On EDI Positions and Change Management

This has been an incredibly busy week for me. On top of the work that I do on a regular basis I had the honour of presenting to information and library professional colleagues at UNBC and other colleges/universities from the north on accessible and ethical GenAI considerations. On Wednesday I was part of a great keynote panel at Centennial College's teaching and learning symposium. Then on Thursday I had the privilege of keynoting to colleagues at Canadore College. I also facilitated two workshops on Accessible Assessment, along with a pedagogical reading group. Add to that a very busy back to back schedule of meetings with faculty, staff, and RAs about at least three different cool accessibility projects I am working on with different areas, and I made it to Friday night sputtering on fumes. 

And yet the whole time this week, my mind was filled with thoughts about the positionality of folk who happen to have equity or inclusion type words in their titles, as part of the work they are supposed to do, and how change management so very often becomes weaponized in spaces, and that causes those in equity roles to leave. So today I wanted to reflect a bit more on these ideas and hopefully open the conversation about how we stop making this happen, or if this bug that is really a feature of equity work is here to stay and requires a bigger disruption of how to support justice in institutional systems. 

Folk in equity roles find themselves in a really difficult position. For the most part, as Sara Ahmed has rightfully noted in a lot of her work, the folk in these roles in turn become the embodiment of the work that those roles are supposed to do. People become the marker of decolonization, the marker of accessibility, the marker anti-racism. It doesn't matter what work is done or not done, the very existence of the role is there to sort of signpost that apparently the work is being done, even if it isn't. 

And often times if the work is not being done that in turn becomes the "problem" of the person in the equity role. They are supposed to be getting the work done, if the work is not being done then that is squarely their responsibility. No where in that conversation is a pause on if the person was set up in a way to get the work done. Change management gets floated around as a term without the recognition that change management starts with leadership setting the stage for that to happen, and that is beyond just hiring a person with a cool word in their title, or using that word in some documents that could be found by doing a search on an institutional web page. If no one has been prepared for the work needed to be done, before the person was hired, it will make it impossible for the magical unicorn hired to get that work done.

So there's a kind of double whammy happening. They are the person to do the work cause the role says so, but the siloed approach means that the work was never set up to be successful. And then you add the third thing, which is that by and large the person hired to do equity type work is someone who already comes from an equity-deserving positionality or even more often is multi-marginalized. The very same kind of equity-deserving positionality that the place probably needs more representative voices in different places. This is how the trauma of some lived experiences are continued in eduspace. I am not sharing things folk do not see everywhere in HigherEd on a regular basis at every kind of institution, from large R1s to community colleges, to liberal arts colleges, and written about every single day in every HigherEd daily. So we see it all the time, so my question is how do we make it stop? How do we stop making it impossible for the unicorns to do the work?

And I am sure some will say, well that is easy stop hiring the unicorns. And yes that is exactly what is happening everywhere, as folk look for cuts, the easiest place to come for those cuts is initiatives to support inclusion that were never set up for success in the first place (again we see it every day in HigherEd dailies. But I would like to be a bit more creative than the bean counters. I know I have mentioned a lot about how cross-institutional support can help with this, and by this I don't mean within one's own institution, but rather looking for solidarity outside it. It is not a coincidence that my podcast on the very same topic last week opened a flood gate of emails and messages from folk saying that was exactly what they needed to hear.  And often people will use academic associations as the space where this work happens. 

Yet, associations have done an excellent job of also not setting people up for success. Their conferences are too expensive, not accessible, and it just help assure that the same kinds of narratives that set unicorns up to fail are perpetuated. I have seen a large amount of people putting extremely non-zero amount of work this week trying to change a monolith association very set in its ways to be more accessible. I am honestly holding my breath because I can see where this is going and what a waste of time it will be for all of them (Kenny Rogers told us in 1978 what to do). 

So what is needed is some kind of third space, says the person who already does the kind of work that is third space work, where ideas can be exchanged asynchronously with folk who share values. Because going back to the embedded trauma, the big issue is that folk do not feel empowered. You cannot feel empowered to do the work that needs to be done in structures designed to not give empowerment. As much as we want to tear it down from the inside, they have carefully designed that inside so that would never even start to happen (people get real careful about things when money is involved). 

It has not been lost on me or others that a lot of the folk hired in leadership roles in the pedagogical spaces we frequent lately are people with organizational management backgrounds and not pedagogical ones. This goes back to the weaponizing of change that I mentioned above. Having someone like that in a role like that is supposed provide hope, change is a coming! But that's a half story; you can't change what you don't understand. Change will only happen if people feel heard, supported, trusted, and empowered towards that change. This is not unicorn work, it is team work, and as I have noted many times when talking about trust, it means showing up, every time. It means acknowledging gaps and trying to fix them, not ignoring them. A lot of things feel like that shrugs shoulders emoji right now.

Basically what I am trying to say in this too long blog post - written on a day I should be resting but can't because I have a bunch of other things to do like research that I am doing with a colleague in another country, like this event I am supporting that needs details sent to the ASL interpreters because that is how you do accessibility- is that we need spaces where we feel empowered and trusted. EDI positions will only succeed if they feel empowered to do the change they were hired to do, and that comes from the top, not from them, they cannot generate empowerment, they are not wind turbines. Do you feel comfortable sharing places where you feel empowered and trusted? Maybe that would be a start for folk to try to find the places where that work could start, instead of the trebuchet so many find themselves in.