diversity statement – johnros.com

we are living through a coordinated assault on the conditions that make equitable education possible. executive orders dismantling DEIJ infrastructure, the erosion of protections for marginalized communities, the weaponization of institutional neutrality against those who need the most protection — these are not abstract threats. they are the daily context in which i teach. this statement is written from inside that context, not above it.

i understand diversity as a way into solidarity — a practice of learning who we are, who we have been, and who we are capable of becoming together. it is not a demographic category or a compliance framework. it is the daily, ongoing work of building classrooms where difference is not managed but engaged, where the full complexity of students’ lives has standing, and where the structures that produce harm are named rather than accommodated.

i am unapologetically anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal in my pedagogy — committed to dismantling the interlocking systems that produce harm inside and outside the classroom. these are commitments that shape how i build a syllabus, whose work gets taught, how i respond when harm happens in the room and what i refuse to treat as neutral. the curriculum is not neutral. the crit is not neutral. the institution is not neutral. i do not pretend otherwise.

whose work gets taught matters. i build courses around artists, thinkers and makers whose labor has been structurally excluded from canonical art history — not as supplement or correction, but as the foundation. this means centering Black, Indigenous, queer, feminist, disabled and working-class practices as primary rather than peripheral, and examining the field mechanisms that have historically determined whose work is legible and whose remains unlegible.

when harm happens in the room — and it does — i do not manage it toward silence. i draw on restorative frameworks that prioritize accountability, repair and the continuation of relation over punishment or removal. this means staying in difficulty rather than resolving it prematurely, creating space for those who have been harmed to be heard, and holding those who caused harm to a standard of genuine reckoning rather than performed apology. community agreements — developed collectively — are the infrastructure through which this becomes possible.

i come to this work as a queer, non-binary, latinx first-generation american who has lived on the margins of institutions not built for me. that experience does not give me access to every struggle — i remain attentive to where my own blind spots are and accountable to the communities whose experiences differ from mine. but it does mean i do not need to be convinced that these structures cause real harm. i have lived it. i have chosen to teach from that knowledge rather than naturalize it.

this is not a moment for hedging. diversity as solidarity means showing up for one another — in the classroom, in the institution, in the street — and refusing to let the current assault on equity go unchallenged. we build power when we stand together. that is what i practice, without apology, every day, in every room we gather in.