Dr. Antonia Darder is coming to Illinois State University to give the keynote lecture entitled “Language Rights in a New Era of English-Only” on April 24 at 7 p.m. at the Atrium Room in the Bone Student Center as part of the 2025 Bilingual Advocacy Week.
This event is sponsored by The Harold K. Sage Fund; the School of Teaching and Learning; the Student Association for Bilingual Education; Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; and the Latin American and Latino Studies Program.
Date: Thursday, April 24
Time: 7 p.m.
Place: Atrium Room in the Bone Student Center
Darder is an internationally recognized Freirean scholar and professor emerita at Loyola Marymount University, where for more than a decade she held the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of ethics and moral leadership. She is an American Educational Research Association fellow, the recipient of the American Educational Research Association Scholars of Color Lifetime Contribution Award, and an award-winning author and editor of more than 20 books in the field, including The Student Guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, After Race: Racism after Multiculturalism, Decolonizing Interpretive Research: A Subaltern Methodology for Social Change, and On Class, Race, and School Reform: Contested Perspectives.
Her experiences growing up in poverty, as a single mother, within the academy, and her love of life are essential to her commitment to working for a more just and loving world. For more than 50 years, Darder has worked tirelessly to counter social and material inequalities in schools and society. Beyond academia, she is a poet and visual artist. She wrote and produced a student-community collaborative award-winning documentary, The Pervasiveness of Oppression, which explored the persistence of inequities within higher education.
Please join us in welcoming Darder as she will discuss the pertinent topic of language rights following President Donald Trump’s recent executive order that declared English as the official language of the United States.
