“How can we be more accurate and inclusive about the true diversity…in the biological world?… It makes us better scientists and better teachers to actually consider and to teach the full diversity of these different aspects of biology.” – Sam Sharpe
This page is intended to be a go-to for resources to begin or continue our social justice self-education. I do not have all the answers and will update this page as I continue to learn. Please contact me with additional viewpoints and resources. These are the resources from workshops, webinars, and discussions that have helped me put my work in context:
Gender in Science
If you’re new to interrogating the impacts of gender in a community, check out the Life Science Cafe. We recently invited our first anthropologist into these community chats: Dr. Elias Capello (video recording of their talk to be uploaded shortly). For a free-form workshop to rethink gender in science, check out the following resources from…
Anti-Racism
A good place to start: Dr. Ibram X Kendi leads the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Want to make change in your own community? My friend Wayne Barnaby has been meeting with university administration at all levels to effect change in line with the petition he created during the Summer of 2020. Today, his…
Inclusive Teaching
The Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) is one of my favorite organizations producing regular, asynchronously available, digestible webinars on interrogating academic biology as we know it and creating a more inclusive environment. Dr. Bryan Dewsbury gave a SABER talk and a workshop at UMass through the Inclusive Excellence Program. In this…
Science as we know it today is not representative of our global community. When I started researching the brain in 2014, I was confused as to why this work focused on the male brain and excluded females entirely. I didn’t know then that most research is conducted that way. A study on gender inclusion in research conducted in 2019 shows us that 81.5% of biological research had no mention of females at all. My research today brings females into the equation, but there is still a long way to go before genders outside of the binary are commonly included in scientific conversation.
This kind of deeply rooted exclusion comes from centuries of men in positions of power, deciding whose research gets funded, whose research is worth citing, who should receive awards for their work, etc. It was painfully obvious to me as a female researcher that females are not represented in our body of knowledge. I was able to bring my own perspective into the questions I ask today, comparing female and male brains and behavior. But there are so many questions that I’m not thinking of and that are painfully obvious to other people with different backgrounds and experiences. We must work together to increase the accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion of science to make our research findings applicable to a larger portion of our community.
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Science by Emma Dauster 