Speakers
Description
With the impetus for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) across societal landscapes, and increasing attention drawn specifically to ‘safe sport,’ sport organizations across Canada are under increasing pressure to create EDI polices. What values are centered in creating such policies? Furthermore, we ask, do the policies inadvertently reinscribe inequity, harms, and injustice? Do they alienate the very stakeholders they are meant to serve?
The Re-Creation Collective includes researchers with both lived and academic expertise in the ways that sport and recreation opportunities are impacted by intersections of racism, colonialism, (dis)ableism, sanism, (hetero)sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, fatphobia, and barriers around poverty and citizenship. As researchers committed to disrupting such harmful intersectional oppressions, we co-conspire with leading sport organizations to think about their policies and create accessible ways to initiate changes across their spheres of influence. We implemented a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of all publicly available EDI-related policies of National-level Canadian sport organizations. We found that many policies in such organizations (un)intentionally reproduce, reinforce, and justify many if the dynamics through which exclusion and inequity is enacted.
Therefore, in this presentation, we present a robust conversation about these findings. Moreover, we will uncover our analysis methodology and offer a toolkit of resources to assist researchers and organizations committed to ‘doing-the-work’ of EDI. The language built into policies has can potentially affirm the humanity of historically marginalized people and generate justice-based process across the sport sector.
