Understanding the Cognitive Toll

Understanding the Cognitive Toll Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Marginalization
Engagement: Immersive

This interactive presentation targets administration, faculty, staff, and students in an exploration of the emotional, physical, and cognitive costs related to marginalization, exclusion, and threats associated with historically excluded identities.

An understanding of these socio-psychological "underminers" helps us better to serve our students and colleagues who have been at the receiving end of such slights and surely advances environments of belonging and well-being across the academy and the community.

Presenter

Dr. Debra Bolton
Director of Intercultural Learning and Academic Success
Diversity and Multicultural Student Affairs

Dr. Debra Bolton, director of intercultural learning and academic success and faculty member in the department of geography and geospatial sciences at Kansas State University, plays a key role in fostering cultural advocacy, civility and intercultural learning through education to address historical exclusions of multiple identities socially and academically. Intercultural learning and development includes LGBT Resource Center with Dr. Brandon Haddock. In addition, Intercultural Learning addresses emotional and physical safety, with campus collaborators, through Safe Zone workshops and ally training.

Previously, Bolton served as an extension specialist for K-State Research and Extension for 13.5 years and as an adult educator for 12 years based in Southwest Kansas. She continues her passion for research by leading a multistate research group in community research in multilingual populations focused on leadership, education, health, well-being, community integration and social networks.

Bolton, a National Geographic Society Explorer, introduces geospatial analysis and geography to high school aged females of color, a grossly under-represented population in the geosciences and other STEM disciplines.