Welcome to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Higher Education Photography. I'm Glenn Carpenter. I'm the photographer at Moraine Valley Community College, and I am also the president of the University Photographers Association of America. Up has about 350 members from across the globe who every day try to accurately portray their university or college in photography. These members come from two year schools, four year schools, public and private. They are dedicated professionals to their craft. This morning, we're going to be joined by several of these photographers. Susan was the chief author of our paper. And speaking of the paper, it's available at upa dot org. So, Matt, why don't you go ahead and get us started this morning? Hi. I I'm sure I'm the senior university photographer at the University of Notre Dame. I'm not only a Notre Dame employee, I'm a Notre Dame alum. I graduated in 1994. So as a student this year from 1992 94, and I worked on the yearbook and we had questions of diversity and representing diversity arise even then, only we were still at that point, barely 20 years removed from having gone coed. Notre Dame was not the most diverse place and when we tried to show diversity, it definitely felt staged and contrived. And fast forward 30 years and it's genuinely a much more diverse place. And that's wonderful. But from time to time, I still might get called out on social media for photos where someone thought I didn't show enough diversity, or we might get questions of someone wanting to know did we stage or engineer diversity through post-processing? And the answer is definitely no, never. But I've wrestled with the question of from time to time in my own mind of am I doing this the best it can be done? I definitely want to help the university attract even more diversity. And so I want to know that I'm doing this right, and these are questions that I would think about on my own from time to time. UPA is such a wonderful organization in that they encourage ideas and contributions from everyone, not just board members. And over the years UPA at our annual symposium, has begun doing outreach and service programs and we've been thinking in a larger external way with some of the service programs that we've done. And I thought this is the sort of thing that UPA was created to think about questions of diversity and how we show them as university photographers. Because we're staff photographers, we have long institutional memories. We think about these kinds of questions more so than a freelancer or occasional campus visitor might. And so I raised this question with Glenn Carpenter, the UPA president, in the fall of 2019. And I thought in the spirit of some of the outreach activities we were doing at the symposium, perhaps for the 2020 symposium, we could produce a statement on diversity and inclusion, not a policy, because everyone's campus is different, but a statement that people could take back to their leadership on their various campuses and say to their leadership and say to higher ed as a whole, we upa think about these things, we endorse this statement and we just want to let the world know that we do more than just stand around and ask each other what our favorite stuff is at our symposium and we think about bigger things than technical things. Glenn was completely in support of that idea. No surprise, and assembled the committee that later produced the paper. And the first meeting of the committee was in March 2020, on the day that that I really feel like the national panic over COVID set in. And there would have been every excuse in the world to table this until the crisis had passed. And they didn't. And I am so proud and grateful to the committee for what they produced. And I am proud and grateful to have played a small part in having produced it. Thank you. Max idea was brought to the board and we formed a committee in February of 2020. I was a new member of the board and was excited that there was a call from our President for this to turn into something that as an organization we could stand by. I knew members of UPA would be just as excited as me for us to take this on. There were challenges, of course. We formed, like I said, in February 2020, just before COVID really struck the United States. Like everyone our lives had new schedules, new routines and greater responsibilities. Our organization meets once a year at a summer, I suppose, before everything hit. I was personally excited to, of course, meet with the board, but meeting to meet with other members of the committee and most importantly, to meet with members of UPA and listen to the unique challenges that they had that their university. We also formed at a time right before racial injustices were at the top of the national debate. Violence against people of color was not a new issue, but in many cases, instances of racial injustice. Often those involving law enforcement were brought to light, mainly because people had a camera in their pocket. For me personally, this reminded me what an important role I play and what an important role my camera plays in shaping perceptions and to shine light. I never thought that working at a small university I was creating great change or making a giant difference. But it reminded me that with my camera I can shine a light on those who are underrepresented and those who feel like they are either marginalized or don't fit in. It