Fielding Provost Wendi Williams Selected as Keynote Speaker for APA 2023

The American Psychological Association (APA) selected Fielding Provost and Senior Vice President Wendi S. Williams, Ph.D., as a keynote speaker for the annual APA 2023 conference. The event will take place from August 3rd to the 5th in Washington D.C., with keynote presentations also being live-streamed. Provost Williams will be speaking on the main stage in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Friday, August 4th, at 2 pm Eastern.

Friday, August 4
2:00 p.m. – 2:50 p.m. ET
WALTER E. WASHINGTON CONVENTION CENTER, LEVEL 3, BALLROOM A AND B/ MAIN STAGE LIVESTREAM (Virtual Experience tickets available here)

APA keynote speakers will present some of the biggest challenges facing the world today and how psychology can help solve them. Dr. Williams’s presentation is titled “On Refusal and Recovery: What Black women teach us about reclaiming our wellness in our work.”

Black women have a complicated relationship with labor in the U.S. context and beyond. Born out of a legacy of enslavement, Black women’s labor dynamics entangle identity, purpose, and survival with the potential to undermine their thriving. And yet, Black women are getting free. Finding deeper, personal meaning in our work, articulating boundaries for rest and restoration, and uncoupling the damage of intergenerational racial trauma from the intersection of racism, sexism, and classism from who we know ourselves to be. In this keynote address, Dr. Wendi Williams explains how Black women’s refusal and recovery offer key lessons to positively shape our collective reclamation of wellness in our work lives.

Learning Objective(s):

1. Based on the content, participants will understand the impact of Black women’s labor history on their current work experiences.
2. Based on the content, participants will understand the impact of Black women’s historic labor dynamics on current US labor dynamics.
3. Based on the content, participants will learn refusal practices to achieve wellness in work/labor context.
4. Based on the content, participants will learn recovery practices to achieve wellness in work/labor context.

About Provost Williams

Provost and Senior Vice President Wendi S. Williams, Ph.D.

Psychologist, advocate, and educator, Dr. Wendi Williams applies her work at the intersection of education and psychology to her scholarship and leadership praxis. Williams completed undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis where she majored in psychology and minored in African and African American Studies. She completed graduate study at Pepperdine University (MA in Psychology) and Georgia State University, where she earned a doctorate in counseling psychology, with an emphasis in multicultural psychology and family systems. Williams began her career as assistant professor in counselor education at Long Island University — Brooklyn and has served as an academic administrator for progressive, justice-focused higher education institutions, like Bank Street College of Education and Mills College, School of Education. She joined Fielding Graduate University as provost and senior vice president in October 2022. Dr. Williams is an accomplished scholar in the areas of Black women and girls leadership and development, most notably with her recently published book, Black Women at Work: On Refusal and Recovery.