Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Health and Sustainability: From Theory to Action

Do you want learn about how inequity, injustice, and discrimination shape access to healthy lifestyles, sustainable diets, and equitable health outcomes for people and the planet? And, how can we disrupt these patterns to create a fairer, more sustainable world?

In this course, students engage in the scholarship of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and explore how these principles can be mobilized to foster justice and equality across systems, ranging from the micro to the macro level. Efforts to advance DEI have gained significant interest and momentum in recent years across various domains, including science, business, and public policy. Diversity refers to the richness and patterns of human differences across social identity categories (e.g., race, class, gender, age, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, religion, citizenship); equity refers to fairness and justice; and inclusion refers to the state of being valued, respected, and welcomed.

In the first part of the course, we will examine key theories, concepts, and principles that shed light on how identity categories are constructed and given meaning through human processes and how they are used to produce inequities and injustices embedded in everyday life and practices. To illustrate these processes, we will explore how health and sustainability-related policies and practices can both facilitate and constrain diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will also consider ways in which DEI scholarship operates within academia and science, influencing applications such as the (re)production of knowledge.

In the second part of the course, we will focus on intersectionality, which examines the ways in which identity categories converge and interrelate to create different modes of privilege and discrimination. Students will work in small groups to critically analyze and reflect on real-life case studies that demonstrate how discrimination shapes patterns such as lifestyle choices, access to sustainable nutrition, and disparities in public and planetary health outcomes. In doing so, they will deepen their understanding of the ways DEI scholarship can be harnessed to alleviate health and environmental inequities and contribute to more just and equal systems and societies.

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:

• Recognize and summarize key theories, concepts, and principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Explain how the social construction of difference leads to the division of people between included and excluded, focusing on key social identity categories (e.g., class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexuality, age, citizenship) and their intersections
• Examine policies and practices that influence, shape and/or reflect diversity, equity, and inclusion principles and outcomes, including within health and sustainability-related domains of application and academia/science
• Analyze, through the application of course concepts/materials, real-life case studies in diversity, equity, and inclusion from an intersectional perspective
• Defend a strategy to advance diversity, equity, and/or inclusion through facilitating a shift in policy, practice, principles or science

Assumed Knowledge:

Students enrolling in this course are expected to have a foundational understanding of health and/or sustainability topics. Prior experience or training in diversity, equity, and inclusion is not required; however, a willingness to engage with these concepts critically and reflectively is essential.