Department of Cinema and Media Studies
Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accountability, and Justice Statement
10 March 2025
Introduction
In the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, the issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, accountability, and justice, (IDEAJ) are vital to the pursuit of our broader academic mission. We believe that our future success depends on strengthening each of these five elements, incorporating justice and accountability as a measure of ensuring that we go beyond merely diversifying our faculty and student body. Crucial to this development are the promotion of these elements as central tenets of our work, our teaching, and our department. We strive to promote and embody these issues by recognizing and celebrating the wide array of identities and experiences in our community (inclusion); creating welcoming, respectful and supportive working environments (diversity); establishing fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for members of our community (equity and justice); and taking responsibility for our actions, continuously evaluating our progress, and holding ourselves accountable to our priorities of inclusion, diversity, and equity (accountability).
Our discipline fundamentally depends upon the study of ethnically, culturally, racially, and temporally diverse cinemas and media, in languages and from cultures from across the globe. Much of what we study and teach addresses the ongoing tensions between structures of power and social groups that seek greater equity and representation, aiming to cultivate and promote a specific understanding of media, technology, race, and inclusivity as interdisciplinary and fundamentally connected facets.
The following summary of our department’s ongoing efforts and next steps is meant as a living document, the purpose of which is to detail our commitment to and prioritization of issues of diversity, equity, accountability, and inclusion.
The current (2024-2025) chair of CMS’s Diversity Committee is Golden M. Owens.
Courses
The Cinema and Media Studies department has an undergraduate major, a fully-funded Master of Arts program, and a fully-funded PhD program. From the department’s inception, we have maintained a strong curriculum in the theoretical, analytical, and historical approaches of film and television genres in a global setting.
The Cinema and Media Studies Program offers three core courses which satisfy UW’s Diversity (DIV) requirement: CMS 275: Perspectives on Visual Culture: Sex, Race and Power, CMS 321: Oppositional Cinema/Media, and CMS 322: Race, Representation, and Television). In addition, our faculty actively and intentionally incorporates diversity into existing courses that are not DIV-specific: courses like CMS 480 (Senior Capstone) have allowed for specializations such as Race and Science Fiction, Race and/as Technology, and Media, Activism and the Emotions, while CMS 272 (Perspectives on Film: Genre) has produced specialized courses on South Asian Cinemas and Martial Arts Film. The department also recently instated a Departmental Content Warning explicitly for purposes of inclusion, equity, and accountability, enabling students in our courses to advise themselves of content that may be triggering and to engage in open dialogue with faculty about said content. Finally, we enable our graduate students to teach their own classes in CMS, which has additionally produced racially, ethnically, culturally, temporally, and media diverse courses.
Faculty
Our core and adjunct faculty include specialists in Asian, West European, East European, North American, Latin American, and transnational cinema, television, and new and digital media. Moreover, our faculty research, scholarship, and teaching are invested in questions of class, sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and ableness across cinema, television, and digital media. Many faculty incorporate a decolonial lens, striving to teach and do research in a manner that decenters colonial logics and aims to create more just modes of thinking. When teaching, even in courses that are not diversity (DIV) specific, our faculty incorporate media and readings that are actively oriented toward IDEAJ, including course materials and examples which examine feminism, race and ethnicity, environmentalism, queerness, and neurodiversity. Faculty also actively engage in practices such as “ungrading” (providing grade-free assignments, qualitative feedback, peer review, and self-assessment); promote close reading as a method that interfaces with the social, political, and material cultures that produce media; closely examine the capacity of cinema and media traditions in the Global South to make us question the supposed universality of media; engage with media that expands upon and differs from the canonical line-up of cinema; and encourage students to be conscious of and critical of the unjust society in which we live. Since 2019, we have hired three new faculty whose scholarship, teaching and research have enhanced these efforts, bringing new perspectives on new media, race, technology, surveillance, capitalism, labor, and feminist media theory. These hires have expanded the capacity of the department to engage with media in a broader and more complex manner, enabling us to further address our ever-evolving media landscape and its relationship to/representation of race, gender, and other IDEAJ categories. We plan to continue making such hires as the department moves forward.
