Published Online:December 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Effective Executive
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJEE041225
DOI:10.71329/EffectiveExecutive/2025.28.4.64-95
Author Name:Kurt April
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Management
Download Format:PDF
Pages:64-95
This paper examines the pedagogy and methodological underpinnings of a postgraduate-level diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) course taught in South Africa. Against the backdrop of persistent colonial legacies and systemic inequities, the course adopts narrative inquiry as its central pedagogical approach. Narrative inquiry is argued to be uniquely suited to DEI education, as it foregrounds lived experience, creates dialogic spaces for counter-storytelling, and enables management students to connect personal identities with broader organizational and systemic structures. The paper outlines the theoretical foundations of the course across five orientations each framed within a micro-meso-macro structure. Drawing on critical race theory, intersectionality, relational-cultural theory, and Ubuntu, the course integrates Minority World and Majority World epistemologies. The paper concludes by outlining implications for educators, managers, and institutions: embracing participatory storytelling pedagogies, practicing inclusive leadership through listening and reflexivity, and embedding narrative inquiry as a systemic practice of epistemic justice. In doing so, it argues that DEI pedagogy can itself become a decolonial practice of knowledge production.
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) research should interrogate its axiological, ontological, and epistemological foundations, and the language that follows from them. Widely debated labels such as ‘Global North/Global South’, ‘Third World/First World’, and ‘developing/developed’ create epistemic barriers, where such labels imply negative connotations of an iconic poor and backward world outside of the rich nations which needs development, rescuing and Western-styled democracy and capitalism. As an alternative to the inaccurate, hierarchical, race-based and value-laden geography-based designations like ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ (