Equality and Diversity
Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion
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Equal opportunities and its allied concepts, including inequality, inequity, disadvantage, diversity, and inclusion, have been studied extensively across all disciplines of social sciences and humanities. The promulgation of interest in the field of inequality owes much to the awareness that was brought about by the earlier human and civil rights and feminist movements which have engendered legal and social reforms that provide protections against unfair forms of discrimination. The advent of legal and social reforms in the field, as well as the broadening of the theory of equal opportunities to include a wider range of inequalities based on sex, race, disability status, age, sexual orientation, marital status, nationality and social class have all contributed to the general growth of scholarly interest in the field. EDI engages with this interest, offering a platform for critical and rigorous exploration of equal opportunities concerns including gender, ethnicity, class, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion, as well as other nascent and incipient forms of inequalities in the context of society, organisations and work.
It is important to acknowledge that there are some dichotomies between the reality and rhetoric of equal opportunities, the forms of practitioner and the academic knowledge in the field, scholarly approaches to equal opportunities across disciplines of social sciences and humanities, as well as their use of concepts and methods in order to uncover inequalities, and offer strategies for change towards equality of opportunity, valuing of diversity or pursuit of social inclusion. Further, there is a widening of the gap between studies that adopt micro-agentic, meso-institutional and macro-national approaches to the study of equal opportunities. In this context, the journal, EDI, seeks to serve as a proverbial bridge across the spectrum of scholarly research which is allied with equal opportunities, and to facilitate development of the academic field, by establishing a dialogue across its methodological, theoretical, applied and philosophical silos. This is only possible through individual and collective efforts of the members of the editorial boards, reviewers, authors and readers of the journal in supporting the scholarly rigour and status of the journal.