All in this together: Developing an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Charter for the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy

The purpose of our Special Session is to contribute to the emerging discourse on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), and extend the conversations around how we can build an Academy that is truly equitable, diverse, and inclusive. In doing so, our aim is to produce an EDI Charter for the Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy (ANZMAC), thereby responding to recent a call from Arsel, Crockett & Scott (2022) for scholarly work to develop frameworks that can help communities be more inclusive. Indeed, journals such as the Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ) have paved the way by identifying EDI marketing as a unique area of future research in a review of emerging trends in Marketing (Thaichon, Quach & Ngo, 2022). The AMJ has also recently featured a number of articles discussing various aspects of EDI, including but not limited to Indigenous strategy (Raciti, 2022), racial and ethnic diversity (Badejo, Appau, Zainuddin & Kariipannon, 2022), and gender equity (Dobele, Ferguson, Hartman & Schuster, 2022). We propose an overarching EDI Charter in order to consolidate efforts within each of these areas to produce synergies, and acknowledge the intersectional nature of these various identities. Therefore, the EDI Charter will be underpinned by an intersectional framework, as people can experience various multiple identities encompassed within EDI issues, which overlap and intersect. This EDI Charter will represent a tangible commitment of the ANZMAC community to uphold values of inclusion, and aligns with the ANZMAC strategic aim of co-creating and delivering value with and for its members and other stakeholders. The EDI Charter will guide the ANZMAC community both strategically and operationally in the ways we can foster a culture of inclusion, continuous improvement, and collegiality in our Academy.