I am deeply committed to the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) in the classroom, in research, in service, and beyond. I center intersectionality as a practice and lens in my academic work and personal life.
I incorporate DEIJ principles in my teaching through the structure, policies, and content of the class. I use non-punitive language in my syllabi to encourage communication, and work out individualized work plans as needed. I center flexibility and accessibility by not penalizing late work, permitting students with a documented disability or situational needs time while reducing stress. I provide opportunities for choice in assignments, like selecting any hate crime incident to analyze in Hate Crimes. I incorporate student input and respond to their interests during the term like increasing content on disability and Asian American experiences in my Introduction to Sociology courses, and reproductive justice in my Social Foundations of Public Health course. I include critical work by and about diverse people on every syllabus. For example, I included Black activist Sojourner Truth, Indigenous leader Chief Red Cloud, and disability scholar Thomas Shakespeare in my Introduction to Sociology course. I check in with students and revisit challenging concepts like racial formation theory in Hate Crimes and process and outcome objectives in Program Development and Evaluation. I worked with Oregon women’s prison administrators to address disability accommodations for incarcerated students including screen reader technology options. My policies of flexibility, choice, non-punitive approaches, and utilizing student input as principles of DEIJ directly benefit students with disabilities, first generation students, students whose first language is not English, queer and BIPOC students, incarcerated students, and students with other marginalized identities and challenging social circumstances.
DEIJ informs my research questions, design, participant selection and analysis. I engage Black and Indigenous feminist critiques of white Western binary conceptions of gender to critically examine gender related public policy. In my dissertation research I sought diverse participants by broadly distributing recruitment materials to queer community organizations with a web presence, queer resource centers on college campuses, and posting my recruitment flyer widely on social media platforms. I did not reach the number of BIPOC participants I hoped to, though I attend to participant’s intersectional identities, including disability, geography, and family, and analyze privileged identities like whiteness, in my analysis. I incorporate multiple critical and intersectionally-rooted perspectives in my data analysis. Given research has historically abused queer and BIPOC people, I paid all my participants out-of-pocket for their time.
In service, I organized graduate student community of practice meetings to discuss decolonizing our work and to collaborate on an appeal to our department for DEIJ action. This resulted in further discussion and practical changes including hosting Black abolitionist Brittany Friedman as a guest lecturer, and the college approving the reduction of tuition fees for advanced graduate students as first steps towards addressing equity. I developed bargaining language supporting higher pay and expanded benefits as related to DEIJ as the PSU Graduate Employee Union’s Equity and Inclusion officer. I also re-developed the union website for accessibility. I successfully advocated for the inclusion of representatives from organizations that serve marginalized communities at a summit on aging that I co-organized. And I have worked with Sociologists for Trans Justice colleagues to provide professionalization opportunities for and by transgender, nonbinary, and intersex scholars; making deliberate planning decisions for inclusive practices like providing captions, securing speaker funds, and seeking out speakers with multiple marginalized identities.
Wynn Strange 