Special Report on the 2020 Town Hall on Racism
Summary by Laura Mickes, Digital Content Editor
This recap is part of a special series of session summaries from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.
Over
100 Psychonomes attended Sunday's Town Hall forum to discuss how racism
impacts our research and careers, and how the Society might take steps
towards addressing issues of systemic racism and lack of diversity both
within the field and within the Society.
The meeting started with introductions by the Co-Chairs, Mary Peterson and
Duane Watson
(the 2021 Governing Board Chair). Next, representatives from the SPARK
Society
, Females of Vision et al. (FoVEA)
, Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS)
, the Psychonomic Society Diversity and Inclusion Committee
highlighted some of their initiatives.
Other highlights included:
The CR:PI Special Issue on Systemic Racism: Cognitive
Consequences and Interventions
. The call is live, so don’t miss the submission deadline of December 31, 2020. Contact Jeremy Wolfe
if you have questions.
Reviewer Zero
is a new initiative, in partnership with the SPARK Society, designed to support early-career underrepresented researchers with peer review.
There is an open letter/petition calling
for changes to the way abstracts are selected for our Annual Meeting.
Just after the Town Hall forum, there were 243 signatures. Currently,
priority for giving talks is given to Fellows. Only ~35% of the fellows
are women (note that this number is based on an impoverished dataset).
If that percentage proves accurate, then this selection process
automatically disadvantages women, and almost certainly researchers from
other underrepresented groups.
Having
said this, we all know the value of being guided by the data. So, don’t
miss your chance to take part in the survey that will soon be
disseminated by the Diversity and Inclusion Committee
.
We next joined breakout rooms to discuss the following three questions:
- What would you want others to understand about your experiences navigating academia as a cognitive psychologist?
- What type of change would you like to see in the Psychonomic Society?
- What are some resources or ideas you’d like to share that would help to improve the climate of the Society for all Psychonomes?
After 30 minutes, we reconvened, and here are just a few of the thoughts shared:
- One way to increase diversity is by welcoming more undergraduates to our meetings.
- Meeting virtually allowed undergraduate students to attend and not shell out the big bucks for travel expenses.
- Set
up a mentorship program for students attending the Annual Meeting for
the first time. That way, the newbies have experienced guides to make
the initial meeting less intimidating.
- Our international members makeup ~36% of our membership. Discussions about inclusion need to extend beyond American borders.
- Psychonomes from marginalized groups do not always feel welcome in the field and this needs to be addressed.
- There are structural and social barriers that keep people of color from fully participating in the annual meeting.
I encourage you to revisit the 2018 Digital Event on the topic of diversity and inclusion. Here are the eight posts on the issue.
Also, if you haven’t done so already, please login to the PS website and update your demographic information so we have a complete picture of our membership composition.
One
small contribution that I can make in my role as the Digital Content
Editor is to highlight the research conducted by undergraduate or
Master’s students from underrepresented groups. Additionally, these
individuals can write guest posts for our Featured Content site
. These initiatives would require Psychonomes to contact me
about interested stellar underrepresented undergraduate or graduate students.
|
Print Page
