What does “the work” of DEI leadership and advancement look like?

This is our first post by our newest Contributing Editor, Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros! Pamela is the Latin American, Iberian and Latino/a Studies Librarian at The Ohio State University (OSU). Outside of OSU, Pamela is an adjunct lecturer with the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign School of Information and serves as a consultant with the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).

In 2022, the Association of College and Research Libraries Board of Directors approved Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as a strategic goal of the profession (Stewart and Claire, 2022). Since that time, libraries have sought to elevate DEI advancement in their organizations (Stewart & Claire, 2022; Poole et. al, 2022). It is now rare to find a library that does not list DEI as a core value or a part of their strategic plan. However, LISLibrary and Information Science An interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. DEI initiatives continue to struggle to make meaningful advancement in building inclusive organizations. 

It can be difficult to discern what DEI leadership and advancement looks like within a DEI field that is rapidly changing and growing, and where DEI standards, consistency, or accountability are not yet in place (Zheng, 2023). The social movements of 2020 have helped to create a critical consciousness to support DEI advancement (Zheng, 2023), but clarity of what is effective is still missing from research in the field leaving many of our organization’s engagements to be labeled as “performative” rather than reparative. This blog post will attempt to start a conversation about what may be getting in our way, what we can learn from the DEI literature outside of libraries, and more importantly what the DEI activities are that can make a difference. 

What may be getting in our way.

1. Reframing to see DEI as a process: When we read or hear about DEI advancement through conference panels or literature, it can easily translate into seeing DEI as a task to complete: a program, recruitment strategy, collection, training, metadata etc. A thematic analysis of LIS anti-racism literature revealed a concentration in research and scholarship services (e.g. improved library services), collection development practices (e.g. classification systems and item representation) and retention/recruitment (Jones et al., 2022). This framing may limit DEI and its practitioners to approach this area as a task to be done rather than a process with which to construct, cultivate, and create. Creating a DEI process requires a reflective inquiry-led practice about what can best support impactful change and the norms/values that will guide us through its messy evolution. When approached as a task, DEI leads us to fill in the space with “arbitrarily DEI interventions” to match our good intentions, but sadly do not move the needle, or worse are not inclusive in their design (Zheng, 2023). Remaining task-focused can also easily bypass the relational aspects of DEI work that are at this work’s essence. The common phrase “nothing without us,” reinforces this essential DEI tenant. DEI work is collaborative and relational-oriented (learn more about task and relational leadership styles here: G, 2018). The reality is that meaningful DEI work has no quick fixes. It cannot often be slotted neatly in an Outlook calendar, carried forward through a charge of a committee, or enacted as a task. How does one slot “human flourishing,” “deep listening,” or “radical empathy” easily into a project within a legacy of an existing library structure? As Lily Zheng (2023) reminds us, we are all stewards of the organizational cultures, systems, and environments in which we operate. What will be the norms and values that will guide our approach and interaction with others and our work, especially when we encounter differences? Will it be apathy or fear that takes away our courage to take a risk and experiment? Will it be judgment dressed up as justice? Or can it be radical empathy, connection, compassion, curiosity, creativity, innovation, hope, and love that will guide us to something better?
2. Educating the heart: Another area that comes up is the extent to which DEI can be learned through workshops, readings, and discussions. This approach to DEI advancement presents it as knowledge to acquire through the consumption of its information or training. This is addressed by Figueroa and Shawgo’s article titled “You can’t read your way out of racism” (2022) which discusses the reimagining of a library committee to support what they describe as “the work of reckoning.” The reality is that many DEI interventions (e.g. conferences, public presentations, scholarly publications, targeted initiatives), despite the best of intentions, are not making a difference with regards to representation in the number of professionals, faculty, students, and resources, the retention of those in our profession, or a change of homogeneous workplace cultures (Poole et al., 2021). Unconscious bias training and racial sensitivity workshops are not producing sustained change or creating meaningful impact (Zheng, 2022). Perhaps here our respect for education and traditional forms of learning are clouding us to the limits of this learning style. The challenge DEI poses is that many of its core elements like trust are more relational – closer to emotional intelligence and cultural humility which require us to refine our human to human engagement skills. Add on to that the complexity of interacting across differences which can add to new tensions and challenges (Rock, Grant, and Grey, 2016). In an ideal world, we could read our way into DEI fluency. However, an intellectual approach to DEI will not instantaneously recalibrate other’s behaviors and existing systems, let alone our own. If this were the case, one deep reading of James Baldwin, bell hooks, or Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been sufficient to have made us all respectful, inclusive, and equitable to one another. 

So what does DEI leadership, advancement, and work look like? I’d like to share some examples of reproducible activities that reflect what DEI leadership and advancement can look like (See other examples of recommended organization workforce strategies recommended by Jones et al, 2022 in their article discussionDiscussion The section of a research article where the researchers analyze and interpret the findings. This section provides the “so what” for the research conducted.).

