Diversity Week at Queens College offers a meaningful opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to reflect on our shared humanity, engage in community-building conversation and activities, and consider and celebrate all the ways in which we are different and the same. Through a series of interactive programs, activities, and our culminating conference, we will explore strategies to combat all forms of bias, bigotry, and hate. A particular focus will be placed on addressing issues such as antisemitism, anti-Blackness, anti-Asian hate, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination, anti-ethnic hate, and discrimination based on age and/or disability. This week of reflection and action aims to foster an inclusive environment where we can collectively confront prejudice in all its forms.

Location: Virtual
Time: 10:00 – 11:30AM

Location: Patio Room (Dining Hall 114)
Time: 12:00 –1:30PM

Interactive art workshop where students will learn to create an artistic representation of a brain through the guidance of an art educator. This experience is a celebration of neurodiversity.

Location: Patio Room (Dining Hall 114)
Time: 3:00 – 4:30PM

Join the Office of Compliance & Diversity for a screening of a film about undocumented rights and activism from director Marlene ‘Mo’ Morris and Galewood Films in association with Latino Public Broadcasting Voces. When the Trump administration abruptly threatens to deport 700,000 fellow Dreamers, charismatic attorney and DACA recipient Luis Cortes Romero fights back, co-piloting an A-Team of lawyers who takes their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Luis is the first undocumented immigrant to argue before the nation’s highest court. Set for release amidst a volatile election year and ongoing DACA threats, From Here/From There (De Aquí/De Allá) is a timely documentary that highlights the urgent need for compassionate immigration reform.

Post-film Q&A with producer Nicole Solis-Sison and QC Immigrant Student Support Initiative  coordinator Carla Cordova. Refreshments will be served.

Show your QC pride! Celebrate Q-UNITY Day by wearing your favorite Queens College apparel. Students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to participate.

Location: Student Union 126 – Faculty & Staff Lounge
Time: 12:15 – 1:30PM

Sunny Laprade is the second most followed trans woman stand-up comic in the world. Her material ranges from dating horror stories to observations about working in television and her experiences as a queer transgender woman. You won’t want to miss this live stand-up performance!

Location:  Student Union 320
Time: 12:15 – 1:30PM

Enjoy this casual brunch meet-up where veterans and students can gather to share their stories and experiences. The informal setting is designed to encourage open discussion about diversity in the military, personal experiences, and how we can build a supportive community for veterans on campus.

Location: TBD
Time: 12:15 – 1:30PM

Crisis and uncertainty are surrounding us. On our campus we are facing enrollment and fiscal challenges. In our nation and community, we are facing growing divisions, unemployment, deportations, and a looming recession. These real-life challenges pose threats to our students’ ability to thrive and succeed. But these threats are also impediments to us as professionals. We need lifelines. Unfortunately, none seem to be coming anytime soon. From our positions, we may wonder if there is anything that we can do. Join us for a robust exploration of solutions, led by the QC SEEK team. Refreshments will be served.

Location: Patio Room (Dining Hall 114)
Time: 1:30 – 3:00PM

Lunch will be provided.

Location: Student Union Ballroom
Time: 8:00 – 3:00PM

The highlight of Diversity Week will be the Dismantling and Combating Hate Conference. This event will include Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion(DEI) practitioners, leaders, and stakeholders from Queens College, our neighboring higher education institutions in the borough of Queens, and community and industry partners.

This conference will provide an in-depth exploration of the legalities surrounding DEI in higher education, its significant achievements, and the future direction for DEI initiatives on college campuses. Attendees will engage in discussions focused on the potential to establish DEI leadership as a research-driven community of practice, fostering a network of support and collaboration for ongoing progress in this vital area.

Location:   Kiely Hall 8^th floor conference room
Time: 10:00 – 11:30PM 

Location: Student Union Ballroom
Time: 12:00 – 1:30PM (During Conference Lunch)

Presented by CERRU and the Office of Compliance & Diversity, the Social Identity Fashion Show will showcase the ways students powerfully rewrite narratives and creatively present social identities, culture, and heritage (i.e., race, religion, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, etc.) through fashion, combating perceived/stereotyped social identities.

