenary: Building For Peace and Justice, Surpassing the Sum of Our Parts | 2019 Annual PJSA & PACS-CAN Conference

Closing Plenary for 2019 Annual Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference | Hosted with Peace and Conflict Studies Association of Canada (PACS-Can) at Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) & Menno Simons College (MSC) | October 4th-6th, 2019

About the Speakers:

Hector Vazquez is originally from Naolinco, Mexico and is a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria (Canada). His dissertation will address the embedding of music with Indigenous roots into Mexico’s national elementary curriculum. Hector holds a Bachelor of Music in Performance (Universidad Veracruzana) and a Master’s degree in Education (Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education). Currently, his research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Mateo Oliva Oliva Non-profit Association and the Founder and Director of the Festival Internacional de Música Naolinco, both of which aim to encourage equal access to music and music education.

Ynestra King is an ecofeminist writer, teacher, oral historian and activist. She is a native of Selma, Alabama where she first observed the practice of nonviolent resistance, which was to become a lifelong preoccupation. She is an originator of ecofeminism and she is currently working on a book collection of her many publications in response to requests from climate activists around the US, and in Europe, India and the Middle East, as well as a memoir. She cofounded Women and Life on Earth, and convened the first ever ecofeminist gathering in 1980, which organized the antimilitarist Women’s Pentagon Action, and contributed to the ecology and peace encampment movements of the 1980s and 1990s. Ynestra has taught at several colleges and universities including the New School and Columbia University. More recently, she has written about disability, and originated and directed an oral history project at Columbia University, interviewing people living with significant disabilities and physical trauma (“Listening With the Whole Body in Mind”). Her work continues to be concerned with feminism, climate change, embodied politics, community, and the practice of radical nonviolence. She continues to be affiliated with the Institute for Social Ecology, where she has taught for many years. She is active in Writers Resist and the Board of the A. J. Muste Foundation and strives to live a life of radical amazement.

Prior to his position as Gallaudet University’s Associate Provost for Student Success, Dr. Thomas Horejes was Executive Director for Deaf Empowerment Awareness Foundation (DEAF, Inc), a deaf-centric non-profit advocacy organization serving deaf & hearing communities on communication access. He holds a Ph.D. (2009) in Justice Studies at Arizona State University – his training at Arizona State examines current social justice issues, such as human rights against a backdrop of legal systems, law and culture to create meaningful, real-world impact through public policy and systems change. Prior to his position with DEAF, Inc., he taught at Gallaudet University for 4 years (2010 – 2014) with the Department of Sociology. During his time at Gallaudet, he was founder of TEDxGallaudet, member of the Gallaudet Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Initiative (GSTLI), and in 2012, he was awarded Teacher of the Year by Gallaudet’s Delta Epsilon Sorority. Before Gallaudet, he was also a disability policy specialist for Phoenix, Arizona and community advocate for the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness. Academically, Dr. Horejes has over eight years of teaching in higher education, thirteen peer-reviewed published articles including a book on deaf education by Gallaudet University Press. Dr. Horejes was Primary Investigator for a successful 3-year $495,000 grant that has resulted in numerous publications, presentations, and will be a book forthcoming that studied bilingualism in three different countries (USA, Japan, & France). He was also co-chair of the Research on the Education of Deaf Persons Special Interest Group (SIG) for American Educational Research Association (AERA).