ANALYSIS: Recent conference illustrates growing trend to embed DEI, social justice into field
A Cornell University scholar is studying how racist housing policies from decades ago in America has influenced the genetics of common American house ants today, a line of research recently touted at a major evolutionary biology conference.
Sylvana Ross, a grad student at Cornell, presented her talk July 30 regarding her ongoing doctoral research examining in part how past racial segregation in housing, or redlining, has altered house ants’ genetics across urban and rural neighborhoods.
The talk was titled “Evolution in the City: Racism’s Influence on Urban Wildlife Adaptations.”
Ross’ research illustrates a growing trend within evolutionary biology highlighted at a recent conference that focused considerable attention on diversity, equity and inclusion, with scholars arguing more needs to be done to infuse “justice” and “belonging” into the field and presenting research to that end.
Ross’ research was presented at the Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in late July, which brought together the American Society of Naturalists, European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution.
It’s described as “one of the premiere international opportunities for sharing research on evolutionary biology.”
In addition to standard workshops on scientific publishing and grant writing and presentations on topics such as adaptive epigenetics, bioinformatics, speciation, and molecular evolution, the third annual conference played host to much DEI fare, highlighting the embrace within STEM of widespread diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
“We recognize that we have the responsibility to engage critically with the ideologies and guiding ethics behind our theory and our research and we strive to engage with decolonial practices and methods that have been put forward by indigenous scholars,” said Queen’s University graduate student and self-described “settler” scientist Mia Akbar in her introduction of a symposium she co-organized on “The Politics of Citation in Evolutionary Biology.”
“We’re very committed to trying to make space for voices and perspectives that have been erased by dominant science,” she added.
Haley Branch, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, while giving a presentation titled “Ableism as foundation for evolutionary biology,” voiced concern over how the “axiological assumptions” of evolutionary biology are built off of a “white, heteronormative, Christian, Western, male framework.”
One poster, “Queer perspectives on ineffective DEI initiatives in EEB [Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior],” complained of how DEI initiatives have prioritized short-term recruitment over “providing long-term resources and rectifying historic harm.”
Call for feedback! 🏳️🌈 if you were at #Evol2024 and came by our poster, please remember to share feedback! 👇
If you missed the meeting but are interested in DEI, queer theory, and evo/eco bio frameworks, let’s chat! DM me & I’ll share our poster. https://t.co/xBgykJ82Ve pic.twitter.com/8ECQRjKooB
— Madeline Eppley (@MadelineGEppley) July 31, 2024
“Given recent anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and increased turmoil … initiatives which provide resources for justice and belonging are essential to support the persistence of queer scientists in the field.”
Northeastern University, Purdue University, Boston University, UCLA, and UC Berkeley were among the universities represented by the scholars responsible for the poster.
Among the solutions proposed by those researchers were the prioritization of DEI events at conferences, “mandatory LGBTQIA+ DEI education trainings,” following more queer scientists on social media, and dismantling “heteronormative evolutionary concepts in research/teaching,” such as the conflation of sex and gender and material that invalidates queer identities.
Such DEI content was not limited to a couple of stray posters and symposia — but appeared central to the actual scientific work of some researchers presenting at the event.
Sylvana Ross and her insect victims of redlining were one example of this.
Another was Richard Prum, a professor of ornithology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at Yale University, gave a talk on how “queer feminist theory of gender performativity provides a detailed intellectual model of individual development that is precisely and productively applicable to molecular, developmental, and evolutionary biology.”
“Many intellectual elements of queer gender performativity– including agency, discourse, citationality, constraint and innovation, hierarchy, and distributed power relations– provide a predictive framework for the analysis” of the aforementioned fields, Prum noted in his presentation’s abstract.
According to Prum, the presentation was intended to serve as “essentially a condensed infomercial” for his 2023 book, Performance All the Way Down, which he described as “a new model of the genotype-phenotype relationship, a critique of gene-centered causation in biology…a historical answer to the question of what is sex…and a proposal for the creation or the establishment of an explicitly queer intellectual space in the heart of genetics, developmental and evolutionary biology.”
MORE: DEI takeover of STEM hinders ability ‘to produce the best science,’ say scientists
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