GHS Hosts Diversity Conversation

On April 22nd, 2020, we convened an event via Zoom to talk as a department about what diversity means to us and how we can work to continue improving the diversity of our department and fields. Time was set aside first for everyone to think on their own, then to convene and discuss their thoughts. Our present faculty members (department chair Ian Quinn, DEI committee chair Gundula Kreuzer, and DGS Michael Veal) gave their thoughts from the faculty’s perspective on what initiatives the department is taking. These presentations were followed by an opportunity for students to discuss the same issues without the faculty present. Some recurring themes of discussion were the vast multiplicity of types of diversity that must be considered, reflections on how far we’ve come but how far we still have to go, and ways in which we can use our sociality and sense of department community to understand each other more closely and create the type of respectfully diverse environment that we would like to see in the wider world.

Contributed by Liam Hynes-Tawa