Response to Diversity in a Digital World

Diversity In A Digital World Utilizes General Dei Skills

Due to the Cycle of Social Distance (Cartwright & Reeves, 2018) significant personal work must be undertaken to disrupt said cycle through meaningful engagement with DEI work. The Cycle of Social Distance (Cartwright & Reeves, 2018) adapted from Bucher’s (2014) work on positionality, is the common set of circumstances that leads to the development of identities that keep us “insulated” from those we, for any number of reasons, see as “outsiders”; this is analogous to Moral Panic Theory (Cohen, 1972) and the identification of ‘folk devils’. As Bucher (2104) explains, the process is continuous and nonlinear, though it is discussed linearly for the purposes of this discussion. The effect of the Cycle of Social Distance is succinctly explained by DiAngelo (2018): “if I am not aware of the barriers you face, then I won’t see them, much less be motivated to remove them. Nor will I be motivated to remove the barriers if they provide an advantage to which I feel entitled” (p. xiii).

Figure 1.

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Adapted from Bucher, 2014

Each person is born in a particular time, place, and body; these embodied and cultural experiences create our positionality, or universal perspective. As with all perspectives, they are naturally bounded by a range of intrinsic and extrinsic elements. We can only see what we can see; we can only know what we can know.