2022 Spring Speakers
Tyler Campbell
February 3, 2022
Born in Texas, Tyler recalls life-changing words learned from his father at an early age, “A Campbell Never Quits.” When confronted with life’s obstacles, these words provided strength and encouragement. Tyler received a football Scholarship to San Diego State University in 2005. While attending SDSU, he was a consistent scholar athlete and contributed mightily on the gridiron for the Aztecs. The tides of life came rolling in during his junior year when he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Tyler became the first individual to play division one college football with the disease. After graduating from SDSU in 2009, Tyler moved back to Austin. An entrepreneur in his own right, Tyler travels the country as a professional speaker delivering empowering and inspiring messages of self-worth. Coining the phrase “TC Speaks”, Tyler hosts his own on air radio show, Real Lyfe Reel Talk, every Saturday from 12pm-1pm on 104.9 The Horn FM in Austin. The inspirational show has become so popular that the Moody School of Communications, at the University of Texas, has hired him on as a consultant to work with students on their semester podcast projects. Author, can now be added to his resume with the release of his new book “The Ball Came Out: Life From The Other Side Of The Field”. Tyler and his wife Shana, along with their 3 children, reside in Texas.
Susana M. Muñoz, Ph.D.
March 3, 2022
Dr. Susana M. Muñoz is Associate Professor of Higher Education, Program Coordinator of the Higher Education Leadership (HEL) Program, and Co-Director of CSU initiatives for the Race and Intersectional Studies for Educational Equity (RISE) Center in the School of Education at Colorado State University (CSU). Her scholarly interests center on the experiences of minoritized populations in higher education. Specifically, she focuses her research on issues of equity, identity, and campus climate for undocumented Latinx students, while employing perspectives such as legal violence, racist nativism, Chicana feminist epistemology to identify and dismantle power, oppression, and inequities as experienced by these populations. She utilizes multiple research methods as mechanisms to examine these matters with the ultimate goal of informing immigration policy and higher education practices. Dr. Muñoz has been honored by the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics for her teaching and research, she was also recognized as a Salzburg Global Fellow and named one of the “top 25 most influential women in higher education” by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine. She also brings 13 years of student affairs experience in multicultural affairs, greek life, diversity and leadership training, TRiO programs, and residence life.
Dr. Muñoz received a B.A. in Political Science and International Studies from Iowa State University, a M.S. in Student Affairs and Higher Education from Colorado State University, and a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from Iowa State University. Her dissertation, entitled “Understanding college persistence issues for undocumented Mexican immigrant women from the New Latino Diaspora: A case study”, was funded through the Association for the Study of Higher Education/Lumina Foundation dissertation fellowship. She also received the Iowa State Research Excellence award for her dissertation research.
Winona LaDuke
April 18, 2022
Winona LaDuke is a Harvard-educated economist, environmental activist, author, hemp farmer, grandmother, and a two-time former Green Party Vice President candidate with Ralph Nader. LaDuke specializes in rural development, economic, food, and energy sovereignty and environmental justice. Living and working on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, she leads several organizations including Honor the Earth (co-founded with The Indigo Girls 28 years ago), Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute, Akiing, and Winona’s Hemp.
These organizations develop and model cultural-based sustainable development strategies utilizing renewable energy and sustainable food systems. She is also an international thought leader and lecturer in climate justice, renewable energy, and environmental justice, plus an advocate for protecting Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.
In 2021, she was named to the first Forbes list of “50 Over 50 – Women of Impact,” in partnership with Mika Brzezinski’s “Know Your Value,” dedicated to shining a light on women over the age of 50 who have achieved significant success later in life, often overcoming formidable odds or barriers. In 1994, LaDuke was nominated by Time Magazine as one of America’s 50 most promising leaders under 40 years of age. She was awarded The Thomas Merton Award in 1996, The Biha Community Service Award in n 1997, The Ann Bancroft Award for Women’s Leadership Fellowship, and The Reebok Human Rights Award (which she used to begin the White Earth Land Recovery Project). In 1998, Ms. Magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the Earth.
A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she also has written extensively on Native American and Environmental issues. LaDuke is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves as co-chair of the Indigenous Women’s Network, a North American and Pacific Indigenous women’s organization.
Her seven books include: The Militarization of Indian Country (2011); Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (2005); The non-fiction book All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999, South End Press); and a novel, Last Standing Woman (1997, Voyager Press). Her new book, To Be a Water Protector: Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers (Fernwood Press/Columbia University), is an expansive, provocative engagement with issues that have been central to her many years of activism, including seven years battling Line 3 -- an Enbridge tar sands oil pipeline in northern Minnesota.
Dr. G.T. Reyes
May 5, 2022
As an uninvited settler on the unceeded Huichin, ancestral land of the Oholone, aka East Oakland, Dr. G.T. Reyes (Taga-Ilog & Kapampangan) is a community-engaged scholar-artist-organizer-PRAXISioner. His work is grounded in the empowerment of young folks, teachers, school leaders, and cultural workers to radically imagine and build capacity to transform their own realities while both excavating and honoring their ancestral ways of being and becoming. As an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership for Social Justice Ed.D. program and Preliminary Administrative Credential Services program at California State University, East Bay, he is an active part of cultivating programs that have liberatory potential and power. His approaches to educational leadership development, research, and professional learning are rooted in critical, socio-cultural, & ethnic studies discourses that forefront culturally sustaining and radical healing pedagogies while also decentering whiteness and coloniality.