Association for Behavior Analysis International

The conference chair will present opening remarks.

In the spring of 2018, America watched in horror as nearly 3,000 children were separated from their parents on the southern border. Civil society groups have righteously and steadfastly responded to these harmful policies. What is often lost in the national conversation today is a deeper recognition that what has transpired at the border is just the tip of a very large iceberg. There are nearly 6 million American children in the country living with an undocumented parent. These families could be separated by deportation at any time. In 2019, UnidosUS published a report entitled, “Beyond the Border: Family Separation in the Trump Era.” It considers the consequences of a continued immigration policy status quo on these American children by looking at the intersection of immigration policy and health, education, and economic outcomes. The UnidosUS team has delved deeper into these issues including by examining the impact of the current immigration environment on K-12 student. We have also elevated these intersection in the press, including, in the context of a proposed housing policy change, in a New York Times Op-Ed by UnidosUS President and CEO, Janet Murguia. In short, UnidosUS believes that state-funded cruelty against immigrant communities imposes perhaps some of the steepest harms on American children, and that the nation is at a critical moment for action.

Carlos Guevara is the Associate Director for the UnidosUS Immigration Policy Project. Carlos leads UnidosUS’s immigration policy work, which focuses on advancing effective and humane federal immigration policies that promote and uphold family unity, protect workers’ rights, build on immigrant integration efforts, and improve the current immigration system. Headquartered in Washington, DC, UnidosUS is the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. Through its network of nearly 300 affiliated community-based organizations, UnidosUS reaches millions of Hispanics each year in 41 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.

Prior to joining UnidosUS, Carlos was a Counselor in the Office of the Secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2014-2017. There, he worked on immigration policy issues under the Obama Administration. Before that, he served as a Staff Attorney at the Diocese of Grand Rapids, MI then Catholic Charities of Baltimore where he provided a wide range of Immigration Legal Services to low income immigrants.

Mr. Guevara earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and his bachelor’s degree from University of Virginia. He is a licensed attorney in Maryland. Carlos was born in Hermosillo, Mexico and grew up in San Antonio, Texas.

In response to Guevara’s examination of current immigration policies and their repercussions, the panelists will present behavior analytic interpretations of this issue and offer strategies for behavior scientists to engage in activism and human rights advocacy efforts. Beginning with a better understanding of the history of behaviorism in supporting humane immigration policies, the panelists will offer a call to action for culturo-behavior scientists to extend this analysis in light of existing conditions. Ongoing research designed to change verbal behavior and promote social activism using stimulus control procedures and shaping will be discussed as well as the critical role of graduate students and future behavior analysts in addressing global humanitarian crises.

Global injustices and dangers experienced by vulnerable populations are becoming more and more apparent. Many of these occur in borderlands and involve complex responses to people of different national, racial and ethnic identities. The purpose of this presentation is to share the process and preliminary outcomes of an education project aimed to increase compassionate responses to suffering in vulnerable populations in borderlands. “Nur-e-Esperanza” is a collective learning project grounded in the philosophies of behaviorism, womanism, and the people’s science movement. Our approach involves inductive and participatory practices to increase the expansiveness and depth of social discourse within local communities. Specifically, we are developing and evaluating component training modules for: 1) Noticing and relating to the feelings of others, especially those that are very different than ourselves; 2) Noticing and evaluating the social justice relationships between ourselves, communities and institutions; 3) Noticing dimensions of social privilege, coercion and attraction; 4) Engaging in skilled dialogs between people of diverse lived experiences; and, 5) Engaging in the translation of values into strategic actions and reflections. Our topics center on race, gender, religion and nationality. Our dependent variables are changes in verbal behavior, feelings, and reported activism. The instructional design involves stimulus control procedures (systematic introduction and discrimination of increasingly complex classes of social justice/injustice examples) and collective shaping of noticing and engaging. The project is discussed in relation to the ways that understanding and changing individual behavior may support actions and policies that protect and enhance human life and reduce suffering.

Shahla Ala’i received her B.S. from Southern Illinois University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Behavior Analysis at the University of North Texas (UNT) and the director of the North Texas Autism Project (NTAP). NTAP is a service, training and research program working in cooperation with several global partners, with applied anthropologists, and with Easter Seals North Texas. Shahla is also a member of a social justice collective at UNT. This is an interdisciplinary effort designed to create a space for applied research and activism in social justice and includes faculty and students from Woman’s and Gender Studies, Applied Anthropology and Behavior Analysis. Shahla teaches classes on ethics, autism intervention, parent training, applied research methods, and behavior change techniques. Shahla served on the governing board of the Behavior Analysis Certification Board (BACB) and as a subject matter expert on supervision and on ethics. Shahla currently serves on the ABAI Practice Board and the APBA Diversity Ad Hoc Task Force. She has published and presented research on ethics in early intervention, play and social skills, family harmony, change agent training, and evidence-based practice. Her research is applied and grounded in a commitment to love and science. She has trained hundreds of master’s level behavior analysts who have gone on to serve families and communities with honor. Shahla has over four decades of experience working with families, particularly those from non-dominant cultural backgrounds. She travels and presents her work nationally and internationally to both professional and lay audiences. She was awarded an Onassis Foundation Fellowship for her work with families, was the recipient of UNT’s prestigious student selected “Fessor Graham" teaching award, and received the Texas Association for Behavior Analysis Career Contributions Award in 2019.

