Through our scientific work and our lab culture, we seek to advance the causes of equity and justice. Power structures in academia traditionally do not include marginalized groups as voices of influence and beneficiaries of resources. We seek to transform existing power structures to thoughtfully integrate perspectives that are historically and currently marginalized. We do not accept racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, or any other types of bigotry. If someone speaks or behaves in a discriminatory way, we seek to normalize addressing it right then and there. This starts with the lab director (hn) and applies to everyone who participates in our lab community.
We bring our whole selves to our research and to the community. This means that instead of denying that we have personal values, identities, experiences, and perspectives, we explicitly acknowledge the values that motivate us and the questions we seek to understand. As part of our continual commitment to intellectual humility, we welcome conversation and thoughtful criticism.
Specifically:
We aim to incorporate and examine the influence of institutional, systemic, and social structural factors in our research. We do not live in a vacuum and neither do the topics we study.
We commit to reading more broadly and across disciplines, in addition to learning from and amplifying historically marginalized perspectives. We continuously work on diversifying what and whose work we read, learn from, teach, and cite.
We actively create and support a scientific culture that calls people in rather than calls them out.
We communicate respectfully with the goal of making our own and each other’s research better. We are not interested in scientific takedowns nor competitions for prestige. We do not ask questions or give feedback to show how smart we are; we ask questions or give feedback to help each other advance science and society. We take mansplaining and whitesplaining with many, many grains of salt. This applies to individual conversations, lab meetings, talks and seminars, and peer reviews.
We seek to treat everyone as a whole individual and acknowledge that we bring our whole selves to our research. We do not ask anyone to be a spokesperson for any of their identities.