reminded me of the role that I play. Again, not just me and my camera, but the role that photographers, videographers, social media managers and designers all have a role and all have their hands on their fingerprints on shaping a perception of our institutions. I think the whole committee knew that. We hoped that this paper would help all of the members of UPA and hopefully to share it beyond that, to tell help, tell stories in a more compassionate manner to get the actual paper started. And we started with research and Amanda can tell you more about that. Thanks, Trevor. Hi, Al. I'm Amanda Pitts, senior photographer at Green Valley State University. Gvsu is located in southwest Michigan between the city of Grand Rapids and the Lakeshore. To get started on this paper, we did a bit of research to see what kind of related work was out there. Focused on inclusivity and diversity in higher ed photography. Several of us reached out to the librarians at our own colleges and universities to help us search out anything we could use to get started. We also asked our diversity, equity and inclusion professionals if they had any research recommendations in this area. Surprise. There are very, very few resources out there that were specifically about this. We gleaned what information we could from the resources available, but most things we found were outdated or about more general overall marketing in higher ed and most of the resources were not particularly useful. So how did we write this paper then? We decided to turn to the DTI experts that we work with at our schools. We wondered what do they notice about university photography and what are their views on how we can best improve our photography in the area of DTI? First, the committee brainstormed a bunch of questions, the answers to which we thought might provide useful information to form the basis of the paper. We then mirrored the questions down to five, which you can see here in this slide. Then those five questions were sent on to the DTI professionals at several universities. As the answers flowed in, we added them to a spreadsheet where we could look across all of the responses and spot similarities and differences. After we received a good number of responses, Cydney Scott from Boston University formed an outline based on the responses. There were many commonalities between the answers, using the answers from experts, our own personal experiences as university photographers and the resources we had found about marketing in higher education. We were able to come up with an outline that we felt covered. Most of the important points that should be made about inclusion and diversity in higher ed photography. The outline was broken up into categories or sections like Authenticity is paramount. Then we added the supporting quotes from our experts into those sections where they best fit. We reviewed and edited the outline through Google Docs, each committee member adding comments and suggestions. Once we were satisfied with the outline, we sent it back to our DTI experts to get their feedback. We received very positive and constructive responses and were able to work some of them into the revised outline and then into the final paper. John Sue Bishop, director of the Milton E Ford LGBT Resource Center at Grand Valley State University, had this to say about the finished paper. Best practices for inclusive and diverse photography in higher education is a thoughtful and critically important resource for universities and colleges. As we continue to both imagine the possibilities and reflects the realities of our diverse campus. Photography is an important tool we can leverage to live into our commitment of creating educational access. It is a reminder that diversity, equity and inclusion is all of our work. Now to speak a bit more about representation and university photography is Jen Bowes, Chief Diversity Officer, University of Alaska, Anchorage. Representation matters when prospective students, even as young as elementary school age, see university billboards and websites that contain images that represent their ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, ability, or any other aspect of their identity, they believe that they too, can achieve the dream. Inclusive images can provide hope to students from underrepresented backgrounds so that they can rise above the inequities and injustices they may experience in their lives. These images may often be the first societal representations students receive about what college means and who college is for. Although the photographs should always be authentic, even aspirational representation opens up a world of possible oddity that many may have thought was close to them. Hello, I'm Susan McSpadden, marketing photographer for Jackson County Community College in the Kansas City area. Based on the information we received from the D.A. professionals, we were able to break it into categories. These categories include authentic city going beyond skin color, being representative without overselling and using images in a timely and contextual way. Authenticity in photography means being truthful in representing the campus community in all areas. This builds trust in the messaging that institutions communicate to current and prospective students. Trust in your authenticity leads to more of a willingness to work with photographers and marketing departments. Photographers