Engaging Critical Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: Insights From Art, Activism, and Scholarship

In recent years, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) (also called DEI) initiatives have gained significant prominence. This surge can be traced back to the overwhelming violence and brutality that culminated in the murder of George Floyd, a Black American man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020. The incident ignited widespread protests and calls for racial justice, prompting mainstream corporate settings to adopt EDI initiatives aimed at fostering inclusivity and reducing disparities (Kujawa 2022, p. 72; Seijts and Milani 2022, p. 573-4). Despite their stated goals, the effectiveness of these corporate EDI initiatives in addressing institutional racism remains widely debated. Critics argue that many of these efforts are performative—superficial gestures rather than substantive structural change (Ahmed 2012; Bain 2023; Walcott 2018). The majority of the extant research in the field of EDI work concerns the instrumentalization of EDI strategies by corporations. Common examples include: EDI staff training, EDI audits (by specialized consultants), and explicit shifts within organizational structures in the wake of broadscale EDI, which include, for example, hiring mandates aimed to create more visibly diverse workplaces, which stem from affirmative action policies (Alegria 2020; Andresen 2007; Dewidar et al. 2022; Harrison-Bernard et al. 2020; McCandless et al. 2021; Naidoo et al. 2023; O'Brien and Kerrigan 2023; Puritty et al. 2017; Stevens et al. 2008). Against this backdrop, our special issue approaches EDI from a different angle–one rooted in grassroots community organizations, as opposed to strictly corporations and institutions. This impetus stems from scholars like O'Brien and Arnold (2022) who note that “rarely is a grass roots or bottom-up approach to EDI considered” (p. 2). We sought to engage with researchers who connected with, or had pre-existing relationships with, organizations that were built upon EDI principles or foundations, rather than those that had imported EDI at a later stage in their development. We were particularly interested in organizations whose practices and policies were founded upon serving their constituents, many of whom could be understood as historically oppressed, through intersectional means (Crenshaw 1989). These were organizations uninterested in solely performative EDI, or what Ahmed (2006) calls EDI “non-performatives.” These are organizations who were doing the real things their constituents needed, responding to demonstrated needs; for instance, they were not hiring an EDI consultant ad hoc solely to appease external donors or trends. It was through this focus on grassroots and community-led practices that the idea for this special issue emerged. Our SSHRC-funded project brought together an international research team exploring what we call “EDI from within.” This concept recognizes that social-justice organizers and their community initiatives have been enacting EDI for decades, whether they have labelled their work as such. Through our call for papers, we sought to understand how internally developed EDI policies and practices can foster genuine inclusion in grassroots organizations led by historically oppressed groups. We also wanted to explore how these models might be made visible to strengthen the growth and sustainability of other organizations. We were fortunate to receive many excellent submissions, which extended the scope of the outlined call towards institutions and venues beyond those of community organizations, while also providing fresh and novel insights for this field. Our project has also enabled our team to connect with, learn from, and support local social-justice and community organizations in Canada, the United States, and Morocco. Contributions emerging from these collaborations include articles by Marie Bernard-Brind'Amour & Yasmin Jiwani; Faiza Hirji; Alison Harvey, Tamara Shepherd, Dani Rudnicka-Lavoie & Emily Mohabir; Sandra Jeppesen, iowyth Ulthiin, Emily Faubert, Kira Min Poole & Dale Boyle; Kenza Oumlil, and Zeinab Farokhi & Evangeline Holtz Schramek. In our efforts to mobilize our project over the past few years, we have connected with scholars around the globe: Sarah Jane Aiston; Pascale Caidor; Ardavan Eizadirad & Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui; Danica Facca & Arun Jacob; Lynell S. Hodge & Natasha Jones; and Thulani Nkosi & Nerishka Singh. The outcomes of these rich research, connections, and collaborations are compiled in the pages of this special issue. We write this 5 years after the murder of George Floyd and during a period of marked backlash against any material gains for EDI that were thought to take hold in the wake of this tragedy. We write this from the territories currently known as Canada, at a time when the King of England has just opened the federal parliament—an act not performed by a British monarch since Queen Elizabeth's visit in 1977. King Charles III noted the exceptionalism of this moment: “the world is a more dangerous and uncertain place than at any point since the Second World War” (2025, p. 7), with values such as “democracy, pluralism, self-determination, and freedom” (2025, p. 6) under threat. We are not monarchists, but the underlying stance of this vision and its grandiose optical gesture speaks to the complexity of this moment. The authentic practices that together are understood as “EDI” are an associated limb of such stated values and thus, too, are under threat. There are many helpful critiques of the implementation of the affirmative action policies that have formed the bedrock of more contemporary EDI movements. However, it is our position that a consistent retooling of the praxis of EDI work should not rupture the foundational import of EDI's broader social-justice impulses. What do we have if we do not have equity, equality, diversity, and inclusion? This is a world we do not want to inhabit; a world where we fear for the many while the few rise inexorably. This concern is echoed by Eizadirad and Ghaffar-Siddiqui (2025), who express it so eloquently in their commentary for this issue. They explain that, as EDI gains