A Strategic Orientation

The work of justice, equity and inclusion at Western is done within two spheres and at two scales:

  1. Individual
  2. Structural

The individual work must be done before the structural work. It is not possible to successfully contribute to transformational structural change at Western without first interrogating one’s own place within systems of power and privilege. Additionally, research from the corporate space indicates that early adopters need to be invited into doing the work voluntarily. Mandating it can increase institutional implicit bias and resistance.

Individual Change

At the individual level, the SJEC identifies five primary intersectional axes of identity and privilege (this is not a comprehensive list):

  1. Race
  2. Gender
    1. Sex
    2. Gender
    3. Sexual Orientation
    4. Sexual Preference
  3. Class
  4. Religion
  5. Ethnicity
  6. Disability
  7. Situational context
  8. Individual lived experience

Individuals must do the work of identifying and interrogating their own positions and privilege in relation to these axes, and then they need to bring that lens to increasing equity and inclusion in every aspect of their work within the institution, from the classroom to governance.

Structural Change

At the structural level, four primary modes to transforming the university exist:

  1. Incremental improvement (little to no system change, change the individual to win better within the existing system–entrepreneurship, small system changes to accommodate more diverse inputs)
  2. Antagonism (confront or obstruct university systems with conflict as a key mode of interaction)
  3. Agonism (proactive driver of change, characterized by sustained creative tension and cognitive dissonance)
  4. Radical Reimagining (ideate, prototype and pilot changes—experiment, learn, fail within a defined and contained organizational structure. Knowledge production and institutional reconfiguration are key objectives. This is what Andreotti et al at the University of British Columbia call liminal hacking, but in this case, it is reconfigured through the lens of an institutional mandate to advance the institution past its current state).

SJEC Approach

We observe modes one and two, Incremental Improvement and Antagonism, deployed most often at Western. We aspire to be Agonists and seek to pilot Radical Reimagining.

Radical Planning is another framework that is helpful in imagining our path forward. It has three essential criteria. The work must be:

  1. Transgressive
  2. Imaginative
  3. Counter-hegemonic

One of our goals is to expand justice work at the university away from being a specialized function housed in a particular place within the institution, such as the SJEC or other entities with similar charges, to a broadly distributed function dispersed throughout its standard structures such as the faculty senate, colleges, departments, classrooms, etc.

To achieve this, it must be recognized that the work is both personal and structural, and that the personal work must first become broadly distributed across disciplines and at all levels of the university.

Within the structural aspects of the work, there is both a general need for the entire community to participate and contribute, and a specific need for specialized committees, task forces, hubs, etc. to move the work forward.

Recognizing that the existing university structures do not provide a means to their own transformation or even reflection on their own design, the specialized role of institutional justice work exists to create complementary and/or contradictory governance structures that seek, in service to strategic goal 4.B, to “establish, fund and sustain practices of self-examination and continuous improvement to identify, understand, and remediate structural injustices and inequities at Western”.

Then the work seeks to engage the institution in ways that activate and sustain creative tensions that generate positive outcomes for the community in service to equity and inclusion. An effective Social Justice and Equity Committee will be in a state of continual evolution and growth as structural transformation is achieved.