Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, & Social Justice (IDEAS)

The IKT Guiding Principles partnership is committed to working towards helping transform research systems to prioritize inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, and social justice (IDEAS) by supporting meaningful research partnerships and fostering the use of the IKT Guiding Principles in practice. We are committed to fostering a diverse partnership in which partners can actively participate and achieve recognition on terms that are set fairly, democratically and transparently.

Our partnership has adopted the acronym IDEAS to refer to our commitment to inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, and social justice. We see accessibility as an important and discrete factor that needs to be considered in our work.

Our partnership values diverse worldviews and forms of knowledge (e.g. lived experience). We aim to take an intersectional approach to research and knowledge mobilization meaning that we see human beings as being shaped by the interaction of different social locations (e.g., ability and disability, race/ethnicity, gender, gender identity, class, sexual orientation, geography, age, migration status, or religion, just to name a few). These interactions are directly impacted by the contexts of connected systems and structures of power (e.g., in the form of laws, government policies, and institutional protocols) in which they occur.

In addition to following our IKT Guiding Principles, we are committed to enacting IDEAS principles. We recommend that all partners complete a course in IDEAS. We tailored IDEAS principles within the Queen’s University Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Course to guide our partnership’s IDEAS commitments.

Specifically, our partners are committed to the following IDEAS Principles:

  1. Examining our own background and bias.
  2. Deeply analyzing our data with the intent of exposing underlying historical and systemic disparities beyond our own biases.
  3. Recognizing that the research process has and can perpetuate systemic forms of oppression, we  must play a role in ensuring that research benefits equity-deserving communities.
  4. Working in partnership and crediting each other for our contributions.
  5. Guarding against the implied or explicit assumption that white, settler, able-bodied, straight, cis-gendered, male, and upper/middle class are the normative, standard, or default position.