need to be able to capture diversity where it really is, rather than engineering diversity into an image. Our audience is savvy and can spot a produced image that is trying to force diverse narratives, also trying to achieve a false representation of diversity through software editing, such as darkening a skin tone or dropping a person of color into a scene is not worth the hit to an institution's credibility. The next category in the paper is about going beyond skin color, which includes quite a few subcategories, including stereotyping, misidentification, representing staff and faculty and services and spaces. I'm fortunate to work on a pretty racially diverse campus with a 35% nonwhite student population, so capturing representative races is the easy part. Other aspects of diversity are more challenging to capture because they can't readily be seen. Examples are sexual orientation, gender identity, mental and some physical disabilities and religion. To be inclusive in these areas, photographers need to seek out visual cues that they can use in their images, such as symbols and signage. A student wearing a cross or carrying a rosary, clothing with representative messaging and pins and stickers and patches on backpacks, water bottles and laptops can help visually broaden DTI beyond skin color. Stereotyping is probably the biggest offense in marketing photography. We've all seen examples of black students only shown as athletes and Asian students only shown as studious, showing those who are underrepresented and in broader roles demonstrates that the full potential of all students is recognized by your institution. Regarding misidentification marketing departments often rely on keywords within the metadata of image files to help find and choose photos for publication. The accuracy of the keyword descriptors is central to correctly reflecting diversity and showing knowledge and sensitivity to ethnic and racial differences. When choosing keywords for a photograph of a group of brown students of uncertain ethnicity, for example. It's best to use the umbrella terms diverse and diversity as descriptors rather than misidentifying a Honduran student as a mexican. We can broaden our DTI efforts beyond students by incorporating a diverse workforce in our publications. Prospective students often look to faculty and staff as models of their future, highlighting diverse faculty and staff who are achieving in their field illustrates the opportunities available to students, as well as showing that inclusion and diversity are valued beyond the classroom. The final subjective grade in this section is about services and spaces. Science for gender neutral bathrooms and dedicated breastfeeding rooms. Braille on building entrances, classrooms and elevators. Closed captioning on digital monitors and sign language interpreters can all visually signify inclusion. Often photographers, myself included, try to avoid including those things to create a cleaner composition. Crystal Williams is the associate provost of diversity and inclusion at Boston University. Made a really good statement. She said When there is a photograph of a leader making a speech and the ASL interpreter is either cropped out or more likely, the photograph that amidst the ESOL interpreter is chosen for publication. We're making a decision not based on the quality of the photograph, but on the content of the photograph. In this way, we're not normalizing inclusive actions, and those omissions have impact. Now I'm going to send it back to Trevor to talk about her being representative without overselling. An issue I struggled with was how to show representation without giving a false image of our campuses. At the time of writing this paper, I was working at a small university in rural Ohio. A school such as? Such as mine has unique challenges. If printed materials are purely representational of the racial makeup of our campuses, it does not communicate where a school might want to be in the atmosphere and opportunities available to students, staff and faculty of color done properly. It is not out of the question to show images in an aspirational context. If the school's goal is to attract more students of color, it's important to use images that communicate that those students have a place and can succeed on your campuses. When doing so, it must be done carefully. Images should be paired with census or other data so that prospective individuals can make informed decisions that are not based solely on visual imagery. We found a study that we cite in our paper that show most universities and colleges are using students of color in an overall representational manner in their marketing materials. If you're an institution that uses students of color in an aspirational context, it's important to remember that staff, prospective staff, students and faculty have tools outside of your marketing materials to make decisions if they don't already have a perception or knowledge of your campus, say they live out of town, for example. While a simple visit or an incredibly simple social media search can show another aspect of your universities from another perspective, it can be damaging if they find that marketing materials are in excess use over representing students students of color. As Matt pointed out earlier. Oftentimes money is very important if minority populations are small. A concise effort must be made to not overuse individ overuse imagery of those individuals. Sometimes it's not uncommon to grab a handful of students and take them all across campus to show different areas of campus life, just as you would for any student, regardless of their race. It's very important to not show the same individuals, especially students of color, in every aspect of campus life. It might be unusual to have a student who is, for example, the same student in a chem lab in a theater stage on in an interim Euroleague in a fraternity showing that one individual, again, regardless of race, can certainly be detrimental when telling the visual story of our campuses. I now want to give it back to Amanda, who's going to discuss the final section of our paper. Context and timeliness. Thank you, Trevor. Image is used in context and in a timely manner. Signal ongoing attention to inclusion and diversity. Your community members, especially your students, Notice when your college or university uses photos of the same underrepresented students or groups of people over and over again. This can signal to students and potential students a lack of diversity at the school or a lack of importance of diversity to the university. In addition, using photos of underrepresented students out of context can be insensitive and misleading. For example, you should not use a photo from an engineering event to represent the Department of Middle Eastern Studies because the students in the images are wearing hijabs. This creates a false narrative, will not go unnoticed by your students and can indicate that the university is not invested in learning about and embracing the details surrounding inclusion and diversity. So what can you do about this? Number one. Continually refresh and update your photography archive to include underrepresented students. Number two. Only allow use of and access to the last few years of campus imagery. Number three use photos and instruct others to use photos within the context that they were originally intended. Number four properly keyword and or caption photos so that when they are found by someone other than yourself in an image search, the context of the image is obvious to the user. And number five. Work with student organizations and clubs to identify a wide range of students, to participate in photo shoots, and also in order to capture imagery of authentic and timely student centered events on campus. Hi, my name is Sydney Scott and I'm a photographer at Boston University. A lot of really great conversations have come out of this paper. Those of us who worked on it feel that we are relative experts in the field of photography, but we are not experts in the field of DIY. It is why there are experts in the field of diversity, equity and inclusion. It is simply not a topic that you can grab a book and read it and suddenly say, Hey, I know everything. When we started this paper, the one thing we knew is that we didn't know what we didn't know or we knew what we didn't know. You know what I mean? We knew that there was a distinct possibility that throughout the process of making this paper, we were going to miss something. At Boston University, I was in a meeting with a group of designers. I had presented the paper to them and we were having a conversation about it. And one designer said, What type of photo do you recommend we use to represent a person who is neurodiverse? And I was stumped. And it's what makes me so happy about this paper is that it's gotten the conversation started. And also, I am taking notes and my colleagues are taking notes about ways in which we can improve upon the paper in its 2.0 version. I went back to the members of the UPA and I asked them that designer's question. I said, I'm stumped. What do you think? Quite a few people responded, but one member in particular had a question, hadn't had an answer that I thought was really great. And it was. He said, How about an assistance dog or an emotional support animal? And I thought, Well, that's brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant. That's a great solution to that. If you are a person who is neurodiverse and you see a photo of an assistance dog in a pamphlet from a university, you're considering going to. That's an indication that you are welcome here and accommodations will be made for you. Now, your university may not give you a dog, but if you have an assistance dog, your dog is also welcome. And any other accommodations that you need to be successful at your college at the end of this video, a group of us are going to get together and talk about some of the questions that have arisen since our paper has been released. So we hope that you continue to learn more through that conversation. Hey, you ready? It's nice to see everybody. This is fun. We're going to talk about our paper and things that have come up since we wrote it. I'm Cydney Scott. I work at Boston University. Should we just jump right in? Yeah, let's do it. So one of the first things that comes up over and over again is key wording and there's sort of there's sort of a discussion that moves around the topic and everybody has different opinions and different techniques on how they handle it and sort of different changes depending on your university. At Boston University, for example, we don't use the word diversity at all. And in our paper we touch on that a little bit. Does anybody want to talk about sort of how we covered in the paper or some of the things we talked about in the paper or some of the ways we've talked about it moving forward and diggers? Well, the biggest thing in the paper that we kind of stressed was if you don't know, don't guess and don't don't generalize. If you can help it. If you know for sure that it was an event of Asian-American students and they identified themselves that way, then I think that's fine to keyword that that way. But if it's an event of mixed ethnicities, I wouldn't begin to try and specify because you risk leaving someone out or misidentifying someone. It's just safer not to not to go that route. