Here and There: Flipping the Focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Modern Languages

While the concept of diversity in the United States may speak to equity and inclusion along the lines of gender, race, disability, age, religion, and sexual orientation, this definition may not apply directly to other nations where hierarchical race, ability, age, religion, or gender ranks are the norm.

In the Carnegie Mellon University Department of Modern Languages, it is our belief that a departmental mission statement should not and cannot be mere rhetoric. Instead, it should reflect a collective ongoing effort to explore, research, understand, and commit to creating and practicing transformative pedagogies that acknowledge mechanisms of exclusion—both historical and contemporary—and promote inclusion, social justice, and engagement. 

For this purpose, the Here and There: Flipping the Focus on DEI Working Group invites Modern Languages scholars and instructors from all of our area- and discipline-specific subgroups to engage in a year-long series of meetings involving readings, discussions, talks, and curricular development activities to explore questions related to: 

• basic beliefs and assumptions about the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the United States and outside the United States in countries/regions/languages about which we teach

• the need to modify the underpinnings of U.S. value statements about domestic diversity and inclusion initiatives when we are teaching about countries, languages, and cultures outside the United States as well as those that refer to immigrant and/or ethnic and/or racial and/or religious and/or gender diverse communities from those countries living within the U.S.
• the pedagogical tools that have we already implemented that seek to ‘flip the focus’ as well how we might improve upon those tools