Communication Studies Department DEIJA Commitment

The Department of Communication Studies commits to principles of DEIJA (diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility). Our mission is to educate individuals as active agents of social justice for meaningful transformation in diverse local and global communities. We aim to cultivate a community in which all members feel valued, represented, and respected, as well as enabled and supported to achieve their personal, professional, and academic goals. Our framework for DEIJA embraces all backgrounds, identities, and experiences, as constituted by gender identity and expression, transgender identity, socioeconomic class, disabilities, age, race, ethnicity, religion, generation, sexual orientation, regional origin, nationality, active duty/veteran status, occupation, language, political ideology (especially those that have not been historically and widely embedded), and intersectionalities among additional important positionalities. With this, DEIJA goes beyond inclusion and participation; it requires deep cultural work in examining contested identities and creating spaces for such identities.

We define D, E, I, J, A as:

• Diversity: our engagement with and valuation of difference, culture, and varied identity backgrounds and identity experiences.
• Equity: our confrontation of structured inequalities, systemic oppressions, and power differences among cultural groups, identity backgrounds, and identity experiences
• Inclusion: our work to address the societal, historical, and internal structural barriers to the full participation, contribution, and success of members across varied identity backgrounds and experiences.
• Justice: our work to disrupt unequal power relations and contexts.
• Accessibility: our ongoing commitment to creating inclusive learning environments that meet the needs of all students by recognizing that all bodies are unique and change depending on the enabling and constraining dynamics of space and time.