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I think self identifying is a huge part. Susan That if it's a club you can definitely put the club that hosted it and that's a clue to what was going on. But you nailed it. Yeah. You don't want to misidentify. Yeah. And often your captions are going to be doing the key wording for you, which is great because you're unless you're captioning completely. Wrong. You're going to be keyword ing those individuals correctly, especially if it's relevant to the topic that you're covering. So, so is anybody changed how their key wording either publicly or privately, anybody personally grew uncomfortable singling out what I felt was singling out people using keyword diversity as aspirational as it was, as good a goal as it was to assist in promoting diversity. I personally grew uncomfortable with it many years ago and just quietly stopped doing it on my own again, leading leaving it to groups who've identified themselves as and or the Asian-American Student Association events such and such. And I believe that that is doing an adequate job of it as a designer is looking for students who aren't the traditional students that that Notre Dame has always attracted. I think those types of caption information. I think that that doesn't adequate job. So there's been no formal change of policy because we had no formal policy to begin with. Right. So that's actually an interesting point, Matt, that key wording has been around, I don't know what, ten years, 15 years, I don't know, four for us that do it. It's kind of just part of what we do. But was there an official keyword list? Is there a poll of the group here who had an official keyword list? Anybody know it kind of made it up as you went, right? Mm hmm. Well, it's interesting that something so fundamental to how we search for images and how they will be identified, possibly forever, was not that big a deal when it first started. Kind of interesting. I almost sort of feel, too, that when it comes to for designers and obviously this isn't my area, so whether it's false or not remains to be seen. But I know that with our designers, they will often be searching for like the activities or the colleges that they need, like, you know, College of Arts and Sciences, socializing library, and then they'll see what comes up. And it almost sort of feels like you're going to get an accurate representation. And when you're doing those keyword searches anyway, you know, but if you're if you are doing aspirational designing in that moment, then maybe it becomes a little bit trickier and you need to dig a little bit more. But none of that, of course, speaks to our point in the paper of being overly aspirational or like, like walking that line of aspirational and and an honest or what's the correct word that we use Authenticity. Thank you. Authentic. Yeah. So I think though, using the word diversity can be kind of tricky too. I know we've talked before about how different universities use it in different ways, and it could mean very different things from one university to another, even from one person to another. What they think that that means. For instance, like if if I'm looking for diversity in an image, what does that mean? Does it mean that it just doesn't have, you know, all females in it? Does it mean that it has different ethnic groups in it? What does what does that mean, really? So I think that's important that if you are going to use that, you know why you're using it, you know, within your own university and department. That was one of the reasons why I grew uncomfortable using it, because I realized that diversity means so much more than just gender or skin color. And and I couldn't. What's just different than me equals diverse. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Right. So so it's interesting is key wording is something that we do you know, we'll add a keyword or list of keywords to images for people to find later. Now who are looking for those images, you know, at least in the role, I mean, it could be the public relations or communications department or the graphic designers or the web designers. So there's an external audience to what we're creating that are looking for things. Now, I know we've had some discussions with designers who are like, Oh, I need to know exactly. I need to find that because there's seeing the publication with 13 photos and seeing diversity throughout the entire thing. So how do we help them see diversity in the correct way? Oh. That's a good question. I mean, you know, they at least what I was hearing from some of the other groups was they want to search for a particular type of person, you know, be it a male or female. And I'm like, well, what if you're not identifying? How do you. Yeah, it's very real. So how do we help out? You know what? Maybe