Speaking & collaborations
Make room for meaningful conversation.
I welcome opportunities to speak, facilitate, teach, and collaborate with people and organizations creating spaces for learning, reflection, and shared understanding.
My work brings together scholarship, lived experience, storytelling, and community engagement. Through keynotes, workshops, reflective conversations, book events, documentary screenings, and collaborative projects, I explore how migration, memory, caregiving, resilience, and social justice shape our lives.
Keynotes & workshops
Scholarship with a human voice.
I speak with universities, professional associations, community organizations, cultural institutions, healthcare and human service organizations, and faith communities. Presentations can be adapted to your audience and paired with a workshop, panel, book conversation, or screening.
Selected topics include:
- Migration, Belonging, and the Meaning of Home
- Beyond Borders: Immigration, Education, and the Human Experience
- Whose Stories Get Remembered? Oral History, Memory, and Social Change
- Rising from the Waves: Disaster, Memory, Resilience, and Community
- Holding On While Letting Go: Caregiving, Dementia, Grief, and Love
- Listening as an Act of Social Justice
- From Research to Storytelling: Using Scholarship to Create Social Change
Ways to gather
Choose a format that opens the conversation.
Healing circles & reflective conversations
Intentional gatherings for sharing experiences, listening, and finding connection through collective storytelling. These conversations can focus on caregiving, grief and loss, migration and separation, identity and belonging, racial and cultural experiences, disaster recovery, or resilience.
Designed for caregivers, helping professionals, educators, students, families, and community groups, each gathering emphasizes reflection, shared humanity, and the wisdom people bring from their own lives.
Holding on to Pearl: book conversations
Author talks, readings, book clubs, caregiver conversations, and academic discussions drawing on Holding on to Pearl, my account of caring for my mother through dementia.
Programs may explore memory, role reversal, cultural expectations of care, ambiguous loss, grief, migration, and the changing relationship between parent and adult child. A book discussion can also be paired with a reflective circle.
Learn about Holding on to PearlDocumentary screenings & community dialogue
A screening of Connecticut’s Fault Lines can be accompanied by a facilitated discussion, panel, classroom presentation, or community conversation about racial, economic, and health inequities exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Programs can be adapted for universities, social work programs, healthcare organizations, professional associations, and community groups interested in inequality, public health, and resilience.
Explore the documentaryResearch, creative & community partnerships
I welcome collaborations that connect academic scholarship, community knowledge, creative expression, and public engagement. Possibilities include research partnerships, oral history and cultural preservation, documentary and multimedia work, educational programs, conference panels, and podcast conversations.
I am especially interested in projects that help communities document their own histories, amplify overlooked experiences, and connect research and lived experience to social change including work with Caribbean communities and the broader diaspora.
Let’s work together
Every collaboration begins with a conversation.
Tell me about your audience, the topic or project you have in mind, your preferred format, and any proposed dates. We can explore a program that connects with the people you hope to bring together.
Invite ChristianaOr email cbest@usj.edu.