DIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY
Hailey Nicole Otis
My scholarly persona—as a teacher, mentor, researcher, and activist—consistently centralizes questions of power, privilege, oppression, and social justice. Researching and teaching at a predominantly white institution with the goal of honoring and serving our most marginalized communities and student populations has shaped the two imperatives that drive my approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion:
(1) questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion require an intersectional approach, and (2) pedagogy is a tool of social justice.
Intersectionality—“the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities”—encapsulates the first guiding framework that structures all of my academic work, both in terms of research and pedagogy. Foregrounding intersectionality in pursuit of an inclusive classroom directs me to urge students to investigate their overlapping experiences of both privilege and oppression. For example, I often ask students to do an “intersectional mapping exercise” wherein they are asked to draw a picture of themselves and then draw lines branching out from that picture that denote their salient identity markers (for example, woman, queer, white, etc.). I then ask them to identify systems, structures, and institutions that privilege or oppress them based on each identity marker. Finally, I ask them to identify the ways in which the various “branches” of their identity converge, both in terms of their individual identity markers and the systems that shape their lived experience of those identities. This provides students with both the language and direction to think through how their experiences of privilege and oppression intersect with one another, creating an early understanding of identities, embodiments, and institutions as complex and overlapping.
This imperative of intersectionality extends beyond my classroom practices to encompass the overarching lens I take to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, leading me to ask questions such as: When we say “diversity,” what axes of identity/embodiment are we invoking? Are we talking about folks who are diverse in a singular, identifiable way or are we talking about experiences that involve multiple marginalization? When we talk about “inclusion,” who are we looking to include? For example, when we seek to make a space more inclusive for “women,” do we mean all women or are we allowing “women” to stand in as a default placeholder for white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied women?
The second imperative that shapes my approach to scholarly work considers pedagogy as a tool of social justice (and, relatedly, understands social justice to be deeply pedagogical). Much like the theory of intersectionality, the same frameworks that inform my research form the foundation of my pedagogical approach, including anti-racism, queer theory and activism, intersectional feminism, disability justice, and body justice. All of these frameworks lead me to keep the following questions at the front of my mind and praxis: How do my research and teaching reflect and reproduce structures of oppression? How can my work subvert those structures? How do my intersecting forms of privilege obscure the lived realities of my students and/or the communities I study? How can I be an advocate for my multiply marginalized students and community members based in deep listening, trusting, and honoring of diverse experiences?
Furthermore, I encourage my students to consider their roles as agents of social justice in the world and model this same imperative in my own work. When teaching classes on Rhetorical Criticism, I urge students to use the skills they learn as a critic to intervene in the public by condemning discourses of violence and oppression as well as uplifting voices that empower marginalized communities. I show them how my work on fat activism and my work as a fat activist pushes against dominant cultural fatphobia and uplifts the voices of intersectionally marginalized fat folks. I demonstrate to my students how the skills of the rhetorical critic translate to the on-the-ground work of advocacy and spark regular conversations about how learning to analyze discourses in the world prepares us to transform those discourses to make life more livable for marginalized bodies. Folding social justice imperatives into the foundations of my students’ roles as learners empowers them to embrace an autonomous and agential approach toward fighting injustice in its manifold forms and locations. It also allows me to connect my research, teaching, and pedagogy toward a broader telos of intersectional social justice.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion have, in many ways, become higher education “buzzwords” that lose potency when casually thrown around in the contemporary neoliberal academic economy. Intersectionality and social justice, however, are concepts rooted in the lived experiences of multiply marginalized people and oriented toward uplifting those same people toward full participation, agency, and humanity. I harness the power and influence I have in academic spaces toward these goals with the expectation that both my students and I will grow together in our journey toward a more just world.
1. Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41, no. 1 (2015): 2.
COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY IN PRAXIS
My teaching, research, and service demonstrate a consistent and cohesive commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusive excellence in higher education. The overarching commitment that shapes all of my scholarly work is body justice. Body justice, in my estimation, refers to social justice efforts that recognize the ways in which bodies are made vulnerable in a variety of overlapping and mutually shaping ways. Anti-racism, intersectional feminism, gender and sexuality equity, fat liberation, and disability justice are frameworks that fall under the purview of body justice and, therefore, are part of my approach to teaching and scholarship. Body justice speaks to my own identity as a queer, fat, disabled femme while allowing me to extend both my activist and academic efforts to reach other marginalized communities, such as communities of color.
