“I was Doing EDI Before EDI was an Acronym”: EDI From Above and Below

Abstract

As part of an international research project, my colleagues and I have been investigating how principles of equity, diversion, inclusion (EDI) and belonging are enacted in grassroots arts organizations, and what factors may be enabling or limiting. This commentary discusses findings from interviews that pertain specifically to necessary conditions for fostering true diversity, equity and inclusion, and attempts to offer recommendations in this fraught moment of growing EDI-disavowal. Resistance to EDI initiatives, and to the notion of recognizing one's privilege, is hardly new (Ahmed 2012). This paper falls in a conflicted space within this already conflictual moment, resting on the principle that diversity, equity and inclusion matter while acknowledging the gap between official EDI and the true lived experiences of those who seek to promote equity and inclusion on a regular basis. The interview findings serve to highlight this gap.

In 2024, our team conducted semi-structured interviews with representatives from eleven arts and culture organizations in Canada, identifying individuals within those organizations who had developed or been involved with some type of EDI initiative within their organizations. We used purposeful sampling to identify relevant organizations, then employed a snowball sampling approach to help us expand our list of potential participants. Many of these organizations were small and relatively specialized, often focused on local initiatives or very specific aspects of arts and culture development. From the beginning, our research team hypothesized that EDI in grassroots organizations would not look like the EDI found in larger organizations, which has come to resemble a type of EDI industry: professionalized and structured, with its own jargon and labels. This is one of the tensions of conducting research on practices that genuinely promote diversity, inclusion and belonging, while understanding that EDI has come to be understood, at a mainstream level, in a very limited way (Cupples 2024; Nichols and McAuliffe 2025). This tension arose when, early in the research process, we revisited our initial consideration that we would be able to translate our learnings into recommendations for incorporating EDI in organizations, even to the point of creating a toolkit, and realized the challenges we would encounter, echoing the finding that “even well-meaning attempts to produce decolonizing toolkits can too easily reproduce the colonial logic of universality” (Shahjahan et al. 2022 in Cupples 2024, 3). Similarly, one consistent finding in our own research was that any conscious attempt to impose or systematize EDI may, paradoxically, hinder the development of real equity, aligning with previous research suggesting that “the bureaucratization of EDI work—or ‘doing diversity’—has the potential to reduce the problem of institutional injustice to a ‘matter of tick boxes and paper trails’ where the work is no longer about, and even conceals, ongoing struggles for social justice” (Ahmed & Swan 2006, 96, in Nichols and McAuliffe 2025, 7).

The author declares no conflicts of interest.