The principles of behavior analysis hold great promise for addressing many of the major challenges faced in society. Yet the applications of behavior analysis remain limited in scope and breadth. This session will focus on the large-scale application of applied behavior analysis in educational settings. Emphasis will be given to identifying the core features of effective educational environments, and the process for implementing those features with high fidelity, sustainability, and at scales of social significance. Experience over the past two decades with implementation of positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) in over 27,000 schools will be described.

Join this networking hour to discuss the following topics and others related to social activism:

• How can behavior analysts be activists who use their professional skills in service of progressive goals through strategies such as advocacy and accompaniment?
• How can behavior analysts advocate for progressive goals in the course of their jobs (e.g., university instructor, clinician, administrator, etc.)?
• ABAI does not have its own ethics code; instead it relies on members to adhere to their “home discipline’s” ethics code. An ABAI ethics code that reflected environmental determinism would establish social activism as an ethical mandate because it would be arbitrary to limit a functional analysis to the individual level and ignore the higher-level systemic determinants of behavioral and social problems. This continuity of determinism implies that clients’ overall behavioral health requires activism to change harmful metacontingencies. NASW’s ethics code can serve as a model.

Join this networking hour to discuss how to apply ABA to problems of high social value and approaches that define core features and functional mechanisms. The process of implementation is important if ABA is to be applied at a large scale. In addition to effective interventions, how might we also emphasize (1) organizational systems; (2) stages of adoption; (3) personnel seletion, training, coaching, and feedback? What role might measuring fidelity implementation have on large scale adoption of ABA?

Join this networking hour to discuss conceptual issues in CBS. Questions to consider include:

• What areas of conceptual investigation in Culturo-Behavioral Science do you think have the greatest potential for leading to a practical impact?
• How do we resolve any potential tension or impact between designed social system interventions and self-organized social movements?
• What are we missing that we need to integrate/investigate as Culturo-Behavioral Science expands?

Discussion will be open to any other topic of interest to attendees as well!

Societies have always depended on education: it is through education—formal or not—that many operant repertoires and many culturo-behavioral practices are developed. In modern, complex societies higher education is crucial because of the techno-scientific basis and infrastructure upon which our societies are built. Institutions responsible for higher education are necessary because they are responsible for the replication of such knowledge. It is through higher education that socially relevant operant repertoires—replicated over millions of people—are developed. But the role of higher education is not the mere reproduction of knowledge or of patterns of behavior and culturo-behavioral practices. As institutions, colleges and universities are nowadays important sources of wealth, contributing directly for economic growth of local, regional and even national communities. Most crucially, as institutions, universities and colleges also contribute to the building of patterns of ethical and socially responsible behaviors: from within universities stem many new cultural practices that lead to social development and to the solving of cultural problems. Universities (as the institutions responsible for higher education) are linked with the decrease of violence, of social inequality, and of poverty, and with the increase of social awareness, democratic societies, and responsible public policies. Finally, universities—even when they are small and have only direct local influence—have a tendency to become part of a much larger system that is mostly concerned with shaping up positive behavior and social justice.

Street gangs and community violence remain among the most pressing social issues within the urban landscape. Recent spikes in shooting and killings in a number of cities during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and following the social upheaval in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis police, moreover, have given the topic of urban violence renewed traction in national public discourse. Yet much of this discourse is based on crude characterizations of gang members, the nature of this violence, and the dynamics fueling it. Unsurprisingly, public officials typically have little idea how to effectively address such violence, and ostensibly evidence-based interventions routinely fail to produce their intended—and often loudly mis-touted—effect.

Drawing on years of community-engaged research on Chicago's South Side and in East St. Louis, Illinois, this presentation will provide clarity as to the complex and interrelated conditions fueling gang membership and collective violence as well as the structural nature of these conditions. Specifically, street gangs constitute a form of social organization that provides material and psychosocial benefits to their members, including modest economic support, protection in navigating a violent social landscape, emotional support, a sense of identity and meaning. Membership in such collectives represents a compelling prospect for young people facing desperate circumstances, ongoing traumas, and few prospects for even a minimally stable life. Within this context, vendetta-style collective violence—that is, gang warfare—constitutes, most centrally, a manifestation of solidarity among group members. Interventions that fail to account for the structural determinants of gang membership and for the solidaristic nature of gang violence are likely to fail, and generally have. The presentation closes with a discussion of an alternative framework for intervention firmly rooted in these realities.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.