Jaya Gajparia: Listening, learning and acting on feedback to improve racial and ethnic representation at the ACCESS Annual Assembly

“I am not an EDI person!” I exclaimed in a call with a potential invitee who I believe will not only enrich conversations at the ACCESS Assembly 2025 but is someone I would love to meet and get to know. She laughs, and soon responds, “I know what you mean”.

Hello, I am Jaya. I am an ACCESS Leadership College Fellow. 20 of us were selected through a competitive process as having qualities that identify us as emerging leaders in environmental social sciences across academia, government, NGOs, and industry. The ACCESS Leadership College Fellows get to attend annual funded retreats that provide interdisciplinary training, expert coaching, and collaborative opportunities focused on climate, environment, and social science leadership. I am also an ACCESS Flex Fund round 1 award holder for a project on decolonising the UK conservation and environmental sectors. And now, in addition, I am freelancing with the ACCESS team to help address a common problem: where are all of the black and brown people in environmental work?

Apparently “we” don’t do sustainability, or choose degrees related to the environment! I kid you not, I was told this at a conference by a white male professor from a Russell group university. He went on to say [paraphrasing] “they” [referring to students of colour] “choose degrees that can make them the most money [referring to degrees in business studies or engineering], so I am not sure how we can diversify the sector”. Stunned to silence, the exchange was overheard by some of the conference organisers and, once we broke for coffee, they pulled me aside to apologise and enquire if I was ok.

I often find myself in situations where I am having to say the hard stuff that others in the room may be thinking but not saying. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like being that person and in fact, before entering a space I have a talk with myself about not saying anything. But, more often than not, my hand throws itself up into the air to contribute, and before my brain can register what I have done, the words are spilling out of my mouth in an open forum of very accomplished, mainly white, leaders from academia, and the public and the charity sectors.

My contribution is always offered with respect, I am not disrupting to simply disrupt, but I deeply believe that there are talented experts of colour who are far more accomplished than me that should also be in the room – so where are they and why aren’t they there? Surely, science is far better with diverse people collaborating?

Getting back to my opener, I’m not an EDI person. EDI work focuses on shifting cultures, policies, and practices within institutions or organisations or teams to foster environments where people feel included, respected, and are treated equitably. It covers a wide range of areas including gender, disability, class, sexuality, race, ethnicity and more, often through an intersectional lens.

My own focus has centred most closely on racial and ethnic diversity not because other areas are less important, but because this is where I see the most urgent gaps in the spaces I move through, and it’s where I feel I can contribute most meaningfully. I also recognise that I don’t show up in these spaces as just one thing. I am a woman, a person of colour, a mother, a Londoner, a social scientist, and a first-generation university student with working-class roots. These parts of who I am shape how I experience the world and, in turn, how I do my work. That said, no matter what I do to distance myself from EDI work professionally, I am pulled right back into it in one way or another.

I believe EDI work is critical and incredibly important but, unfortunately, it continues to be undervalued and underpaid. For me, it just seems too obvious for a brown woman of colour with caring responsibilities to be championing EDI.

Championing EDI can be both challenging and rewarding. It demands emotional labour, navigating bureaucracy, pushing back against tokenism, and maintaining resilience in the face of resistance. In addition to this, when organisations are faced with financial crises, EDI budgets are often the first to be withdrawn. What message does this send out?

Attendees at the ACCESS Annual Assembly 2024

In 2024, I was asked to participate in the ACCESS Assembly at the University of Exeter. It was my first time visiting the campus even though I had been involved with the ACCESS team for a few years by that point. How different the campus is to a London institution! You see, all my experiences of higher education as a student and employee have been on London campuses, but at Exeter, surrounded by green spaces against a rural back drop, I was impressed. For a cheeky minute I quietly entertained the thought of what it would be like to live and work there, but I was quickly distracted by playing the ‘spot the black, brown person’ game. I assume many of us do this – take stock of our surroundings, to evaluate a sense of self in a new place and quickly put an end to imagining ‘what if’. Although I was not surprised at the lack of racial diversity and I didn’t expect the same level of London diversity, belonging is still a great preoccupation of mine, which quite frankly is exhausting and something I wish I didn’t think about.

