What is Engaged Pluralism?

EP 2: Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams

This episode features a thoughtful conversation with Hakim Williams about community, identity, storytelling, and the importance of creating space for meaningful dialogue grounded in reflection and personal experience. This conversation explores how relationships, learning, and engaging in conversation can strengthen connection and understanding across difference. Content Warning for a brief discussion of suicide, suicide ideation, and self-harm. Please take care. If you or someone you know struggles with these, and you are a Vassar College student, reach out to 845-437-5700, or for those listening off campus, reach out to 988

EP 1: Conversation With Steven Cash

Hello, this is your host, Kimberly Williams Brown, for the 'What is Engaged Pluralism?' podcast. In today's episode, we wanted to foreground what you're about to hear so that you can decide for yourself whether or not you listen. You will hear details about an incident that occurred around Steven Cash's (Class of 1984) visit to campus on February 5, 2026. We release this episode with deep humility and deep understanding that not all people will agree with our decision to release it. As evidenced by our release of the episode two months after the recording, we have thought long and hard about the benefits and the costs of releasing this episode. We're leaning into what we see are the benefits of a conversation that is nicely complemented by the other episodes in the series. Our hope is that our audience will learn from and question/critique Stephen's role in the federal government and his move to sound the alarm about where our democracy is currently headed. That was the intent of his February 5th talk, and we capture that sentiment in the recording on February 6th. Thank you for listening.

EP 0: Trailer

Hello. My name is Kimberly Williams-Brown, your host for the What is Engaged Pluralism podcast. Before the start of the 2025-2026 school year, the Engaged Pluralism Collaborative Team, composed of the Director for Restorative Practices for Engaged Pluralism, the Director for Inclusive Pedagogy, the Associate Director for Organizational Development and Employee Equity, the Program Manager for Engaged Pluralism, and me, the Director of Engaged Pluralism, made a decision to start a podcast so more people in our campus community and beyond it would be able to engage with us, learn about what Engaged Pluralism is, and begin to understand how to engage and practice EP. We decided to start recording in the spring of 2026 because in the spring semester, we typically invite two to three speakers to campus to engage us around a particular topic. These speakers are academics, lawyers, writers, poets, and other creatives and practitioners who, through their scholarship, work, or lived experiences, model for us pluralism. We do this in tandem with our everyday practices of storytelling, restorative practice, intergroup dialogue, and inclusive pedagogy, working in smaller groups, smaller cohorts with folks to think about and to practice and live into the different modalities of engaged pluralism. In the spring of 2026, we chose the theme because of what we'd heard from faculty, students, staff, and administrators at a retreat the previous May and what we'd been hearing from the campus over time. We organized a series called "Rooted in Pluralism, Growing in Possibility: Democracy, Race, and Disability. We imagined that we would have a series of speakers who addressed the theme differently but in important ways based on their embodied professional and intellectual histories. The four speakers in the series for 2026 are Stephen Cash, Hakeem Williams, Consuelo Amat, and Cole Arthur Riley. They are a diverse group of interlocutors who represent the political, sociological, spiritual, and critical discourses of the theme. We imagined that together in conversation, they would offer the campus the opportunity to participate in weaving discourses about the complexities of U.S. democracy and the uneasiness, tension, and deep frustrations that we all are currently experiencing. Come alongside us for these episodes. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Thank you for listening.