Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Broaden your knowledge and research skills/capacity in the B.C. post-secondary context.
Learn more about research, Indigenizing research, EDI in research, decolonizing research, and accessibility.
Be inspired to participate in research communities of practice or explore the themes in your studies or work.
Connect with academics and community members who share your interests.

September 21st, 9am PST - Virtual
Join TPGi for a live AMA event with Mark Miller. Mark has over 10 years of digital accessibility knowledge and has supported accessibility teams at all points in their journey. No matter where you are on your accessibility journey, there is always something new to learn. Get answers to your top accessibility questions.

September 21st, 5pm - UBC
Negative accumulation, Denise Ferreira da Silva offers, invites a shift in thinking in line with the black and indigenous anticolonial, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist radical traditions. As an image, it captures the trajectory of black and indigenous (of the Americas, Africa, and Asia and the Pacific) persons and populations in the past four hundred years or so. As such, like the image of unpayable debt, it supports the statement that decolonization is the only appropriate descriptor for the goal of any ethico-political program designed to confront global capital.

September 28th, 6:30pm - Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue
This panel discussion features law and bioethics scholar Florence Ashley (they/them)—author of Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis (UBC Press, 2022)—and Jules Sherred (he/him), writer, disability and trans rights activist, and conversion therapy survivor. Florence and Jules will discuss shortcomings of the recent Canadian conversion therapy ban, the insidious nature of conversion practices within the public healthcare system, and relationships between institutional forms of oppression and conversion practices—with a particular focus on equity and justice for trans people.

October 4th, 4pm - Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, UBC
In this time of radical change and essential re-examination, Inconvenient Indian brings to life Thomas King’s brilliant dismantling of North America’s colonial narrative, reframing this history with the powerful voices of those continuing the tradition of Indigenous resistance.

October 7th, 12pm - Virtual
This website features factsheets created by UVic students from the Departments of History, Gender Studies and Social Justice Studies in courses taught by Dr. Georiga Sitara.

October 10th, 11am - Virtual
Decolonising x Design – Part III: Exploring how we can facilitate collective healing and reshape the future with Yussef Agbo-Ola, Lelani Lewis, Javier Lizarzaburu, Hanss Lujan Torres, and George Adegite.

October 11th, 1pm - SFU Burnaby
By engaging with critical race/whiteness theories, academia in colonial Canada can be understood as a site of colonial encounters of differently positioned subjects within simultaneous contact zones (Senate, Board of Directors, student/campus services, departments, classrooms) in a white settler society. University spaces are powerful sites of colonial settlements re/producing white entitlement while managing the socio-geo-political local and global intermixing of a diversity of students, faculty, and staff across racialization, class, gender, trans/non-binary, citizenship, and ability.

October 13th, 7pm - SFU Harbour Centre
When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, award-winning author of several books, including the recent novel Noopiming, began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here.

October 15th, 2pm - Virtual
This new series of artist talks features Xicanx exhibition artists speaking about their works and participating in roundtable dialogue moderated by exhibition co-curators Jill Baird and Greta de León.
Xicanx Speaks! is an opportunity to learn more from these artists who are confronting the critical issues of our time such as racism, diversity, and identity. Join us for the full series: September 24, October 15, October 22, November 12, and November 19.
The second iteration of Xicanx Speaks! on October 15th will feature Linda Vallejo, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, and Deborah Kuetzpal Vasquez.

October 19th, 6pm - SFU Harbour Centre
Developed from extensive ethnographic research, the science fiction documentary Ningwasum places the Indigenous Yakthung community from eastern Nepal in a futuristic space travel scenario. Ningwasum is centred around two Indigenous astronauts and time travellers from an alternative future, in which a Yakthung nation coexists with other nations and allies that have created their own advanced technology. The film explores concepts of time, memory, and belonging as well as experiences of colonization and cultural erasure.

October 20th, 1pm - Virtual
In this lecture, Dr. Bright will discuss her diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work within library and information science (LIS), ranging from development of a DEI audit for academic libraries, to the creation of the Privilege Layer Cake professional development activity. Dr. Bright will also speak specifically about DEI research and DEI in research, particularly as it related to LIS and efforts to dismantle systemic inequalities.

October 26th, 10am - Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
UBC Library and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC) are excited to introduce the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Scholars-in-Residence Program, launching in September 2022.
In this workshop, Bri Watson guides participants through the development and use of a checklist developed over the course of multiple years in consultation with the creators, developers, maintainers, sustainers, and affected individuals and communities. Working through this Ethics Checklist that is divided into three major areas subdivided into 7 subsections, participants will:
Leave the session with an understanding of how checklists work to address potential ethical pitfalls
Learn how checklists and codes of ethics may be useful for their work, research, or projects
Reflect more deeply on who and what isn’t represented in our information sources
Gain experience in thinking and talking through ethical questions

October 26, 1pm - Virtual
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ (CARL) Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Working Group is pleased to announce the fifth in a series of planned webinars on inclusion perspectives, which will feature a panel of library colleagues from the 2SLGBTIAQ+ Community discussing their perspectives on the state of Canadian librarianship and how we can affect change.

