In this new year's episode, Will's joy is cozy winter activities, especially his friend group's weekly movie night. Amber's January joy is birthday celebrations, because her family has a lot of birthday celebrations in January. As she does in all things, Amber brings lots of themed, personalized festivity to birthday celebrations! Connecting to new year's traditions of setting new intentions, this episode's discussion topic focuses on how to be intentional in diversity efforts. We don't want diversity efforts to be something we fall backwards into; diversity and inclusion deserves forethought and intentionality. Continuing that theme, we share stories that exemplify unfortunate diversity attempts and some that are more successful. This episode's question is "How do I ask about someone's identity respectfully?", and we discuss bad ways to ask about identity and offer suggestions for more positive and respectful ways to ask about others' identities. This episode's habit-breaking skill is to Think Ahead. Bias is more likely when we're figuring things out spontaneously, and less likely if we've thought things through ahead of time. Will's media recommendation for this episode is the action-packed period piece, "Prey", which is a wildly entertaining sci-fi action flick that also showcases Comanche history, language, and culture.


 

In this episode, we mentioned our producer, Eric Roman Beining, and his photography. If you're interested, check it out at erbeining.com.