The Leaning Tower: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Counter-Narratives within the Ivory Tower

• In Event: The Stories We Tell: Theorizing Intersectional Justice in the Context of Working With Marginalized Communities

Abstract

A post-truth society marginalizes people of color and females in the academy (Monforti & Michelson, 2020) while denigrating the importance of education. Sharing space(s) within a Midwestern PWI, we vary in age, race, religion, language, ethnicity, income, and educational-faculty status. However, the “Ivory Tower’s” systems bind us to its (and our own) inherited injustices. Finding dissatisfaction in absolute and relative spaces controlled by relational, institutional, and interpersonal boundaries, we search for a collective third space (Soja, 1996), where we feel revival and repair while moving towards just educational renewal (AERA call, 2024). This movement is guided by considerations including:
• Can creating a collective counternarrative reorient diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) committee commitments to intersectional social justice?
• How might collaborative faculty efforts stabilize, repair, or remedy spaces built on oppressive or “faulty foundations”?
As educational leaders on our university’s DEI committee, we seek intersectional justice (IJ) in our collaborative work to affirm identities/positionalities and honor community stories while speaking out against institutional and collective injustice (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

We use “the leaning tower of Pisa” as a conceptual metaphor for work from a Midwestern PWI built on a foundation of systemic oppression (Hartlep & Ball, 2019; Rizvi, 2013). This paper explores our authors’ work within three spatial contexts (Table 1), seeking “third space” through “new insights that extend our practical knowledge into more effective actions to achieve greater justice and democracy” (Soja, 2009). Locating and extending such spaces requires IJ practitioners and DEI teams to utilize a geographic perspective, drawing on committee members' “overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination” (Taylor, 2021, p. 9).
Multimodal storytelling during a group writing experience led to rapid ideation and collaborative stories through a co-constructed performance piece. Forwarding this second conceptual space in public brought us to further explore Soja’s conceptions of space, specifically the conceptual, physical, and imagined active third space of liberation. Building on the practices embodied in our first writing collaboration, we teamed to create poetic turns outside our system of practice. These counternarratives echoed, beginning to counter the heavy institutional weight and offset the “lean” of the dominant institutional practices. 2024-25 committee plans attempt to balance the tower through a college-wide book study (Taylor, 2021) and theater of the oppressed intensive. Inspired by the counterstorytelling from our practice, we extend commitments to IJ with student and community members. In this third space, we challenge the system's ability to function for only itself.

By utilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa as a conceptual metaphor from where to examine a liberatory third space, we stretch the possibilities for IJ. While the structure itself is slanted, the potential of the third space can be determined by our collective commitment to justice.

Authors

• Brianne Rose Pitts, Western Michigan University

• Elizabeth Isidro, Western Michigan University

• LaSonja Roberts, Western Michigan University

• Mary Ebejer, Western Michigan University