Diversity Statement

As a Bahá’í, queer woman of color, my commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is deeply personal and political. My father was a child when he moved with his mother from Puerto Rico into a low-income suburb of Atlanta, and my mother immigrated with her parents and sister as refugees from Iran in the early 1980s. These formative cross-cultural experiences translated into my investment in a radical intersectional praxis of study. Furthermore, as the first member of my family to attend a top thirty university and earn a Ph.D, my financial need to work multiple jobs during my undergraduate and masters years kept me grounded in a world outside the university, with one foot always in the working class. These personal interactions with colonial and capitalist apparatuses of power motivated and inspired my intellectual interest in strategies of resistance and freedom against racial biocapitalism.

Throughout my time in academia, I have felt the vulnerability and insecurity of a young woman of color in an institutional setting; as a result, I have done my best to practice decolonization in both my studies and actions, while balancing the demands on my time and navigating my hypervisibility as a woman of color as best as possible. For example, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, I was mobilized by the lack of response in our department and co-founded the Romance Studies anti-racist initiative, the Committee for an Anti-Racist Romance Studies. As part of this initiative, we created two subcommittees—one to write and publish an official statement on behalf of our department, the second to gather demographic data related to graduate student, staff, and faculty makeup—whose findings were to be presented at a department town hall. We also generated an anonymous cohort and alumni survey to self-report experiences with racial bias in the department and to give suggestions for transforming department culture. It is my belief that anti-racist work is never done, and this committee is still working to create a safer and more accountable institutional space for precarious lives.

As a professor, my pedagogical goal is to create a safe space for learning in the classroom, which I have found both produces and reproduces systemic inequalities even as it presents opportunities for resistance and freedom. Systemic inequality is always present in a classroom setting, and as my awareness of this reality increases, so does a greater feeling of responsibility as a figure of authority and privilege in the classroom. As instructors, it is ethically and politically important to question the assumptions and accessibility to subject matter; it is equally important to facilitate a classroom where every student feels comfortable taking up an equitable amount of space. Practically, my continued commitment to the work of decolonization has meant actively re-working textbook lessons and activities to reflect a diverse and equitable population, while acknowledging the power dynamics at play epistemologically. Wherever my professional trajectory takes me, I plan to continue to decolonize myself and the spaces I inhabit, in order to best show up as an ally and supporter for those in positions of precarity.