Presented by Western Mass Science for the People, Saturday, November 19, 2022, 4:00-6:00 p.m. on Zoom
This was our fifth Making Science Work for Social Justice community workshop. Many of us have seen how science has helped us in our own lives, but are those benefits equitably distributed? This workshop focused on how science, as developed within our current power structures, contributes to inequity at both local and global levels. We also explored how people can mobilize scientific knowledge to address inequities, especially in the realms of health and environmental justice.
Our workshops are always intended for a wide audience with diverse perspectives. At the core of our solidarity science philosophy is a focus on reaching multiple experiences and understandings to solve problems and improve the science itself. We invite participants to demand more from the scientific community, to create a coalition, to listen to each other better, to critique the role of science in our lives, and rather than ask, “how do we fix this?”, question who we need at the table to fix this.
This workshop began with “lightning talks” by our members to orient participants to some of the central problems related to trust and science that we have been discussing in our chapter meetings. Presenters were Sarah Brownell, Steve Fernandez, Emma Harnisch, Tim Nsubuga, Darsh Patel, Preya Patel, Sigrid Schmalzer, Brian Schultz, Chloe Spurr.
We then proceeded to breakout rooms, where participants met in groups of three to five people and engaged in exciting discussions. Participants included community members, academics, students, and educators interested in changing the questions that scientific institutions prioritize, the forms of knowledge that are valued, the policies that get developed, and the ways the fruits of science are shared. We left with meaningful connections and a feeling that we had worked to envision a more equitable science.
Please feel free to use the materials from our workshop to create your own programs. And if you do, please let us know! We are excited to see what you do.
SLIDES FROM LIGHTNING TALKS AND BREAKOUT ROOM INSTRUCTIONS
VIDEO OF LIGHTNING TALKS AND POST-BREAKOUT REPORTS (COMING SOON!)
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE BREAKOUT SESSIONS
Here we share some of the comments that were made during the breakout sessions. We relied on the notes taken by the scribes during those sessions, aided as well by our own memories of the sessions that we participated in. We edited the notes for clarity.
WHAT DO WE WANT?
Producing More Equitable Forms of Knowledge
- Addressing racism in engineering needs to be about more than interpersonal trainings; it has to move into the realm of engineering design itself.
- Collect data and expand sample sizes in ways that minimize racial bias.
- Design technology in ways that minimize racial bias.
- Empower people to learn about their own bodies and make this a mode of medical knowledge production. This may be especially important in chronic conditions that are highly personal: people should be given tools to help with experiment and data collection; ultimately, people need to be the ones to decide what to do about their own bodies.
- Producing more equitable forms of knowledge will help build more trust in BIPOC communities and will increase willingness of BIPOC communities to participate in the medical system.
- Engage more in “citizen science” (or “solidarity science”), involving stakeholders early in the research process so that the knowledge produced more effectively and equitably addresses local concerns, and so that people are more invested in the process.
Transforming STEM Knowledge through Representation
- How can we change the framework of science to include everyone?
- Certain types of knowledge, and certain people’s knowledge, have been prioritized, which automatically excludes many people and leads them to disengage.
- We should expand our idea of who is a knowledge producer; e.g., homeless people produce valuable knowledge related to their experiences, and that knowledge should be brought into STEM.
- There are many types of knowledge:
- Valuing ancestral and family knowledge can enrich and transform our understanding of how to take care of the environment.
- We need to research diverse medical disciplines, e.g. homeopathy in India.
- We should think about how people in other times and places have attempted to transform STEM through more diverse representation, e.g. the efforts in Mao-era China to make agricultural scientists collaborate with peasants and local cadres. The Western Mass chapter of SftP has similarly highlighted the significance of community knowledge in addressing mold as a health hazard.
- We should be more active in taking opportunities to learn from international students and scientists about their experiences in their home countries and in the US—this can be a way to connect global and local issues.
- International students and scientists can also have a role in transforming conditions in their home countries through what they have learned in the US, e.g. about Black and Brown political struggles.
HOW DO WE GET THERE?
Organizing
- We need to be not just Science for the People, but Science with the People; we need to work with a wide range of people, e.g., community organizers, farmworkers, people in other countries.
- We should seek out people working on similar problems in different communities, near and far: e.g.
- the Ames Chapter of Science for the People is connecting with the Twin Cities Chapter on pipeline resistance;
- a conference last spring brought indigenous groups to northern Iowa to talk about pipelines in Russia;
- a class at UC Irvine is connecting experiences of health inequity in Louisiana and California;
- farmers and farmworkers are organizing around the world through La Via Campesina and through farmworker unions to network and share experiences and knowledge;
- people supporting immigrants also recognize that immigration is often compelled by US foreign policy propping up dictators (linking local and global concerns);
- pollution can be seen as having local and global ramifications, and should be understood as such.
