✨What if Diversity Were the Mainstream? Rethinking the Ordinary Together.
Dear colleagues, partners, and friends,
My equity, diversity and inclusion job is about including the perspectives of minority groups into mainstream programmes and organisations. Sensing the irrelevance of the wording -not to say of the concept, we sometimes refer to social minority, in the case of women for instance.
Let’s do a count check though! Out of the worldwide population:
- 49,7% are women (World Bank, 2022)
- 16% are persons with disabilities (World Health Organisation, 2024)
- Between 60 and 85% are people of the global majority – meaning people from racial or ethnic groups that are globally prevalent, comprising the majority of the world’s population.
- 28% are children under the age of 18 (UNICEF, 2024)
Adding up these non-exhaustive categories of the population, these are a lot of people already! So, what if diversity were actually the mainstream? What about starting from the population’s identity traits to build the ordinary, and not the other way round?
Happy solstice,
Nadège
© Freepik
Teaching Gender at University!
Over the Autumn, I taught a Gender and International Action course to post-graduate students at Sciences Po Lille, my hometown political sciences university:
- The course prepared future staff to integrate gender perspectives into humanitarian and development programmes.
- These students truly grasp gender diversity and intersectional identities. The new generation will challenge us all!
- While I have plenty of resources on women and girls, I struggled to find ones with an intersectional gender approach. Please share if you have any good ones!
© Commoning / Nadege Riche Consulting
My top 3 inspirations of the year!
I read extensively for research and staying informed. On top reads this year were:
- “Bracing Against Place: Disability, Nature, and Interdependence”—a conversation between Naomi Ortiz and Julia Watts Belser. The authors beautifully illustrate how ecological thinking and disability experiences highlight interdependence as essential to human and ecological connections. They also shed light on how marginalised perspectives reveal new insights, reminding us that outdoor spaces are often designed for the able-bodied, while wild and urban environments coexist in ways we often overlook.
- Come to Selfhood from artist photographer Joshua Rashaad McFadden. His interviews with young African-American men explore black masculinity in a powerful, counter-narrative way. The book, featuring both portraits and moving handwritten testimonies, captures the intimacy and love these men share with their fathers. It challenges prevailing race-based stereotypes and offers a deeper understanding of masculinity and family bonds.
- In Displaced: Migration, Conflict, Climate Change, Richard Mosse emphasizes that literature, art, and photography can evoke a profound sense of mutual implication and collective responsibility. These forms of expression are uniquely equipped to communicate justice and equity. It reminded me of the value in integrating academic research with artistic approaches in the pursuit of social justice.