I'm asking too big a question here. I think the first thing is I kind of put the responsibility on myself if I previously worked at a predominantly white university. So it's making sure that when I'm outside capturing images that I'm showing or that I'm supplying our designers and and others with images that can be with good images that show a variety of students. So the first thing I do, I know, Cydney, you mentioned that sometimes people have to do a little bit of digging to find images if they're looking for like a club or a group or anything like that. So the first thing I try to do is make sure that I'm coming back with images that show the good images, that show the broad range of people at our university. Is that kind of what you're talking about on. Yeah, exactly. You know, or how do you help them look for that good image without just, you know, Google a spoiled a saw. You can type in a crazy sentence and Google and you'll it'll narrow it down right to exactly what you want. And I think everybody that's looking at her photos wants that you know they would like to hit all the checkboxes You know a bald male with slightly reddish skin. You know, it's it's crazy. But, you know, Google has spoiled us and instead, like, start looking for photos and looking for good stories to represent your college adequately or authentically. Absolutely. Because because also, if you're if you're always searching for a specific type of person, then you're running into tokenizing that person, which is the whole point of the paper is to not be doing that. I told a story a while ago about how I was. I went into a space on campus where students were studying and and there was an African-American student and then 30 other white students. And I specifically did not photograph that African-American student because they didn't happen to be in a scenario that was esthetically interesting, like they weren't composed in the space in a way that was interesting. They weren't sitting in a space that was architecturally interesting. They weren't interacting with a student that was interesting. And so this sort of old mindset of like forget diversity at all costs just doesn't I just don't do it. I don't know. But that's yeah, yeah. So, you know, we've we've talked about gender, we've talked about skin tone. What other areas of that have come up. Yeah. So. So, so appearance is a good one which, which is a ridiculous word even used because it feels so generalized. But we had a really interesting conversation among the upper when to when a member shot a collection of photos of people with really brightly colored hair and they got pushback from their university about how we don't want to run pictures of people with bright hair. Well, that's like a thing. That's like a thing. Now. People are like doing bright hair. It's just the way it is. And it always goes back to if you want to have diversity at your university, you want potential students to look at your university, documentation, websites and so forth and see themselves in it. And if you're not photographing people as they are today in whatever shape they are, they don't have to be skinny. It's like that's not normal all the time. Now. That's not like the best thing ever. We need the variety among us as humans, and so that needs to be featured in our work and that needs to be featured in our promotional material, whether it's bright hair or like crazy piercings or tattoos, because lots of people have tattoos now and the idea of like, don't show people with tattoos, well, then you're not showing people because that's how that's that's people that's what we look like. We have tattoos, we have piercings, we have bright hair, and we come in all shapes and sizes. So that was an it. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. It's not only a reflection of diversity, but it's just a reflection of documenting that the times and the trends of the time. So you're not doing your job reflecting the, you know, 2020s. If you're not showing some of those things. Cause when people look back and know kind of some history around what was what was hot and hip and trendy during that time and don't see that, they're going to wonder, wait a minute, what's going on here? So, you know, it's it's part of our responsibility to show those things, to reflect where we are in our history. Yeah. A few years ago season, we had our 50th anniversary of the college and so we're going back to the old images and the ones that everybody loved or the graduation photos with the really short mini skirts. Everybody thought that was, Oh my goodness, can you believe did you see? And it was like today. I mean, I think it got back. Oh, don't show that. That's a little too out there. But you're absolutely right. When you look back at it, you're like, wow, that's what it was like then. And the people that were still around were like, Oh, yeah, that is what it was. You have to shoot what is the way it is? Because you don't know. I mean, I don't think people in the seventies knew that their Bellbottom jeans were going to be a defining thing about the seventies until 20 years later. It's the same thing now. If you don't shoot the bright colored hair and different things like that 20 or 30 years down the road, when people say, Oh, I remember the 2020s when everybody's hair was bright, you know, it's just. I know, I know all of us have photos of masks. You know, early in the