Adi Sneg's ARIA project:听Report on Reports: Evaluating Repetition as Praxis in Institutional Commitments to Equity at 捆绑SM社区.
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This summer, I was fortunate enough to continue working with Dr. Alanna Thain under the Climate Change: Institutionality, Equity, and Activism Now Speaker Series through an ARIA internship. My interest in this particular project was its exploration of the concept of institutional 鈥渃limate鈥�, and how actors under academic and non-academic structures are pushing towards institutional realities marked by sustainable, dynamic equity practices. The initial project vision was to track the implementation of principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion through in-person events examining how Montreal arts institutions and 捆绑SM社区鈥檚 equity-related policies adopt these ideologies. Due to social distancing regulations, the project was reconfigured into two initiatives, the second of which served as my primary research: a podcast series where stakeholders in local art galleries, festivals, and programs are asked to reflect on equity; and a deep dive into 捆绑SM社区鈥檚 official equity commitments. The learning goals underpinning this work were to understand and contribute to wider conversations of 鈥渃limate change鈥�, or shifts towards institutionalized equity, and to critically examine institutional undertakings of equity initiatives.
In analyzing 捆绑SM社区鈥檚 equity documents, I took on an intersectional feminist lens (Crenshaw 149) with a focus on tracking repetition of both institutional language (specifically the words equity, diversity, and inclusion) and recurrent requests-turned-recommendations. Ahmed鈥檚 thesis of emotions and language, which posits that official institutional language can be mobilized in repetition to elicit emotional responses which inform cultural practices (9-14), was especially useful in illustrating the impacts of institutional language repetition on the individual. With this in mind, I applied Bacchi and Goodwin鈥檚 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the Problem Represented to be?鈥� policy analysis strategy (14) to tease out the ways in which social problems are represented and constructed via 捆绑SM社区 policy. The findings of my research construct a complex web revealing the realities of institution-led equity efforts at 捆绑SM社区, revealing a pattern of contradicting implementation of equity-related language at the administrative level. Analysis of this web points to sporadic attempts on behalf of 捆绑SM社区 to either identify itself as neutral ground to be 鈥渄iversified鈥� or made 鈥渆quitable鈥�, with token students and community members acting as catalysts towards this growth, or equity not being an institutional, collective responsibility so much as a role assigned to and localized within an individual. Integral to this propping of 捆绑SM社区 as an equitable institution is the decontextualizing of student-led and faculty-supported activism, as is the case with the circumstances which led to the Report of the Working Group on Principles of Renaming and Commemoration in 2018. These documents obscure years of activism met with non-response, performative stalling, or retaliation by 捆绑SM社区. This facilitates the University鈥檚 movement away from colonial, white supremacist modes of identification and towards 鈥�21st Century鈥� standards of institutional responsibility without acknowledging participation in and proliferation of the very oppressive actions it opposes via policy.
Reflecting on the experience of this internship, I first feel great gratitude towards the donor who made my internship possible, Mr. Harry Samuel. This internship and being able to engage with academic work during a global pandemic was not only intellectually challenging, but intellectually grounding, as I felt connected to a cause greater than myself. Some of the highlights of this internship were having the opportunity to partake in a podcast production workshop with Studio XX, being able to work in the park on sunny days, and collaborating alongside my friends, who are working on separate projects for Dr. Thain. By virtue of working during a pandemic, I encountered both the anticipated challenges of an internship alongside circumstance-specific ones; most notably, I found it difficult to separate spheres of work and home, and to track my progress when the pandemic rendered the distinction between weekday and weekend virtually non-existent. To combat these, I collaborated with other individuals in internships and dedicated a specific space in my apartment to work in. I also found that scheduling in work hours and breaks, as well as creating daily to do lists, made it easier to approach this internship under an abstract, long-term timeline. These organizational skills, along with my newfound critical gaze towards equity at the institutional level, is one of the ways that this internship has impacted my future. Coming out of this summer, I am inspired to work in spheres where such policies are created. This internship has further offered me a continued research assistantship with Dr. Thain, with the intention of using my research on equity reports and policies as a foundation for a remote event to bring to fruition the community element integrated in the original project idea.