October 27th, 6:30pm - Vancouver Playhouse
Indigenous journalists have always covered stories that are personal. You can’t be part of an Indigenous family and not be touched by the residential school experience, the Sixties Scoop, climate change, addiction or incarceration. We write from a perspective of deep knowledge and we often find ourselves as unwitting teachers, activists and truth tellers. What does our perspective mean to news organizations and to readers? What is our responsibility and what is yours?

October 27th, 1pm - Virtual
LIS workers have to deal with a myriad of issues on the front lines, while also navigating a profession that doesn’t inherently value equity and inclusion. This discussion is rooted in the belief that we all must take up the mantle to fight white supremacy in all forms and combat systems that hurt us all. In this #CriticalConversationsinLIS lecture, Angel Truesdale will present how to sustain yourself through the demanding but sometimes fulfilling labor that is “diversity work” in LIS. She will talk about her own experiences and offer advice on how to approach this work with cultural humility, emotional intelligence, and a desire to support and uplift.

October 28th, 10am - Virtual
One million urban Indigenous People live in Canadian cities and the future of Canada is Indigenous. For our 8th annual symposium, we present a national dialogue on Culture in Indigenous Cities, considering the needs of Indigenous cultural and urban practitioners. The Symposium's tradition continues this year with a deep-dive for settler cultural and land-based organisations to learn from successful strategies of showing up to do redress in policies and systems as accomplices in building Indigenous cities.

Nov. 4-5th - Chan Centre UBC (Virtual & In-person)
“Games in action: interactivity / activation \ activism" will be the largest event organized on UBC campus focused on video games and their impacts on our social and political world. This two day event will feature discussions among game designers, artists, musicians, scholars, and writers, to explore how games act upon us and through us, and how they compel us to take action for ourselves. Through various panels, roundtables, game demos, and keynotes, artists and thinkers will come together to ask how interactive media can affect and help better understand structures of power within multiple spaces (across nations, communities, and genders/sexualities) and scales (from the deeply personal to the broadly political, social, and economic)

November 9th, 2pm - Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
UBC Library and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC) are excited to introduce the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Scholars-in-Residence Program, launching in September 2022.
In this lecture I will talk about swinging wildly from one extreme of the internalized racism spectrum to the other, and how I’ve arrived at where I currently am, “the radical centre.” A place where I am “centred” in my cultural hybridity, and “rooted” in both the trauma and joy I’ve inherited from my ancestors. - C.E. Gatchalian

November 16th, 2pm - Virtual
Dr. Desi Small-Rodriguez is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and Chicana. As a social demographer, her research explores the intersection of race, indigeneity, data, and inequality. Broadly conceived, her research examines how sociopolitical processes, ideologies, and institutions construct, control, and erase populations, peoples, and knowledges. She draws on a broad range of theoretical perspectives within sociology, including racial and ethnic identity formation, governmentality, critical race theory, social closure, and state building. With a focus on Indigenous futures, her current research explores the racialization of Indigenous identity and group boundary making, Indigenous population statistics, and data for health and economic justice on Indian Reservations.

Nov. 17th, 2pm - 312 Main St
Come to this workshop to learn how to use Google Earth and a participatory mapping approach called Direct to Digital (D2D) to map community knowledge. The method was created by the Firelight Group for mapping Indigenous traditional knowledge and with it’s emphasis on principles of Indigenous data sovereignty, and it’s ability to visualize how people understand, experience, interact, and move about their environments, D2D is particularly suited for mapping knowledge in the context of community-engaged research.

November 21st, 1pm - Virtual
In the face of increasingly visible climate change and social injustice, galleries, museums and other institutions of art and cultural heritage seem to have felt a growing conundrum. Despite their very real connection with colonization, imperialism and capitalism, these institutions have spared no effort to redefine themselves as ethical institutions, positioning their practice as one intended to promote social equality whilst raising awareness of both social and political issues. This has in turn given rise to notions of curatorial 'care'. But curatorship is a social practice and how it is performed is set within a specific social tradition, and care has always been diverse, presenting as ambivalent in both significance and ontology.

November 23rd, 10am - Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
UBC Library and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC) are excited to introduce the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Scholars-in-Residence Program, launching in September 2022.
Through a practical example, we will explore how white supremacy culture only invites, includes, and welcomes those who uphold “…the all-encompassing centrality and assumed superiority of people defined and perceived as white, and the practices based on this assumption.” (DiAngelo, 2012) We will also explore how this culture is not only maintained by white people but can also be internalized, expressed, and upheld by people of colour, despite it working against their interests. And lastly, we will explore solutions and what is required to achieve true belonging for everyone.

November 30th, 1pm - Virtual
Learn more about the Online Roundtable Discussions from ACRL: https://acrl.libguides.com/EDI/online

December 2nd, 11am - Virtual
Learn more about the Online Roundtable Discussions from ACRL: https://acrl.libguides.com/EDI/online

December 7th, 11am - Virtual
In this session, attendees will learn how to apply the best practices for creating effective library signage 2. Implement a signage audit to evaluate the current state of your library's signage 3. Identify "touchpoints" in your library that inform where to mount library signage. 4. Utilise different signage research techniques that will help provide valuable quantitative and qualitative data about your users. 5. Understand how ADA compliancy may affect the design and placement of library signage 6. Create a template for a library signage policy