Inclusive Higher Education: Inspiring Change from Within

Amalia Dache, Ph.D. is an award-winning Afro-Cuban American scholar and an assistant professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis Department at the University of Missouri in Colombia, Missouri. Her experiences as a former Cuban refugee and student traversing U.S. educational systems—such as inner-city K-12 schools, community college, state college and a private research-intensive university—inform her professional experiences. She earned her doctorate from University of Rochester’s Margaret Warner School of Education. Her major research areas include the postcolonial geographic contexts of higher education, activism and education and college access discourses of working-class, Black and Latino/Latina students in the U.S. and abroad. Her most recent publication “(Re)imagined Geographies: A Critical Geography and Urban Higher Education Class Explores Postcolonial Spaces Post-Ferguson” is published in the journal Research in Education and addresses how urban racialization and geography conflate in navigating local college opportunities.

Stephen John Quaye Ph.D. values dialogue and activism as vehicles to promote change in society. Most recently, he engaged in a study on the strategies Black student affairs educators use to heal from racial battle fatigue. Stephen is an associate professor in the Student Affairs in Higher Education Program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and a past president of ACPA: College Student Educators International. His work is published in different venues, including the Journal of College Student Development, the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, and Teachers College Record. He is also an author on the most recent edition of Student Development in College. His Ph.D. is from Penn State University, his master’s degree is from Miami University, and he holds a bachelor’s degree from James Madison University.