Taking Action
Doctoral student Karina Sembe helps guide the CAS Diversity and Inclusion Action Team
When Karina Sembe (GRS’25) arrived at BU, she already had a master’s degree and a PhD. Now a candidate for her second PhD, in Romance studies, she’s researching power, freedom, and sovereignty through the lens of colonization and mobility of the African diaspora in the Americas.
Sembe had another interest as well. Born in Ukraine to a Cameroonian father and Ukrainian mother, she wanted to be part of one of the college’s newest initiatives, the Diversity and Inclusion Action Team.
“I think that there’s still a lot of formality when it comes to understanding concepts such as inclusivity and diversity,” says Sembe, who is helping to guide the team. “There’s not a lot of nuance and room for courageous conversations and not a lot of recognition of one’s own implicit biases.” As one of two graduate students on the team, she has spent the past two years trying to create more room for those conversations.
She spoke with arts&sciences about the team’s work.
a&s: What has the team done in its first two years?
Karina Sembe: We’ve reviewed diversity statements across departments and programs, to see how people understand diversity, equity, and inclusion; we talked to [people] to see what needs to be done, what support they expect or need or are not getting; and, with the Center for Teaching & Learning, we launched the Inclusive Pedagogy Institute.
What did your diversity statement reviews produce?
It depends on the department and the program because what is understood by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “inclusivity and accessibility” is very different for different departments. What constitutes diversity for a Latin American studies department might not be what constitutes diversity for a biology department. What the action team does is provide an opportunity for liaising. Whoever has specific requests can come to us.
What was the goal of the institute?
It goes deeper into what inclusivity means—accessibility, universal classroom design, and implicit biases. The institute creates a great environment for people to form learning communities and form action communities. Once we recognize our own biases and learn to live with them—not necessarily even change them, but just acknowledge them and live with them and make room for other people’s shortcomings and biases—this is where real diversity and inclusion starts.