Being big in the big tent: is fat social justice part of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on college campuses in the United States?

ABSTRACT

Fat social justice and fat liberation movements share language, symbols, and strategies with many other movements striving to fight discrimination and stigma, such as movements centered on race, gender, sexuality, and disability. These communities should be natural partners with fat activists in striving for intersectional liberation and in fighting existing structures of privilege. It is less clear, however, the degree to which fat activism and activists are welcome in spaces explicitly constructed to address comprehensive approaches to social justice. To address this question, we examine a setting specifically built to address issues of privilege, oppression, and discrimination: diversity, equity, and inclusion organizations at US colleges and universities. We compile a data set of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices at 200 four-year colleges and universities in the US, with stratified samples to ensure inclusion across regions of the US, a broad variety of educational settings from large Research 1 institutions to small liberal arts colleges, and a subset of historically black colleges and universities. We examine whether and to what degree issues of fat social justice and liberation are included in university diversity and inclusion offices, websites, and materials. Findings show fat people, their experiences, and fat social justice issues are generally excluded in DEI spaces. We provide potential explanations for this exclusion and outline possible steps forward for those interested in fat social justice.

KEYWORDS:

• DEI
• diversity
• fat inclusion
• fat social justice
• inclusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mikaela J. Dufur

Mikaela J. Dufur is Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University and a sociologist. Her research connects child and adolescent social capital in families and in schools to educational success, pro-social behavior, and better mental and physical health and has found these patterns in Australia, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She also studies family structure across national contexts and, when she is lucky, race and gender in sport. She found competitive powerlifting as an adult because mass moves mass. Her cat is the best cat.

Tiffany Fox Okeke

Tiffany Fox Okeke is a master’s student in Sociology at Brigham Young University. She earned a BS in Family Studies along with minors in Africana Studies, Global Women’s Studies, and Sociology, also from BYU. Her research interests focus on translating scholarly work on social inequalities to social policy.