ARKive post 3 — Anoushka Kandwala

Anoushka Kandwala

Do We Need A New Way of Talking About Diversity?

In the last decade or so, the word diversity has infiltrated the creative industries. While diversity as a concept has significantly increased in popularity, the word’s lack of specificity means that it can be wielded in any which way. Does this term still serve the creative industries or do we need more clearly defined approaches?

To investigate this question, I sought out Reeta Loi, Founder and CEO of Tiger Iron, a culturally-rooted agency employing people from diverse backgrounds to take a decolonial approach to creative campaigns. Diversity helps construct accurate representations Within what Loi calls ‘agency-land’, there is a huge disparity between the identities of the audiences that creative teams are trying to reach, and the makeup of the teams themselves, who tend to skew white, male, cis-gendered and straight. The people who are shaping culture influence how populations see themselves. Loi sees a lot of advertising as problematic because without adequate representation “these concepts are created by people who are othering [audiences]. They’re feeding into stereotypes and prejudices all the time... and then we believe that that is what we are.”

Accurate representation of audiences is often one of the reasons most cited for why we need diversity in the creative industries, but Loi thinks that hiring practices aren’t enough—people need to feel safe enough in the workplace to share their ideas. “When we’re going into traditional agencies, we’re having to assimilate, often code-switching because we’ve learned to do that for our survival.” Code-switching refers to a change in behaviour in order to fit in with the dominant culture in your environment.“As soon as you start assimilating, you start losing everything about you that makes you unique and wonderful as a creative. So how can you bring a culturally-rooted, authentic experience into the work that you’re doing if you don’t feel safe to do that?” Loi founded Tiger Iron for this reason—to provide diverse creatives with a space where they can be themselves and make work that lets them thrive, rather than just survive.

I speak to Elizabeth Guffey, an editor and educator whose work focuses on the intersection of design, visual culture and disability studies. She explains that often, disability is left out of conversations about diversity—perhaps this is why the disability justice movement has been making waves in the last few years, because of its specificity. Guffey makes the compelling argument that design shapes what we see as ‘normal’, and thus defines what disability is. “Vision impairment used to be one of the most significant disabilities there was”, explains Guffey, “but since we’ve normalised glasses-wearing... people don’t even think about it.” Glasses are in fact assistive devices that have been designed to correct what is in fact a disability, but it’s unlikely that every glasses-wearing person would identify as disabled. It’s striking to consider the creative industry’s ability to sculpt what normalcy is, and how an increase in representation of disabled creatives in the workforce could change the way disability is represented in our culture.

Diversity is the first step towards equity Julian Thompson is the founder of Rooted by Design, a change & futures studio which centres the realities of Black communities. Thompson sees diversity as the first step in the journey towards change, but explains that “some of that agenda isn’t even driven by Black people or people of colour. The industry might have good intention, but at the same time have their own agendas as to what this means for the survival of their organisation. There is a commercial reason sometimes that people want diversity.”

Rooted focuses instead on equity. Thompson explains that their mission is to centre voices that have historically been on the margins, from hiring solely Black designers and strategists to taking on projects which centre Black audiences. “This is about recognising that because of inequity, things are broken.” He is adamant that Rooted can never be a DEI initiative—rather than fixing agencies’ diversity issues and metrics , Thompson wants to “fix health outcomes that are disproportionately impacting Black people.” Rooted’s methodology recognises that those who have experienced inequity have consistently experienced a “historical deficit”, which comes from a lack of investment, care and visibility. To counter this, “we need to create experiences that allow people to experience something other than inequity... that make people feel powerful, strong, valued, seen and heard.”

This text origilllary appeared in the Creative Review