- STEM workers need to work actively to counteract the dominant patterns in which:
- community members are not consulted about issues (e.g., pipeline construction) that affect them;
- laborers are not educated about safety issues related to their work because this knowledge is not properly distributed;
- labor related to STEM projects is outsourced to places with worse safety and/or environmental standards
- In order to build trust with community members:
- STEM workers regularly need to leave the comfort of their labs/work spaces to engage with the community and become visible in public spaces—they need to take to the streets on environmental justice and health equity.
- We need one-on-one conversations to show that STEM workers care and are willing to do the work to build a better world. Zoom technology helps bring together people from all over the world, but connecting in-person is imperative.
- We should use movies, podcasts, articles (including in Science for the People magazine), books, lightning talks (as in this presentation!), etc. to bring STEM workers together for discussion. E.g., UMass recently had very productive discussions using the film Powerlands about how pursuing renewable energies under capitalism will not solve our many crises.
- We need to connect better with others:
- We should draw on labor organizing strategies, articulating sharp, clear demands that can mobilize people; we need attainable goals that people can get behind.
- We should make use of existing resources—e.g. The Union of Concerned Scientists has organized resources for scientists.
- Learning to recognize “spillover problems” (where actions in one context produce problems in another) can help us better organize across different communities.
- Establishing mutual aid networks (including food networks, skill networks, resource networks) to protect not only the people in one’s own local community, but people in other communities as well: locales helping locales.
- We need to bridge the disciplines:
- We need to mobilize more social scientists to apply their expertise to STEM issues.
- We need more organizing across academic disciplines, including bridging STEM with the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
- We need to recognize where science stops and policy starts: sometimes what is needed is better policies and laws.
- Capacity building is essential.
- We need to identify root causes: we need to rescue babies drowning in the stream, but also go upstream and stop people from throwing the babies in.
- We need to challenge the idea that solutions must involve products: only people who can afford to buy the products can be part of the solution. We need more solutions that are based in knowledge and policy, rather than consumerism.
Educating
- We need to develop more effective means to connect local and global struggles.
- How we teach is as important as what we teach. We should push back against the idea that we are just transmitting specific knowledge: it’s more important to encourage students to investigate and bring themselves into the learning process.
- We need to teach students to think critically about the specific views and values that underlie everything they are reading.
- We should respect students as knowledge producers and encourage them to see themselves in this way.
- Ground the curriculum in what students already know, including what they have learned from their families.
- People learn in many different ways, including observation (especially of family members), making, dreaming, doing, etc. We should help students be more conscious of the many ways of learning and knowing things, and how those ways come together in frameworks.
- We need to include a social justice and equity lens in STEM education, counteracting the tendency to indoctrinate scientists and engineers to become mere professionals and to choose career stability over ethics.
- We need to resist the tendency for STEM education to imply the irrelevance of subjective experience and to assert that science is apolitical.
- We need to connect STEM education with social justice issues, building on the example that Emma offered in her lightning talk.
- STEM educators need to prepare for the push back against critical teaching (e.g., on environmental justice) in their classrooms.
- Organizations like Science for the People can play an important mentoring role in cultivating and supporting STEM teachers who incorporate social justice in their classrooms.
- Case studies can be a powerful way of teaching about environmental justice and health equity; we can juxtapose local and global cases. Despite differences in particular injustices across regions, on a global scale we can see recurring themes. Local and global inequities are linked (e.g., lack of equitable vaccine access).
- We should not underestimate the inspiration that global examples and historical examples (e.g., Black Panthers’ community health clinics) can provide in educating about STEM equity and inequity.
- Students are increasingly overburdened with work and other activities; we need to think about how to engage them more effectively and build on the knowledge they are accumulating in other spheres.
- We need to teach about the political and economic inequities that have led to the situation where a few countries are causing the bulk of the global warming that is affecting all countries.
- We need to acknowledge that harm has been done through science to many communities, especially BIPOC communities. This has led to people distrusting vaccines.
- STEM workers should do more outreach, holding regular community forums to discuss their research.
Building Relationships and Supporting One Another
- We are not all individuals separated; we are all parts of communities and groups that work together and fit together.
- Everyone’s basic needs, including social and emotional needs, must be met if we are to move forward.
- Meeting people’s needs requires enormous care work, including care based in communities.
- Everyone has different needs and circumstances:
- It’s challenging to develop individualized strategies to support each person. Each person is the expert on themselves. We must find ways to bridge our experiences and develop supports (including medical care) relevant to people’s individual lived experiences.
- We need to empower people to remake themselves based on knowledge of who they are and who they can be.
- Listening to people is essential.
- Addressing affordability in health care will help build trust.