Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
in Sage Video
Sage Video streaming collections are curated to provide a comprehensive teaching, learning, and research resource in each collection discipline. As a product team, we are committed to publishing a diverse range of content, ideas, and perspectives as well as representations of people and populations throughout these collections, and we also have commitments regarding platform inclusivity and accessibility too.
Sage Video's core diversity, equity, and inclusion pledges are below. We will be open, honest, and transparent about any areas in which we fall short and invite feedback from our customers and partners about this at any time. We welcome any comments or feedback. Please send directly to Michael Carmichael, Head of Visual Media, at michael.carmichael@sagepub.co.uk.
Our Pledges
Representing diverse communities. We pledge to be extra vigilant in our practice to publish video content, both originally produced and licensed by SAGE, which contains diverse communities of people, including those from BIPOC/BAME and different gender groups, the LGBTQIA+ community, people with disabilities, and people of a variety of age groups. Our aim is for all our viewers to find themselves and their experiences reflected in our video content.
Placing inclusive design and accessibility at the heart of our product design principles. We pledge to ensure our video platforms (SAGE Knowledge and SAGE Research Methods) are designed with inclusion at their hearts, avoiding designs that will exclude any user. We pledge to achieve high standards for accessibility for these platforms, specifically to maintain a minimum of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) AA conformance and Sections 504 and 508 compliance (Rehabilitation Act of 1973), so that our users are engaged and included.
Showcasing a diversity of voices. We pledge to include a diverse range of voices and perspectives within our video content from practitioners, community members, organizers, and activists, as well as perspectives from across the academic spectrum to assist academic conversations and to heighten educational and research attainment for our end-users.
Encouraging a diverse and equitable referencing practice. We pledge to work with our video 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, people of a variety of gender expressions and experiences, people from the LGBTQIA+ community, and people with disabilities.
Promoting anti-racism and anti-discrimination. We pledge to continue to publish video content that promotes anti-racist and anti-discrimination scholarship and practice and educates viewers on the latest research into the experiences, realities, and themes of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination.
Key Initiatives Underway in 2024
The Sage Video Editorial team has developed a mechanism to capture voluntary, self-reported, and anonymous demographic data of the video contributors published, which was rolled out as a trial in 2021 for 2022 video products. This will be used as a guide to inform progress around the representation aims as expressed in the above pledges.
As part of the same team’s ongoing content update work, systematic reviews of the subject taxonomies and metadata on which Sage Video collections sit will be undertaken to ensure that they are relevant, fully inclusive, and in alignment with curricula that have been/are being reconstructed or decolonized.
Further, the Editorial team commits to undertaking a review of the current Editorial Boards for the complete video collections, and to recruit further members where needed to support content and platform development pledges.
Likewise, the Editorial team will ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion representation as a priority when requesting title recommendations and selections from all licensing content partners.
Finally, the Product Management team for Sage Video has prepared a short video illustrating the accessibility features for the Sage Video portal page and Sage Knowledge platform.
Work to ensure that the Sage Video library meets the above pledges is developing and ongoing, and there is full commitment to improving this library as the Sage Video team continues to update existing or publish new collections.