DEIA Statement

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are reflexively represented in faculty research and pedagogical practice. They guide our collective sense of how best to serve diverse student potential and need, including the re-mapping of department requirements and course offerings. While typical departmental DEI statements narrowly focus on bodies and identities that tend to tokenize faculty and students of color, this department distinctively defines DEI as the impact that under-represented scholars and students and their histories and communities have on our conceptualization and practice of scholarly research, pedagogical innovation, and intellectual community.

In other words, our commitment to DEI fundamentally critiques tokenism, which itself often promulgates homophobia, ableism, sexism, and racism. Instead, we take on the much more complex challenge of embodying and encompassing the diversity of methodologies, curriculum, materials, histories, disciplines, and inter-disciplines, to create a vibrant department community.

The department’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion includes epistemic diversity, equity, and inclusion, e.g., conceptual and not just numerical and taxonomic goals. The department provides a model for concretely centering and valuing devalued epistemologies.