In the chart above, everything that is blue tinted is relational, meaning it is touching another living person, not a hypothetical person or a future person, but a real person in the here and now.

Why is this important? I would like to present the idea that DEI leadership and advancement at its core is about guiding us to interdependence, to build harmonious, respectful, and loving relationships with each other, especially across differences. To do so, the centrality of relationship and responsibility to and from the collective inform our DEI actions and process. These ideas are guided from Indigenous knowledge and cultures (Kenny and Ngaroimata, 2012). From this distinct worldview, leadership is about helping people hold more than one point of view at a time in order to value distinct perspectives that gets us closer to seeing things through a whole system view (Guitérrz, 2012).

The active practice shown in the pie chart above is built over time often happening privately one-on-one, where people make and hold space for each other to be seen, heard, vulnerable, and ultimately supported. Successful big DEI initiatives and projects that lead to transformation are informed by these interpersonal interactions, the day-to-day experiences of this everyday work that can allow us to see the gaps, but more importantly the strength and opportunities that can allow an organization to move forward.

In this approach, DEI work is a lot more work and investment into real people around us. It can look like encouraging a student from an underrepresented background to apply for a fellowship and then following up by editing their application even when it’s not convenient. It can look like translating business forms into different languages in order to help an international vendor get paid who is perhaps too embarrassed that their English fluency does not allow them to navigate complex tax forms. It’s about calling a female coworker to praise them for a proposal that was rejected because a person in authority did not listen to her ideas. It’s about listening to the concerns of commuter students who feel out of place because they do not have the means to live on-campus and inviting them to sit with you at lunch. And then it’s about doing something about all these insights to channel them effectively to dissipate the gaps or shortcomings that continue to perpetuate within a system. 

DEI work is about doing all this work inside of the “regular” work, sometimes at the detriment of the “regular” work. So I invite you all to look at the people around you to inspire the DEI work that you will invest in. The ideas from this blog are being drawn primarily from three sources 1) Lily Zheng’s new book DEI Deconstructed: Your no-nonsense guide to doing the work and going it right, 2) Living Indigenous Leadership: Native Narratives on Building Strong Communities, edited by Carolyn Kenny and Tina Ngaroimata Fraser. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012, and 3) DEI field work.

References

Kenny, C., & Fraser, T. N. (2012). Living indigenous leadership : native narratives on building strong communities. UBC Press.

Espinosade los Monteros, P. & Jaguszewski, J. (2023). “DEI Advancement Activities” [Unpublished Figure]. AAHSL/NLM Leadership Fellow Program January Virtual Session.

Figueroa, M., & Shawgo, K. (2022). “you can’t read your way out of racism”: creating anti-racist action out of education in an academic library. Reference Services Review, 50(1), 25–39. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-06-2021-0025.

​​G, S. (2018, September 6). QUALITIES OF TASK ORIENTED LEADER AND RELATIONSHIP ORIENTED LEADER. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/qualities-task-oriented-leader-relationship-sundaresan-g

Gutiérrez, R. “Indigenous Grandmas and the Social Justice Movement.” In Living Indigenous Leadership: Native Narratives on Building Strong Communities, edited by Carolyn Kenny and Tina Ngaroimata Fraser. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012.

Jones, E. P., Mani, N. S., Carlson, R. B., Welker, C. G., Cawley, M., & Yu, F. (2022).

Analysis of anti-racism, equity, inclusion and social justice initiatives in library and information science literature. Reference Services Review, 50(1), 81–101. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-07-2021-0032

Poole, A. H., Agosto, D., Greenberg, J., Xia Lin, & Erjia Yan. (2021). Where Do We Stand? Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice in North American Library and Information ScienceLibrary and Information Science An interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. Education. Journal of Education for Library & Information Science, 62(3), 258–286. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/10.3138/jelis.2020-0018

Rock, D., Grant, H., & Grey, J. (2016, September 22). Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable — and That’s Why They Perform Better. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/09/diverse-teams-feel-less-comfortable-and-thats-why-they-perform-better

Stewart, Claire. “Future States of the Research Library.” Research Library Issues, no. 303 (2022): 3–11. https://doi. org/10.29242/rli.303.1

Zheng, L. (2023). DEI deconstructed: your no-nonsense guide to doing the work and doing it right (First edition). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Zheng, L. (2022, December 1). The Failure of the DEI-Industrial Complex. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/12/the-failure-of-the-dei-industrial-complex

Acknowledgements: Thank you to the wonderful Nimisha Bhat from the Librarian Parlor editorial team, Sarah Buck Kachaluba, Latin American Studies and Iberian Languages and Literatures Librarian at UCSD for her critical feedback on early drafts. Thank you to Janice Jaguszewski’s indispensable advisement, collaboration, and co-design of the DEI Advancement Activities chart and its framing. The inspiration behind this post is dedicated to the librarianship and memory of Dr. Roberto C. Delgadillo, Student Services Librarian at UC-Davis. 

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