Division for Equity and Inclusion

Welcome to the Division for Equity and Inclusion at the University of New Mexico!

In this era of change, students have been vocal about their desire to create a more inclusive and equitable culture within their academic programs.

Movements such as White Coats for Black (and Indigenous) Lives, #ScholarStrike for Racial Justice, #StrikeForBlackLives, and #ShutDownSTEM have brought attention to the fact that western scholarship and teaching have often disempowered marginalized populations. For example, these movements have coalesced like-minded graduate students who are interested in challenging traditional curricula, epistemologies, and research methodologies. Such students seek to promote greater institutional reflexivity. As emerging scholars, they embrace the challenge to reconceptualize their roles in all aspects of the academic enterprise and reorient toward person-centered and culturally sensitive research and teaching.

The desire to rethink curricula accompanies students’ demands for a change in culture and greater institutional accountability for campus climate. Many students seek sciences in service of humanity and that honors their communities. These concerns are especially relevant here at the University of New Mexico, and the like with federal designations as Minority Serving Institutions. At UNM designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and with a Native American-Serving Campus, recognized as both an LGBTQIA and Military Associated-student friendly university, where large numbers of students are first-generation college and where many students were both housing and food insecure, students are keenly aware that they do not learn in an ivory tower. Scholarship for the sake of science itself, and to create a greater knowledge base in a vacuum, defies many students’ sense of urgency to give back to their communities. It is important for many UNM students, as articulated by Canadian feminist sociologist, Dorothy Smith, to create a science for the people, and in service of the many communities from which our students emanate.

It is these concerns that orient our work. Creating an environment that honors the cultural wealth of our students’ communities, centers them and their traditions, embraces diversity of thought and learning styles, encourages students’ pursuit of nontraditional topics of inquiry, and supports all theoretical perspectives, is a way of enacting the culturally responsive pedagogy many students desire today.

We clamor to move beyond what should be the bygone era, in which measures of academic preparedness and various academic milestones mainly serve gatekeeping functions, making it difficult, especially for persons with disabilities, first-generation college graduates, women, and other minoritized students to be successful.

Finally, in order to assemble the right teams of young and early career intellectuals, scholars, and artists, it is finally time to imagine something new together. This is our only route to the type of inclusive excellence that will help us to collectively answer the essential and existential questions of humanity. I look forward to continuing our work together on this journey.

So how do we create inclusive education and build institutions that intentionally center the success and wellbeing of those groups who comprise our growing American majority? How do we move beyond performative allyship to really become champions for justice at UNM? In this website, we offer practical steps that we are pursuing at UNM, led by our President, Garnett S. Stokes, and supported by our division and our many collaborators and partners at UNM. We hope to see you in one of our shared virtual spaces and on the quad soon!

Sincerely,
Assata Zerai, Ph.D.
Vice President
Professor of Sociology
University of New Mexico

: she|her|hers what's this?