In 2021, Nisha started a research project that prompted us to collectively explore the work of public-facing letters related to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) written by university officials. Nisha noticed that when examined together, this collection of letters was politically significant. She was struck by the pattern of letters written by university presidents following the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2021, in which university-after-university declared outrage at police violence against Black people and made public pronouncements of addressing systemic Black racism.
Mindful of the backlash against anything related to EDI or marginalized peoples, we started to track:
The work of letters related to EDI in domesticating, bureaucratizing, regulating, and reordering structurally precarious groups.
How universities re-scripted themselves as virtuous (rather than intrinsically laced with power) through letters claiming to address institutional anti-Black racism.
How structurally precarious people resisted university narratives of EDI, and wrote/rewrote letters in ways that nurtured, not depleted, individuals and communities.
So far, this research has led to a talk by Nisha Nath, ‘The Letters’ EDI and Tracing Work in the Academe as well as a collaborative book project (in progress).