pandemic, we were trying to avoid that because we thought it was going to last two weeks. And we didn't we didn't need those images. We wouldn't need those images. But Susan, especially and I know all of you have done a fantastic job of covering of covering what today is like. And in 10 to 15 years, people are going to look back at those images because they want to see what it was like. Yeah. And I think even in the beginning of this presentation, Matt talked about you have to go back and find images where you saw what Notre Dame was like. You know, And I mean, what year was that? Matt I remember eighties, you know, it was it was very different when I was a student. Yeah. It was not a diverse place. And 20 years before I was a student, it was even less diverse. It was all male. Yeah, Yeah. So those things are important that we be honest about who we are at that point, which is going to Sidney's point about the bride hair. The other thing I think is really critical is a good story is just a good story. It doesn't matter who that person is. You identify with what the story is about, no matter if it's male, female, you know, brown, whatever. It's just a good story. And that's what we should be tackling. Sure, that's true. I mean, and we have to keep in mind, too, that everybody has a story. So don't stay in your comfort zone of of covering the good stories of the people that that are around you, you know, push out and find those stories from outside of your comfort zone and you you go all different areas. Everybody's got a story. And they don't have to be the same age. That's the other thing we talked about earlier. It's not, you know, not all college. I was going to see kids. See, I was about to say not all college kids, not all college students are 18 to 21 years old and more. That's more and more the case. There's not necessarily a traditional college age group anymore. I mean, maybe it's probably more so the case of four year colleges still, but even four year colleges are branching out As far as age as people reevaluate their career paths and switched gears and all that. Several of us are community college photographers, myself and Glen. And, you know, we're all over the map as far as generations go, which is great. I mean, I think it helps. It helps everybody if you've got a classroom that has a 50 or 60 year old mixed in with a bunch of 18 year olds, they learn from each other and help each other. And to be able to show that is is another piece of the puzzle. Mm hmm. Exactly. And I bet. They're bound to have amazing stories, too. But, you know, I'm thinking I have to, like, write that down. In a filter student. With a great story that defaults. I think back before the pandemic, I photographed a nursing student who had just given birth to her first or second child. And the college president is walking down the hallway and sees a father holding this newborn child. And she's like, Why are you? This doesn't seem normal. What's going on is like, Oh, my wife's taking her final exam or an exam for nursing, and I'm watching the baby while she does enter. And when she's done, she'll come out. And, you know, of course, president's like, Give me your name, phone number. You know what? You have to do a story about this and you just you go, wow, this is, you know, truly an amazing place. People still in education at very difficult times in their life or pressing on now to complete a program. So those great stories are out there. And so you find those people identify that absolutely wonderful. One of the other things that has come up is and I think this is such a tricky question, is how do you get the higher ups or even the designers to listen to the topics of this paper and take it to heart? I got really lucky where we had a meeting where the head of Creative Services basically had me present the paper and all of the designers were there and there was a big conversation about it and it was super interesting and I was sort of surprised, even though I shouldn't be surprised that that's what we're doing it for. We're doing it to have these conversations and make the topic in the forefront of people's minds when they're working on marketing for their university. So how do we do that? How do we like, advise people to get the conversation started? That's absolutely fantastic. I know in the past it's been difficult and some of the situations that I've been in in that, you know, let's say, for example, where a designer knows that they're looking for diversity in that image. So I think the best thing to do is just kind of have those conversations sounds like that you're having where you are sitting, which is absolutely fantastic. If I have been in the past, I been sent to say, you know, a culinary class, when I know that when I find out later that the designer was specifically looking for these students to increase the aspirational diversity in our printed images, that, you know, having that conversation with me beforehand is going to pay instead of just sending me to a classroom or telling me to photograph every student with the hopes that I come back with, with a student that fills the checkbox or whatever they're trying to accomplish. So as long as that's coming from a good place, as long as that's, you know, we're still documenting the rest of the class and everything like that, as we should be just so we can have those images. I don't think there anything wrong with having a