When DEI Is Under Attack: Grounded Struggles and Radical Possibilities Across Sectors

Session Submission Type: Invited Session (90 minute)

Description

As DEI initiatives face increasing legislative and cultural attacks, this session highlights the resistance and innovation happening outside the academy. With a focus on community, organizational, and cross-institutional responses, panelists will share how workers, faith communities, mutual aid networks, abolitionist collectives, housing justice advocates, youth-led movements, and professional membership organizations confront systemic injustice and sustain equity work in hostile environments. The session invites sociologists to rethink the boundaries of scholarship and to engage deeply with praxis-based approaches to equity, especially as practiced by those often excluded from mainstream academic discourse. Grounded in an abolitionist ethic and rooted in care, this panel expands who and what counts as knowledge in the current political moment.

Sub Unit

• Thematic Session

Presider

• Theresa Rocha Beardall, University of Washington

Individual Presentations

• Navigating Equity Work in Professional Credentialing Spaces - Aminta Moses Sharps

• Abolitionist Organizing and DEI Beyond the Academy - Brittany Battle, Wake Forest University

• Eviction Resistance and Housing Equity Work Under Siege - Rahim Kurwa, University of Illinois-Chicago

• Spiritual Resistance: DEI, Religion, and the Rhetoric of Inclusion - Jelani I. Ince, University of Washington

Discussant

• Calvin John Smiley, CUNY-Hunter College

Session Organizer

• Theresa Rocha Beardall, University of Washington