are eroded, we must “return to [EDI's] radical roots, which [are] about the community at large and grassroots organizing: identifying and through innovative policies, programs, and/or services meeting the needs of people from different walks of life, in the process creating the conditions for everyone and the larger community to thrive. This is a collective effort and must occur through empathetic listening, dialogue, and relationship-building with one another, including those with drastically different opinions and lived experiences.” It is within this fraught but vital context that the contributions gathered in this special issue take on their full significance. This revelatory, radical work is exhibited in each of the twelve articles. These pieces traverse continents, methodologies, fields, findings, and forms. What unites this issue, however, are these researchers' clear-eyed dedications to cataloguing the work of EDI practitioners as their efforts become ever thwarted, with paradigm shifts affecting funding resources and institutional practices that will impact the lives of everyday people, everywhere. As we have seen with the devastating global ripple effects of recent USAID cuts, these challenges are not abstract—they are already reshaping realities. Yet, the researchers featured in this issue also write of the work still to be done. They intone that, while nomenclature might, by means of the cyclical nature of politics and the shifting status-quo, be put on the defensive, what remains are commitments, burning embers awaiting reignition, no matter what names you call them. This issue becomes, then, a textual archeology of a moment under chaotic transformation, a tracing of a series of heterogeneous practices that may, soon, no longer possess a terminology to bind them. We collect them here, for you, for now, with the hope that both their lessons and their commitments will serve to fuel their future iterations. As co-editors of this special issue, we believe it is important to begin with a reflection on who we are and where we come from–not just geographically, but in terms of lived experience, identity, and institutional location. The themes explored in this issue are deeply entangled with histories of violence and erasure, as well as with the ongoing work of resistance and community care. Our own positionalities inevitably shape how we approach equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI)–what questions we ask, what stories we are attuned to, and how we understand power. I, Zeinab, identify as an immigrant woman from Iran, born during a time of war and raised in its aftermath. My early years were marked by displacement, poverty, and state violence—experiences that continue to shape how I understand justice, belonging, and structural inequality. I have lived, studied, and worked across Iran, India, and now Canada. These transnational experiences have given me a layered understanding of how power, privilege, and resistance operate differently—yet often in interconnected ways—across borders. My academic background spans history, sociology, women and gender studies, media, and communication. This interdisciplinary foundation shapes how I engage with equity work—not only as a scholar, but as someone committed to understanding how power operates across time, place, and representation. Living and working in Canada today, I carry privileges I did not grow up with. My education here has opened doors to institutions, networks, and forms of legitimacy that have fundamentally shaped my career. My Canadian passport provides mobility and access that many others—especially those still navigating war, displacement, state violence, or legal precarity—may never experience. I try to remain aware of how these privileges shape my perspective, and how they may at times create distance from the very communities I seek to advocate for. I, Evangeline, identify as a white settler scholar of the territories currently known as Canada. While I am often socially coded as female, I identify more with they/them pronouns. I have lived experiences in poverty and with addiction and mental health. As a trained policy analyst, intersectional researcher, social justice advocate, global non-profit sector worker, writer, and educator, I possess extensive experience in the fields of feminist, racial, and disability justice. Yet, my white privilege and enculturation within the so-called Canadian state often skews my perceptions towards white supremacy and its colonial and masculine logics. I come to this study awake to this and intent on engaging reflexively with my own biases as they impact both its production and dissemination. As we have navigated our co-editing of this issue and considered the enlightening approaches brought to us by our contributors, we have sought to reflect on our own biases/privileges to provide nurturing, and not gatekeeping, to the knowledge collected here. Our goal has been to create space for the grounded, radical, and often-overlooked equity work that is already being done—in grassroots organizations, in community spaces, and in the margins where resistance thrives. The twelve articles featured in this special issue span local, national, and transnational contexts—from South Africa to Morocco, from Canada to the United Kingdom and the United States. Across academic, activist, legal, creative, and community settings, the contributors examine how equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is being practiced, contested, and redefined in real-world settings. The articles engage diverse domains, including higher education, media, workplace policy, grassroots organizing, and community-based research. Yet, they are connected by four interwoven themes: (1) the tensions between performative EDI and institutional resistance; (2) the negotiations of equity in workplace and policy contexts; (3) the transformative practices of grassroots and community-based justice; and (4) the reimagining of research ethics through co-creation, consent, and relational accountability. These contributions together challenge dominant narratives, resist co-optation, and chart pathways toward more just and inclusive futures. We begin with three articles that interrogate how media and educational institutions