conversation within the office of saying, Hey, we need to increase diversity in our images and these things. So how can we go about doing that in an authentic way? And we're still documenting of the university and everything like that. And then it's not over the top. And every single photo shoot that you go on. Exactly that. That pressure or that like underlining thing of, Oh, by the way, while you're there. Exactly. Me you're absolutely right with your comment earlier about you know if if we're not going for tokenism over the top if there is not a good photo, if there is not a good photo of a student of color that doesn't work out, we're just not going to shoot that photo. You're not going to come back with it just because there's one student of color. And we need to have make sure that we're filling in those those checkboxes, for lack of a better term. Yeah. So the goal of proposing the paper was to start conversations on campuses and to remind people that the photographers are not the last person who should be in the conversation. They're among the first people who should be in the conversation. So simply by virtue of having this paper, I think we're advancing the visibility of photographers in this role, being thinkers and leaders in these questions. Yeah, So I hope so. So, Amanda, I know you had some of the diversity folks on your campus weighed in on the paper. They're quoted in it. Can you talk about their response to the paper, you know, to what Trevor is talking about? How do we have that conversation moving up? I haven't actually had a lot of conversations with them about it, but the responses that I did receive have been positive. And another thing that we are planning on doing on our campus is to have like a program related to this paper. So one of the writers in my department and I are planning on doing like a little workshop and we'll show like our presentation and show the paper and just kind of talk to other people who are communication specialists within our university about how they can think about these kinds of things as they're going about their day to day jobs. Excellent. So as if you were so who would say that's a silly question? Who would say you've got diversity nailed down at your university, your perfect raise your hand? Exactly. I think this is something that we'll all be working on, and that's good to be working on it, which means we'll look back and see where we stumbled it also, we can look and see where we're excelling. So I think that's part of the conversation. You know, Trevor talked about having sometimes a difficult conversation saying, say what things are. Especially. You're absolutely right, Glenn. It's an ongoing process. We can have this conversation and let's pretend that we solved it today. But there are going to be things down the road that were not. Now, I know there are certain subject matters and, you know, groups of people that haven't been identified in the paper that we're thinking about today and things like that. Exactly which is, you know, when you come back to it, you're like, oh, we need to address that, which we will publish updated versions of this paper as we get more input from other photographers, from other professionals in higher ed in the future. Yeah, I really, I really love that. It's almost like a living document that it's something that's going to be morphing as we're learning because it's not. It's just you can't read a book and then be like, okay, I'm all done. I got it. It's all straight. Now. That's not that's. Not. How it works. There's like a long that's why we talk to experts. They they like, studied it and they, you know, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's an ever evolving topic which, you know, makes fun and a lot of ways that we can continue to learn and grow and advance. And you know, when, you know, when you know more, you do better. And that's kind of part of the goal of this whole thing. And there will be, like Glenn said, there will be a version two and a version three and four. And that's great. That's good. That's we've got a fantastic foundation and starting point, but it's always going to need something more as as we go. And I also think we should mention that we're we're open the group that's here to have people this question send us an email, ask things or bring up points that we missed. For us to think we have it all, we don't. We want to be better, so feel free to reach out to us. Let us know. Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. All right. Well, I'd like to say we solved all the problems, but I know we have, and but I'm grateful to this group, as in the presentation earlier find out, this group really came together well and I think produce something that we can all be proud of. Each of our colleges and universities are unique. How we display and portray diversity, we'll be diverse itself. This paper was designed to be a starting point for discussion and how to balance authenticity and aspirational goals of diversity, equity and inclusion. The paper can be found at upa dot org to download, and I want to thank the team members and case for this opportunity. Thank you.

Inclusive and Diverse Photography

Higher Education

Accurate Representation

Challenges of Portraying Diversity

Authenticity in Photography

Tokenism and Engineering Diversity

Representation of Ethnicities

Showing a Diverse Range of Stories

Key Wording and Misidentification