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Announcements

Join us at a University Diversity and Inclusion Event!

The Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs is hosting a diversity and inclusion event next week called The Defamation Experience, open to all UT faculty, staff, and students. It is exactly the kind of event that our iSchool D&I committee has been hoping that our community might participate in, so we hope you can make it. The Defamation Experience is a nationally-touring, interactive theater program that helps create dialogue about difficult societal topics, including race, gender, religion, and socio-economic status. Following the presentation of a defamation court case, the audience deliberate as the jury, and with the help of trained facilitators, have an opportunity to talk and think through facts of the case and different perspectives presented on stage and throughout the room. The goal is to create an opportunity for dialogue and to bring people of different backgrounds who may otherwise struggle to connect.There will be two performances, both in the Shirley Bird Perry Ballroom at the Texas Union, with light refreshments.

• Date: Wednesday, February 21st
• Time: 11am & 6pm
• Where: Shirley Bird Perry Ballroom at the Texas Union
• Who: All UT Students, Staff and Faculty are Invited

Apply for a Student Travel Grant

The UT Austin School of Information Diversity and Inclusion Committee will be awarding a $500 travel award for a master’s student to present at or attend a diversity and inclusion focused conference or to present work with diversity and inclusion themes at other conferences in the 2018 spring or summer sessions. To apply please read through the award criteria and requirements listed below in the "iSchool Funding Resources" section, and then send an application to diversity-inclusion@ischool.utexas.edu by 9 am March 9th

Scholarships, Travel Awards, & Other Funding Opportunities

Definitions

For the purposes of our conversations within the Texas iSchool community, we define diversity and inclusion as follows:

• Diversity refers to differences across a group of people (for example, in gender identity, religion, race, age, or veteran status) that derive from demographic traits or life experiences. Most lists of diversity dimensions that we examined are representative and not exhaustive because people may differ on any number of dimensions.
• Inclusion describes the acceptance of, respect for, reflection of, and engagement of diverse peoples and the beliefs, values, and perspectives they may hold.

Recruitment efforts often focus on diversity, whereas inclusion is a common concern for retention. Diversity begins as a matter of representation (the range of traits and life experiences among us) while inclusion is a matter of a welcome environment for a diverse group of people (quality of our climate for each of us).

Courses

Beyond courses and course material in the Texas iSchool related to diversity and inclusion, a broad range of courses across the university speaks to these issues. Below we include just a sample of those courses; you can find more by checking the course listings of these departments or schools plus others at the university. We list here upper-division and graduate-level courses. Check with your advisor if you have any concerns or questions about whether you may apply any of these courses to your degree program.

Resources

Division of Diversity and Community Engagement:

The Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (DDCE) works with a broad range of student, faculty, staff and community constituents to help make The University of Texas at Austin a national model for diversity in higher education. Learn about events, activities, programs, opportunities and resources directly related to diversity issues at DDCE's website.

Reading Lists:

Diversity & Inclusion Committee

Constituted by the School of Information (Texas iSchool) Dean Andrew Dillon and drawing from Provost Maurie McInnis’s charge, our diversity and inclusion committee focused our efforts in 2017, our initial year, on issues of climate and recruitment.

Because these efforts represent our school’s first formal, concerted, and integrated initiative on matters of diversity and inclusion, we opted not to create a diversity statement or to establish goals and metrics for our endeavor. We thought that doing so would rob us of an exploratory beginning, one in which we might initiate a wide-reaching and enduring conversation about diversity and inclusion across our school to determine what issues we face rather than landing too quickly on solutions to presumed problems. Instead, we began that conversation and documented what we learned from it.

Based on that learning, we made recommendations for our school, specific requests of the Provost, and plans for AY 2017-2018. Details appear in our 2017 Report to the Provost. We appreciate the Provost’s willingness, as Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Janet Dukerich reaffirmed, to tailor our approach to our school rather than to model our efforts against prior ones by other schools or universities.

As we continue our work on diversity and inclusion, we will update this page to reflect new events, resources, scholarships, and the like. We’re committed at the Texas iSchool to increasing our diversity and creating an inclusive community that welcomes all students, staff, faculty, and friends of the school.

Diversity and Inclusion Committee members:

• Diane Bailey, committee chair and associate professor
• Amelia Acker, assistant professor
• Edison Thomaz, assistant research professor
• Ida Rahnamai, senior administrative associater
• Johanna Cohoon, doctoral student
• Caroline Stratton, doctoral student
• Danielle Barraza, master’s student
• Andrea Gutierrez, master's student
• Rodrigo Leal, master’s student
• Diana Mendoza, master's student