The SGPS wants to ensure marginalized groups aren’t grouped together by ensuring their individual experiences are reflected in policy.
The Society of Graduate and Professional Students (SGPS) made a callout on Feb. 7 over Instagram seeking opinions from graduate and professional students identifying as members of marginalized groups to take part in paid consultations with the Society. These consultations aim to hear the lived experiences of students in addition to insights and ideas to revise the SGPS’s current Equity Policy. Graduate students will receive $50 for consultations, while student groups are compensated double.
SGPS Vice-President (Graduate) Zaid Kasim describes the consultations as informal, focused on fostering discussion. Each 60-minute session aims to identify gaps in student support while exploring opportunities for new initiatives. Consultation panelists include Kasim and Vice-President (Community) Simran Sharma, along with the SGPS’s Equity & Diversity Commissioner, Sangeetha Saravanan, and International Students’ Affairs Commissioner, Sumaiya Chowdhury.
In an interview with The Journal, Kasim and Sharma said the current Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Policy needs to be amended to reflect changes in equity since the policy’s last update—which Kasim suggested could have taken place well over five years ago making this first time in SGPS history it’s being updated to this extent.
While the current policy addresses how the SGPS strives to increase Indigenization – Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility and Anti-Racism (I-EDIAA) for members and employees, it doesn’t provide actionable steps on how the Society will carry it out.
“It’s about time we as an organization look ourselves in the mirror, and we acknowledge that times have changed,” Kasim said. “We need to better define what equity is, what I-EDIAA is, each of those individual values and how we can embed equity not into just this policy but embed it in everything we do as an organization.”
Kasim and Sharma cited the AMS Special General Assembly in November as inspiration to start this project. Motion 3 on Recognition Policy passed with a majority, allowing the AMS’s Social Issues Commission to engage in paid consultations with various marginalized groups and students on campus such as the Black Clubs Caucus with the aim of creating a new equity policy. This initiative set a precedent, snowballing into the SGPS passing a similar consultation policy that mandates compensation for students engaging in consultations.
READ MORE: First Special General Assembly of the year sees multiple motions debated
Sharma echoed the importance of changing policy as time progresses, citing increased diversity in Canada and Queen’s over the past few years and a growing need to define individual marginalized groups in policy.
“It was important to not universalize all marginalized students as one homogenous group,” she said.
She brought up the example of identifying caste as a marginalized category within the equity policy—an identity specific to students from India. The caste system, for over 3,000 years, has divided Hindus into four main categories in a social hierarchy. Despite being outlawed in India, the impacts of the system have created lasting inequality among Hindus according to the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
Consultations have started taking place and will continue over the next two months, with an aim to complete the first draft of the new policy by March or April, prior to passing a second reading with the new SGPS executives in May.
Tags
consultation, Equity Policy, Revise, SGPS
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