Provost Wendi Williams to Give Keynote at the University of Victoria Climate Complexity & Decolonization Speaker Series

The Deans’ office at the University of Victoria, Canada, has chosen Fielding Provost Dr. Wendi S. Williams as a keynote for their upcoming 2024-25 speaker series on Climate, Complexity, and Decolonization. Dr. Williams will be presenting a talk titled “Through Liminality: Transformative Leadership in VUCA Times,” on September 18, 2024 at the conference.

For Dr. Wendi S. Williams, leading in “these” times is a formulation layered with complexity and opportunities for generativity grounded in legacies of abolition and liberation first articulated by our ancestors and elders. In her talk, “Through Liminality: Transformative Leadership in VUCA Times”, Dr. Williams complicates the notion of “these” times by exploring the experience of VUCA through Afro-Indigenous lenses of persistent precarity when in relation with settler-colonial violences. How does a framework, such as VUCA which amplifies the pervasive sense of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity and was crafted through a militaristic lens at the end of the Cold War, frame the context of leadership for her, a Black American woman, higher education and disciplinary leader in the field of psychology?

Leading in contexts that carry the legacy of disproportionate dominance, oppression, and harm, Dr. Williams will address the nature of the continuity of VUCA for Afro-Indigenous peoples as a framework for preparing leaders to be responsive to the contemporary needs of our institutions and organizations grappling with the necessity and inevitability of change today.

Dr. Williams will be presenting three separate sessions throughout the day, each tailored to different groups within the UVic community: leadership, faculty and staff, and students. These sessions are by invitation only. Please see the event website for more information: https://www.uvic.ca/education/about/climate-complexity-decolonization-speaker-series/index.php. 

About Dr. Wendi S. Williams

Dr. Wendi S. Williams

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 an 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.’