Location: TBD
Time: 3:00 – 6:00PM

Location: Q-Side Lounge
Time: 5:30 – 8:30PM

Join the Office of Student Development and Leadership and Queens Hillel for a special dinner and dialogue with a diverse group of students, faculty, and staff from all across our campus. Breaking Bread Building Bonds is a citywide initiative that aims to cultivate the immense diversity of our city and bring New Yorkers together to learn about common bonds, share their cultures and traditions, and break down silos between communities.

We believe there’s more that bonds us than divides us, and this dinner seeks to unite our Queens community while building understanding to move towards ending bias, hate, and discrimination.

Dinner will be catered and will include kosher, halal and vegetarian options.

Sponsored by the Office of Compliance & Diversity, CERRU, and Queens Hillel.

Location: Student Union Underground
Time: 6:00 – 9:00PM

The Queens College Gender, Love and Sexuality Alliance (GLASA) and LGBTQIAA+ Programs at Queens College invite CUNY students and their guests to this enchanted forest and fantasy-themed formal. Celebrate yourself by attending a prom where you can be out loud and proud and bring the date of your choice without any gender restrictions or stigma!

Location: Online  
Time: 12:00 – 1:00PM

Join us for an overview of student rights and resources as we debunk common myths around sexual assault. Bring a friend for a Kahoot game review to show off your knowledge!

Location: Virtual
Time: 1:00 – 2:30PM

Location: Online 
Time: 2:00 – 3:30PM

What is disability justice? Why is it important? What does bodily autonomy have to do with it? Join us for a discussion on disability, bodily autonomy, and consent. We’ll talk about disability models, care networks, and more.

Location: Online
Time: 12:00 -1:00PM

Seo-Young Chu will discuss her forthcoming book A Refuge for Jae-in Doe and Other Fugues (Punctum Books, Spring 2026), which is at once the memoir of an abuse survivor missing an identifiable self, a makeshift refuge for a Korean American “Jane Doe,” and a lyric meta-memoir that reflects on what it means to write autobiographically.

Note: Discussion limited to CUNY faculty, staff, and students. Talk will not be recorded.

Location: Online
Time: 5:30 – 7:00PM

Propaganda, Communication and Empire: Western Intervention in Afghanistan (Routledge, 2025) interrogates the mediatized politics of western intervention in Afghanistan to gain a deeper understanding of the occupation within the broader transition toward a multipolar global order. Accurate histories of western interventions and regional realities are often obscured or even eclipsed in the accounts of western mainstream media, which, if anything, tend to rue the withdrawals and lionize the suffering of returning troops. This volume investigates the state’s role in the dark underbelly of the shortsighted interventionist media narrative as well as the dehumanizing portrayals of people living in the Afghanistan–Pakistan region.

Note: Discussion limited to CUNY faculty, staff, and students. Talk will not be recorded.

Location: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 25 West 43rd Street, 17th floor (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
Time: 9:30 AM–6:10 PM

In his 1999 short story “Ten Little Italies of Indiana,” Michael Martone conjures a community of released Italian POWs who settle in Milan, Indiana, after World War II and establish a thriving fashion industry specializing in camouflage garments. This fantasy landscape of immigrant war veterans offers opportunities to imagine hopeful alternatives to the calamities of war related to Italian mobilities.

War has been foundational to the shaping of modern Italian history, memory, and culture—from the wars of the Risorgimento to colonial and Fascist wars of expansion up to and including the two world wars. Furthermore, in all these Italian war efforts, emigrant and diasporic communities have played significant roles whether through moral and material support, serving in the Italian military, or through their opposition to Italian wars. As such, scholars are increasingly turning their attention to the theme of war and its importance to our understanding of the history of Italy, the Italian diaspora, and former colonial subjects.

This interdisciplinary conference explores a wide range of topics concerning war from an Italian—broadly understood—perspective. As in the past, the Institute’s conference proposes an inclusive approach to Italy and Italian mobilities, including inhabitants of the nation-state, members of the diaspora, current immigrants in Italy and their descendants, and former colonial subjects.

In-person conference; two days of panel presentations. See calandrainstitute.org for full program.