Understanding diversity issues and cultural awareness within media and culture

Studying BA (Hons) Media Communication Cultures has provided me with important skills and knowledge to understand diversity issues and cultural awareness within media and culture. It has highlighted not only the issues of modern racism but also the history of it and how we as students can educate ourselves and others to also understand these.  

As part of my final year, I took part in a module titled Race, Media, Culture that helped me understand the inequalities present across a wide selection of industries and communities. The arts and healthcare helped me know that issues of race cannot just be understood through the online videos we see, as crucial as these are.

Inequality needs to be understood in all aspects of our day-to-day life, understanding how one person may struggle to get the same opportunities as another.  As part of this module, our assessed work was a campaign to help fight racism. We had a choice of what area of society we wished to investigate.

My group chose the look into the arts and the lack of diversity on stage. We created the campaign with active ways to break down stigmas and used background research into existing campaigns to make ours different. Rather than writing an essay pulling quotes from existing work, this taught us to be active in our responses to racism, teaching us to think creatively about tackling these problems.

It taught me not to ignore race but instead understand the challenges others face due to their background or cultural differences. It trained us as individuals to be active in our understanding of the challenges others face and become more aware of the duties we as a community need to take to make more equal opportunities for all.

One of the issues that stood out to me was discussing with people with traditionally non-English sounding names struggling to get through to interviews due to systemic racism. Recruitment panels would dismiss the applicants straight away. We came up with ideas such as blind interviewing where people had numbers assigned to them instead of names, meaning the process of filtering through CV becomes fairer, an advantage for gender equality as well.

Discussions and lessons like these have taught us ways to carry ideas forward to our places of work or ways in which we might choose to filter things in the future. It taught us about the problem and has given us ideas of little but important things we can do to tackle them.

We are encouraged to be active members of society and taught to question aspects of prejudice, not just to be bystanders but instead seeking to make opportunity fair for all.