An Introduction to Diversity and Inclusion

In the context of your future work as scientist, e.g. in project teams for research projects, as lecturer in your courses, you will repeatedly encounter conscious and unconscious biases on the part of yourself, your colleagues and students due to gender relations and other diversity aspects. This concerns ethnicity, class, religion, age, sexual orientation, disability, etc. These biases can have an impact on your actions and your interaction with other people. Unconscious biases in particular affects what you do and how you interact with others, distorts judgements about performance and can get in the way of a diverse environment. On the one hand, lived diversity always means an opportunity for social justice and increased development potential, but on the other hand brings potential for conflict.

In this workshop, you will therefore get answers to questions such as:
What exactly does diversity and inclusion mean? How can you accept challenges and opportunities related to diversity and which tools can you help to implement inclusion well and actively? Why does diversity not work without inclusion? The main goal is to enable you after the workshop to face, acknowledge and integrate the topic of diversity and inclusion into your academic practice with an increased understanding, awareness and confidence.

Goals

The seminar aims at giving you an overview of what Diversity and Inclusion mean in practice. It will allow you

• to be able to explain the main concepts of Diversity and Inclusion

• to be able to explain the main reasons for inclusiveness

• to know examples of diversity programmes

• to increase self-awareness of your own values and biases

Content

• Diversity, an American thing?

• Where do we come from?

• The Diversity Wheel

• Basic dimensions or grounds for discrimination: what we call the Big Six

• The Legal case, the Business case, the Moral case and the Social case

• Stereotyping, prejudice and biases

Methods

The seminar is interactive.
In order to get into the mood, I would like to ask you individually to think about the following:

• What does diversity mean for me, and how is it different from inclusion?

• Think of a situation where diversity is/was an issue (positive or negative) and how you reacted to it (feelings, actions…)

• Examples of stereotyping, prejudice or bias that you have witnessed or experienced.

Trainer

Professor Marie-Therese Claes