Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Epigeum takes a collaborative approach to creating interactive online courses designed to support universities and colleges around the world. We are committed to ensuring diverse representation of content, people, and communities within our courses, and ensuring the user experience supports inclusivity and accessibility.
Our core diversity, equity, and inclusion pledges are below. We will be open, honest, and clear about any areas in which we fall short and always invite feedback from our customers and partners. If you have comments or feedback, please direct them to epigeum@sagepub.co.uk.
Our Pledges
Represent diverse communities.We pledge to be extra vigilant in our practice to publish content that contains and reflects all communities of people, including people of color and different gender groups, LGBTQIA+ people, and people with disabilities. Our aim is for all our learners to find their experiences reflected in our content.
Place inclusive design and accessibility at the heart of our product design principles. We pledge to ensure our platform and content are designed with inclusion at their heart, striving for designs that avoid excluding any user. We pledge to achieve high standards for accessibility for these platforms, specifically to achieve and maintain a minimum of WCAG AA conformance and Sections 504 and 508 compliance (Rehabilitation Act of 1973).
Showcase a diversity of voices. We pledge to include diverse voices and perspectives within our content from across the academic spectrum to assist academic conversations and heighten educational and research attainment for our end users.
Encourage a diverse and equitable referencing practice.We pledge to work with our contributors to ensure that their content presentations cite or reference work from a wide range of scholarly sources, in particular the work of minority racial and ethnic groups, women and other genders, LGBTQIA+ people, and people with disabilities.
Promote anti-racism and anti-discrimination. We pledge to continue to create course content that promotes anti-racist and anti-discrimination practices and educates users on the latest and best approaches to tackling prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination.
Key Initiatives Underway in 2024
Our Publishing team is focusing on recruiting diverse advisors, authors, and review panels to support our content and platform development pledges, and we will be connecting with DEI special interest groups to further our knowledge and networks.
The publishing team is making diversity, equity, and inclusion representation a priority when developing course content for all our online courses and course updates.
We commissioned an external accessibility review of our platform and content activity library, and remedial action is underway to ensure that our platform and content comply with WCAG guidelines.
Work to ensure that Epigeum courses meet the above pledges is developing and ongoing, and we have fully committed to improving our work as we publish new courses and update existing content.