PACBIC’s 2021 Reflections and Recommendations
This report reflects on the work accomplished by PACBIC in the 2021/22 academic year and highlights recommendations members have elevated for priority attention in the 2022/23 academic year.
This past year, in addition to the initiatives advanced through the Working Groups, the PACBIC undertook to renew the Statement on Building an Inclusive Community with a Shared Purpose – an important statement of the university’s commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. In addition to engaging the campus community and the appropriate governance processes to finalize updates to this Statement, the PACBIC will focus on the following recommended priorities through the next academic year.
- Continue to enhance supports and spaces that centre the 2STLGBQIA+ community, with particular attention to the diversity of this community and its intersections with race, disability, neurodiversity, Indigeneity, faith/spirituality, and class.
- Continue to enhance structures, resources, and opportunities for collaboration across equity-denied/deserving communities to address issues at the intersection of multiple systemic inequities.
- Continue to bring voice to vigilant, responsive, and proactive support for all members of the McMaster community during the transition back to in-person work and learning, with particular attention to the specific experiences, concerns, and needs of staff, students, and faculty from historically marginalized communities.
- Continue to amplify the accessibility and disability inclusion training, education imperatives, opportunities for students, faculty, and staff and explore more programming grounded in and contributing to critical disability studies.
- Continue to advocate for robust supports for Black students, faculty, and staff, aligned with McMaster’s pledge advance the recommendations of the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion. Continue to enhance all hiring practice to improved recruitment of Black Indigenous and Racialized faculty and staff.