shape, limit, or distort EDI efforts. These contributions highlight the gap between institutional performance and lived experience, and explore how power, race, and representation interact across public discourse and higher education. Situated in the “feminisation” discourse within higher-education institutions in the United Kingdom, Aiston's article explores a novel equity and inclusion strategy: that of the student “voice.” She analyzes the student press at the University of Cambridge during the year when sexual consent workshops were first introduced on campus. Through this lens, Aiston demonstrates how critique from “within” institutional settings can act as a catalyst for cultural change, challenging pre-existing notions of EDI. Drawing on the theoretical framing of space, her analysis reveals how student journalism can function as an alternative site of EDI practice—one that compels universities to confront an essential question: How do universities respond to student voices and who bears the responsibility for listening and for changing? Continuing this focus on the institutional experiences of historically marginalized groups, Hodge and Jones investigate the challenges faced by Black women in higher-education settings in the aftermath of the turn to performative EDI after the mobilization of Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on interview data from Black female academics in the U.S., and grounded in theories of Black feminist thought and Vizenor's (2008) concept of “survivance,” their study explores how Black women navigate and negotiate barriers in predominantly white institutions and how they develop strategies for reconciliation and healing within these institutional spaces. From these insights, Hodge and Jones propose a series of recommendations to improve the vocational experiences of Black female academics. These recommendations include: finding community and staying in community; practicing self-care; and stories and Hodge and Jones however, that the should be on institutions to create for their they have to be from institutional to Bernard-Brind'Amour and turn their to social media of EDI, tracing how on strategies to and dominant They explore such as social media to the the in and the of the the This to discourse that that Black have been of power. these however, the identify of of back to such in that how white privilege and power are built on of broader These contributions examine how EDI are the and the While one critiques how inclusion can be shaped by and the other how alternative approaches rooted in equity and collective can challenge those The first by Facca and on the in Canadian institutions, with to recent to the Canadian that to provide Facca and investigate how this policy is within the Canadian The a issue within this series of they call the and performative inclusion towards female at Facca and examine how and are made to as for that and cultural that is a to be and/or in of this of workplace inclusion the Harvey, Shepherd, and explore how relationships function within and in the American article is within fields for and from on that corporate they on and intersectional to how operates in on the experiences of from historically et the with a collective approach to as opposed to a They argue that when are from the up for the collective historically marginalized and committed to values of and justice, they the to a impact against the larger structural that The of articles shifts focus to grassroots spaces, where EDI is not just but lived and built These engage with models that in to and grounded, approaches to EDI this by up our call to investigate grassroots organizations. article research and knowledge with a grassroots to as to the Through focus groups, and study reveals that how grassroots organizations can EDI initiatives by on the challenges that women in their It also how grassroots their around racial and how these serve as vital meeting for a understanding of racism as well as providing a for fostering Continuing the on grassroots with and practitioners from Canadian and cultural organizations. commentary on a dominant in EDI work the politics and the of equity a analysis to how back against the and of EDI analysis can to institutional structures and may genuine and and equity must function as a lived rather than an The for the of what terms “EDI from and EDI from these approaches could come together and with for the very work already From the Canadian to the the cultural of EDI values within grassroots feminist organizations in Morocco. Through with and women in Morocco, the that have worked on legal to and the of their to knowledge from the to investigate to what and values in the communities with. in her of and as opposed to of the EDI or and in the where and practices of and with intersectional that connect social the race, and as well as the challenges by in this The both and challenges faced by the efforts of feminist communities in however, that these communities remain in their efforts to and Continuing across the Nkosi and us to South where the of justice shape through legal and In their Nkosi and examine a and its broader for across South The the of a who in an while their of the work of Nkosi and and at of South Africa a challenge was put to include in the for and of which to for during the of their This they a by the since it the forms of faced by in South the majority of whom are Black and As Nkosi and argue that the a from that EDI values and the grounded, strategies explored in grassroots organizing, the the of how EDI can be through and research. These contributions the focus from implementation to that the future of equity work in how we power, and In their commentary for this issue, Eizadirad and Ghaffar-Siddiqui take up the around EDI. They argue that equity must be redefined as a and for communities with from local voices and those by structural This they should resist co-optation, and and from to who they their and the they Eizadirad and Ghaffar-Siddiqui by a of and community-led recommendations to the and equity work to the of a at this on this of EDI, Jeppesen, Ulthiin, Faubert, Min and article the of developed through their with the community space for and in Canada. 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