The Civic Symposium will feature presentations and panels that address various aspects of democratic learning and engagement. The Symposium will also feature civic organizations from across campus and the community. This event is the perfect opportunity to learn about the foundations of democracy and the civic engagement issues facing our communities across the country!
This event is open to students, faculty, staff, and the public. Refreshments will be provided.
This year's speakers include:
- Quixada Moore-Vissing: Quixada Moore-Vissing, PhD, is researcher about civic engagement and a practitioner of dialogue and deliberation. She is a specialist in civic health. Quixada wrote New Hampshire’s 2012 and 2020 State Civic Health Indexes and is currently partnering with Florida, Maine, and New Hampshire to write 2024 State Indexes. She was co-author of a toolkit called Local Civic Health: A Guide to Building Community and Bridging Divides. Quixada directs Public Engagement Partners, a civic engagement consulting firm, and works with clients including the Seattle Foundation’s Civic Commons on their Cities of Belonging program as well as UNICEF on their Child Friendly Cities Initiative. Quixada is proud to be an Illini and earned her Master’s in Communication at the University of Illinois in 2011, as well as her PhD in Education from University of New Hampshire.
- Dr. Jimmeka Anderson: Dr. Jimmeka Anderson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Tufts University Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) focusing on projects related to media, youth, and democracy. Dr. Anderson received her Ph.D. from the Curriculum and Instruction-Urban Education program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and her master’s degree in educational media with a focus on New Media Literacies at Appalachian State University. Her research interest includes critical digital media literacies among historically marginalized youth, and she has immersed her professional development efforts in focusing on digital inequity in urban communities.
- Dr. Molly Niesen: Dr. Molly C. Niesen is currently a Faculty Fellow at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and former Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Eastern Illinois University. She completed her Ph.D. in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her doctoral thesis, “Crisis of Consumerism: Advertising, Activism, and the Battle over the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 1969-1980,” won the National Communication Association’s Most Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2014, Critical Cultural Studies Division. Another paper on regulatory debates over children’s advertising was awarded the Brian Murphy Best Paper Award at the 2013 Union for Democratic Communications conference in San Francisco, CA.