What Has Changed
In addition to hiring new faculty and implementing new courses that expand and embody our commitment to diversity, justice, equity, inclusion, and accountability, the CMS department has made the following changes:
- Offering diversity (DIV) courses every academic year,
- Creating opportunities for our PhD students to present works in progress,
- Hosting community building events for undergraduate and graduate students,
- Moderating film events and talks in collaboration with the Office of Public Lectures and the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF),
- Holding Town Hall meetings with students to discuss ways the department can continue improving and adapting
What Our Department Brings to the UW
Beyond simply providing students with historical, theoretical, and analytical knowledge on film and media, the CMS department fosters critical thinking and analysis, trains students in performing individual research and prepares students for careers in a wide range of fields and expertises. Our undergraduate majors have gone on to work in fields including but not limited to Newsroom Assignment Editing, Video Game Research, TV Production Design, Media Writing, Associate Account Strategy, Literary Management, Web Editing, Administrative Coordination, Public Relations, Marketing, UX, and Art Administration. These types of work demonstrate the interdisciplinary and transferrable skills that our program provides to our undergraduate majors.
Additionally, we teach our graduate and undergraduate students to have a better understanding of what it means to be citizens in a society divided by race, class, and other such formations.
Moving forward, we aim to speak with undergraduate students who seek skills-based minors about the skills our department provides, as they can be applied to multiple job and career fields within and beyond film and media. We also plan to continue mentoring our graduate students in their research, teaching, and service as they prepare for postgraduate careers, ensuring that their work thinks critically about the common good so as to make their work more accessible and ethical.
Next Steps
We have successfully achieved several of our previous goals originally proposed in 2016, including creating courses that meet the University’s diversity (DIV) general education goal, adopting best practices for diversity hiring and faculty recruitment, and regular meetings to discuss and assess our departmental efforts and plans regarding diversity, equity and inclusion. In addition to those ongoing efforts, we commit ourselves to:
- offering diversity (DIV) courses every academic year, and increasing the number of DIV courses taught in the department.
- asking that faculty strengthen the components of their courses which challenge the cisheteropatriarchy. This may include inviting guest speakers to courses.
- hosting annual (or more frequent) events, including visiting speakers, colloquia, and symposia, that address historic and contemporary inequities, structures of power, and marginality.
- asking that faculty assess their contributions to IDEAJ as part of annual merit review.
- continuing to recruit, mentor and retain members of underrepresented U.S. minority groups to our faculty and student body.
- continuing to recruit, mentor and retain members of global communities to our faculty and student body.
- working with the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and continuing to consult with the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity and Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program.
- creating a charter for our Diversity Committee, detailing our committee mandates, responsibilities, and goals for each academic year
- continuing to implement the recommendations of the Class C Senate “Resolution Concerning Equity, Access and Inclusion in Hiring” (adopted January 29, 2015), including the UW Advance initiative on interrupting bias in the search process, as well as the tool kit on best hiring practices recently published by the Office of Faculty Advancement.
- implementing workshops and training offered by UW on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- continuing to ensure that our undergraduate and graduate students are aware of on-campus resources and opportunities.
- brainstorming to discuss what else our department can do to promote and provide resources for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accountability.
- assessing our progress at regular intervals; we commit ourselves to revisiting and updating this diversity statement on an annual basis.
Some IDEAJ Resources at the University of Washington
Diversity at the University of Washington
Office of Minority Affairs
Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center
Native Life and Tribal Relations Office
Tri-Campus Race & Equity Initiative
Disability Resources for Students
Office of Graduate Student Equity(formerly the Graduate Opportunities & Minority Achievement Program)
Diversity Funding Opportunities
Alene Morris Women's Center
Q Center
Odegaard Writing & Research Center
Recommended Reads for Equity
Resisting Racism Library Guide
Unite UW Cultural Exchange Program
UW Bias Incident Reporting
Title IX at UW
UW Center for Teaching and Learning
Inclusivity and Community Teaching Resources
Livewell (formerly Student Health and Wellness)
CMS IDEAJ Statement 2025 (PDF)