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In the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, we are firmly committed to the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. We are a multilingual, interdisciplinary, and genuinely global department that explores the cultures of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities around the world. We are proud of the vibrant diversity of our current faculty, staff, and student cohorts and will work to continue bringing new voices into our department. A strength of our department is the presence and study of various languages and cultures from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, including minority and indigenous languages.
We acknowledge the historical privileging of some languages over others and are committed to having departmental conversations to discuss our roles in this ideological debate. We celebrate all of our students’ contributions to our department and aim to empower and support them, second language learners and heritage speakers alike. We also recognize historically underrepresented groups within our field and strive to create a department that ensures equitable access to education and resources for both current and future members of our department. First-generation students play an important role in our department and we are committed to their success by partnering with campus resources to better support our first-gen students and reduce barriers to access.
As part of our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we embrace linguistic diversity. We seek to reduce stigmas surrounding language use with the hope that speakers of all varieties of Spanish and Portuguese feel included in departmental dialogues. Through our collaborations with local schools and non-profit organizations, we are working to build and maintain strong, mutually beneficial partnerships within our community, thereby promoting a diverse and inclusive vision of Champaign-Urbana, the state of Illinois and the rest of the United States.
This work is ongoing. While acknowledging that we may never be perfect, we aim to perpetually improve and create a more robust, inclusive department community.