Latinx Pop Lab & Latinx Creative Critical Consortium

The Latinx Pop Lab along with Critical Consortium partners—Texas A&M, UT Dallas, Southern Methodist University, Texas State, San Marcos, and Austin Community College—offers students from across Texas the opportunity to share, workshop, and engage with the cutting-edge Latinx creative and scholarly work being done today. The aim: for students to critically create work that resonates across on-campus and off-campus publics.

Latinx Pop Lab Creative Collaboratory

The Creative Collaboratory residency brings to the UT campus & Austin community BIPOC creators working in the comics and multimedia narrative arts to work collaboratively on a new project with a given theme. Residencies embed creatives in the ongoing critical creative work at the Latinx Pop Lab, exploring and workshopping with students at UT and K-12 in the community in ways that foster dialogue & creation across the arts, humanities, and STEM fields.

Latinx Pop Lab’s BIPOC POP

Every spring, the Latinx Pop Lab’s BIPOC POP Expo & Symposium brings to the UT Austin campus creatives, scholars, and industry leaders working in the comics, gaming, animation, and multimedia arts to focus on strengthening community through the sharing of cutting edge creative critical knowledge making in the graphic storytelling arts. BIPOC POP clears a creative critical space for making & strengthening community and creative critical action today and tomorrow in the comics, gaming, animation, & multimedia storytelling arts.

LASER: Latinx Space for Enrichment and Research

The White House Hispanic Bright Spot-awarded LASER/Latinx Space for Enrichment Research has built community on campus by working with communities off campus. Latinx graduate students work with Latinx undergraduates on campus, and both groups work with Latinx high school students in the wider community. With LASER Hubs in schools and libraries across the greater Columbus area, and with virtual hubs reaching rural Latinx Ohioans, every student in the program successfully makes it to OSU (or a LASER partner college) and then thrives once in college.

Latinx Space for Enrichment and Research (LASER) nurtures a community of students and scholars engaged in expanding the presence of Latinos in higher education, enriching the undergraduate research experience, and helping to prepare students for successful application to college, professional, and graduate school programs. Signature programs include: a three-stage mentoring system that supports students from high school through undergraduate and graduate school; Latino Role Models Day designed to increase the presence of Latinos in all facets of education and professional life; and SÕL-CON: The Brown & Black Comix Expo. The LASER program and its community of students, staff, teachers, and parents celebrates and affirms diversity and inclusion. The LASER program and its community provide a safe space of enrichment and research for all Latinos.

LATINO Role Models Day

Latinx Role Models Day: I created this single-day yearly event brings to the OSU campus over 450 Latinx high school students from the Columbus and greater and Columbus area. The students visit the campus and engage in exploratory conversations with professionals, faculty, and community members invested in education for Latinos. This personalized networking opportunity opens pathways for Latinx high school students to paid internships and college matriculation.

LASER’s Latinx Role Models Day 2017 offered nearly 500 Latino high school students the chance to hear from undergraduate and graduate students and community members from a wide-range of occupations as well as faculty from The Ohio State University, Otterbein University, and Columbus State Community College. Throughout the day, visiting students had small group sessions with roles models, took a tour of the Ohio State campus, and listened to keynote speaker, Eric J. Garcia, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Latino artivist who works with different media, including political cartoons, to raise social and political awareness.

[IS THERE UPDATED TEXT WE COULD USE FROM THE 2019 ONE?]

Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute

I created this weeklong program to bring nearly 50 diversity high school students to campus to learn from world-renowned professors who actively bridge the cognitive and neurosciences with the humanities. Not only has the HumCog High School Summer Institute opened doors for these students in terms of college admission (with many choosing to attend OSU), but it has fulfilled a lifelong dream: to make a difference in the lives of young people who could otherwise not afford to attend by formally exploring the synergistic interface between work done in the humanities and the sciences.