Leadership

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility

As a leader. educator, communicator, and strategist, it is my job to cultivate an open and welcoming environment for diverse students, colleagues, staff, and community partners. Diversity is what makes people interesting–learning about others’ lived experiences can help us to understand the big picture, and we must make space for voices different from our own. We must work to provide equal opportunities for success, and to do that, the first step is to listen to others tell their stories and describe how their own personal and social identities shape their lived experiences. In the words of Brené Brown, “the slogan is easy. The behaviors to support the slogan are not,” and all too often, our collective aversion to discomfort pushes us away from both creative leadership and genuine DEI initiatives. An institution as large and dynamic as Michigan State University has an opportunity to pave the way by putting the slogan into practice.

I am Director of The Cube, an award-winning lab that attracts people from traditionally marginalized groups because we have made diversity part of our identity. Most of our staff are women; several of those women are Black or Brown; several of those women are queer; one of those women is trans; many of us are neurodivergent; a few have more visible disabilities. I provide copies of Imani Brown’s fantastic Read this to Get Smarter to all of my staff, whether grad or undergrad, and we engage in conversations about accessibility nearly daily, in the context of the work we’re doing for clients. 

A recent project that The Cube completed, Detroit Accessibility Project, was made possible via a CIEG grant; it is a mobile-first website, first conceived by one of my students, that allows visitors to Detroit to quickly search and filter popular destinations and venues based on accessibility needs. My opportunities to lead diverse, bright, ambitious student-focused project teams have enriched my own commitments to empathetic research and design processes, the need for equity-centered learning experiences for students at all levels, and the power of collaboration. For instance, the work my team has done and is doing with a local K-12 school district has brought together undergraduate XA students with high school students and K-12 administrators; my team created, launched, and successfully implemented a large web-based DEI project for the district last year. Its success, even within a community that often struggles with putting DEI into practice, has led to the district hiring our team for a new mental health communications initiative.

As part of my regular DEI practices, I:

• Assign course readings about implicit bias in industry and lead difficult conversations with my students;
• Openly discuss the differences between enacting DEI principles and merely talking about them;
• Verbally acknowledge that younger generations intuitively understand DEI in ways that my generation might not but never use generational context as an excuse not to do better;
• Include in my assignment designs specific deliverables that relate to enacting DEI principles, such as specific DEI-focused outreach and communications strategies;
• Ask my students to engage with material specifically about racism in their fields (e.g., in XA, discussing Google’s facial-recognition software errantly identifying Black men as gorillas and Google “solving the problem” not by solving it, but by removing the word “gorilla” from their algorithm);
• Make space to engage Black, Brown, and Asian voices and provide a platform for such voices to be heard by a wider audience; 
• Do not ask asking Black, Brown, Asian, trans, or visibly disabled people to do emotional or educational labor for me; 
• Do not assume that my own queer and neurodivergent subject position means that I somehow understand what it means to be marginalized in any other way; and
• Stay willing to sit with my own discomfort, confront my own implicit biases, and listen.

As I have learned as a member of the Experience Architecture (XA) faculty—XA is one of the most diverse undergraduate majors at MSU—there are concrete ways in which we can take additional steps toward equity and inclusion, such as infusing DEI components throughout our curricula, incorporating a DEI-first approach to planning and activities, deepening our partnerships with communities based on mutual commitments to shared goals, and working to increase the participation of students representing diverse identities and backgrounds in our learning experiences. We can and must take the time to have hard conversations with our colleagues, staff and students, and we can let our discomfort be generative rather than paralyzing; genuine diversity, equity, and inclusion requires genuine human connection, and we must work to cultivate connections with those around us that are founded on genuine trust and respect.