In 2024, I contributed to the Assembly in a number of different ways: attending as a representative of the ACCESS Leadership College Fellows; presenting my Flex Fund research; and being part of a knowledge exchange panel. Standing at the front of the full lecture theatre, I had one of those moments where I went off script and the words came tumbling out – I found myself commenting on the lack of racially and ethnically diverse experts in attendance.

Dr Jaya Gajparia discussing her Flex Fund Round 1 project on decolonising the conservation & environmental sectors at the 2024 Annual Assembly

Once the session had finished and we broke for tea and cake, several delegates came over to congratulate me for ‘calling it out’. Even though this should have felt affirming it did not feel good; I found myself batting away the emotions as my eyes welled up.

I’m at odds even sharing this bit, this bit about feeling emotional, because what does this say about me?! To feel completely alone in an overwhelmingly white-people space among many highly accomplished academic thinkers – all I wanted was the ground to open up and swallow me whole. I was far away from home. I wanted London, which in that moment felt like a comfort blanket I had accidentally left behind. For me, London is more than this loud crazy expensive city, it’s also where the collective ‘we’, a melting pot of cultures and communities, live. Neighbourhoods, like my home in Wembley, where restaurants aren’t fancy or appropriating food from faraway lands, but instead, serving food made by and for the locals… I am not sure how I have landed on food.

Once home, I thought about what I was carrying silently and decided it wasn’t my burden alone, so I shared my thoughts with Professor Saffron O’Neill  one of the co-investigators and the lead for the Leadership College Fellowship. The leadership team have always acknowledged the lack of ethnic and racial diversity on the project, which also extends to participation in events and in partnerships they have with researchers, academics and policymakers. In fact, the feedback from the 2024 Annual Assembly highlighted the lack of racial and ethnic diversity as a key challenge. This year, I’ll be working alongside the evaluation team to review the feedback from the 2025 Assembly. I’m genuinely curious to see what the findings will reveal about this year’s Assembly.

Early in 2025, we began advancing conversations on how I might join the team to advise and shape the remaining years of the ACCESS project to address the EDI areas of concern. The team were ready to move from talking and acknowledging to finding the resource to create change and in particular to tackle the lack of ethnic and racial diversity at the Annual Assembly. I soon took on a role as a freelance advisor/researcher/ change maker/ critical friend and sought to identify people of colour with relevant expertise to invite to the next Assembly.

Some of the leadership team members rightly identified the tensions between trying to address the lack of racial and ethnic diversity at the Assembly and being tokenistic. Although I understand these tensions, I believe we need to start the work and hold our hands up if we get it wrong. Just because I am a brown woman, I don’t have all the answers!

In putting together the list of potential invitees, I drew primarily on my personal networks and targeted web searches, which were then discussed with Professor Patrick Devine-Wright, the Director of ACCESS  before invitations were sent. I recognise this was a pragmatic approach under time constraints and by no means perfect, but it was a necessary first step. I began having open and honest conversations with potential delegates, sharing a simplified version of how I arrived at doing this work. The responses I received were incredibly positive, with many thanking me for working to ensure ethnic and racial diversity was addressed. This year’s Assembly (taking place on 18-19 June) will have racially diverse experts in attendance, both as speakers and delegates.

It is important for me to say, as I end, that I have not overcome the tensions I feel about doing EDI work. I worry about the cost to my academic career. Am I being seen less and less as a social scientist and emerging leader in higher education, and more for what I represent, a fixer of all things EDI? In these moments, I question whether the contribution to knowledge and expertise that I bring is being overlooked for what I represent. As I try to separate these parts of myself, the reality is the knowledge I bring is inseparable from what I represent, my lived experiences of the world and how I exist have informed what and how I do research. The knowledge I carry is shaped by my lived experience, by how I move through the world and how the world responds to me.

In the end I don’t expect these tensions to be resolved any time soon. EDI-related labour comes with a hidden cost, one that is often unacknowledged, even as it is continually demanded. I expect my position and thinking about this will shift and change over time as most things do, with perspective I might see something I don’t right now. And this, I know is okay