In terms of research, all of my scholarly work coalesces around the notion of uplifting marginalized voices, whether that be the voices of fat, queer, and/or disabled people as well as people of color. Much of my work explores forms of contemporary fat activism, and I use this work to amplify the voices of intersectionally marginalized fat activists. I use intersectionality as a driving framework in all of my scholarship, with a clear and meaningful example of this framework appearing in my debut article, “Intersectional Rhetoric: Where Intersectionality as Analytical Sensibility and Embodied Rhetorical Praxis Converge,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Because my scholarship draws from anti-racist paradigms, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and disability studies, I have a strong understanding of how people of color, women, queer folks, and disabled folks are underrepresented and marginalized in the US. I bring these understandings into every class I teach by always using intersectionality as a starting point to help students understand and intervene against overlapping systems of oppression. I have regularly had queer and disabled students as well as students of color take multiple classes with me throughout their college career and many have told me it is because they feel my classroom is a safe space for them where their voices and experiences are affirmed and valued.
In my previous role as Graduate Coordinator of Professional Development at The Institute for Learning and Teaching at CSU, I programmed several workshops on how to best serve diverse and historically underrepresented student populations. In my last year in this position, I programmed workshops on fostering LGBTQ+ inclusive classrooms, responding to gender bias in the classroom, and promoting students’ sense of belonging through syllabi. Because these workshops reached hundreds of instructors across the university, my commitment to inclusive excellence in pedagogy has had the opportunity to impact the learning of thousands of undergraduates at CSU. One of my final, enduring contributions in the position was to develop and present a workshop on critical social justice pedagogy which catalyzed broader campus conversations about the role of social justice in our understanding of teaching and learning best practices.
In terms of service, I regularly seek out opportunities to teach as well as learn from others about a variety of diverse and intersecting identities, experiences, and forms of marginalization. For example, I presented a workshop entitled “Toward Abolitionist Pedagogy: Liberating Our Syllabi from Carceral Logics” at Bates’ 2022 MLK Day event. This workshop offered an abolitionist approach to course syllabi, providing the tools necessary for educators to (1) critically examine their own syllabi, (2) identify carceral logics that position the instructor as policer and punisher of student behavior, and (3) reimagine their course policies in ways that affirm the humanity of students rather than reproduce broader contexts of oppression. I also presented a session on Disability Justice at CSU’s 2020 Diversity Symposium in which I explained how to approach questions of access and accessibility in the classroom from a disability justice framework. Furthermore, I belong to several caucuses associated with the National Communication Association Diversity Council, including the Disability Issues Caucus, the Caucus on LGBTQ Concerns, as well as the Women’s Caucus and I have chaired and participated in several roundtable discussion panels addressing body diversity, fatphobia, and thin privilege at both national and regional conferences. In February 2021, I participated in a 3-week training on Inclusive Pedagogy to ensure my syllabi and classroom practices communicate a sense of belonging and affirmation to students of diverse identities and positionalities. Finally, I served as an interviewer for the CSU Office of International Programs’ 2019 project, “Portraits of Resiliency: Reflections of CSU Women.” For this project, I had the opportunity to interview a diverse group of women (including queer and trans women, single mothers, first generation students, and immigrant women) to learn about their experiences of resiliency, which ultimately contributed to a photo-project on these women that appeared in various places on campus.
For me, diversity and inclusive excellence are not just facets of my academic and professional endeavors; they are the core foundations of who I am as a person and the work I do in the world. I am deeply invested in expanding opportunities for people in marginalized and underrepresented groups, uplifting and amplifying the voices of folks in those groups, and using my own experiences of intersecting privilege and oppression as a starting point for knowledge and action. I believe that, taken together, my commitments to diversity in philosophy and praxis produce an environment where a diverse array of people, ideas, and experiences can be heard and thrive.