Plenary Lecture 2025: Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities

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The Commonwealth Honors College Plenary Lecture is an annual event that features thought leaders from across the spectrum of UMass Amherst faculty. The lecture is also connected to the Honors course “Ideas That Change the World.”

The Fall 2025 Plenary Lecture will be held on Thursday October 9 at 5 p.m. at the Student Union Ballroom. Nilanjana 'Buju' Dasgupta, provost professor of psychology in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UMass Amherst, will deliver the lecture.

Dasgupta's talk will draw from the 2025 book she authored—Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities, published by Yale Press—which offers a science-driven approach to achieving social change. In the book she argues that small changes to the “wallpaper,” the local cultures around us, are far more effective in producing structural change locally than seeking change through bias awareness training, symbolic acts, or relying solely on good intentions.