Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Research Teams: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Abstract

Since the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the racial justice protests that followed, many institutions, including the academy, pledged their support for policies and practices that combat on-going racial injustice. Social justice and anti-racism initiatives abound on college campuses, including programming, hosting speakers, and proposing required ‘diversity’ classes for all students. For all this rhetoric, college and university administrators have remained silent when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion practices as they relate to research. And yet, extant research documents the ways in which racial and gender biases have consistently shaped every level of research from the development of the research question, to the diversity (or not) of the sample, the availability of funding, and the probability of publishing. In this paper we focus on one aspect of the research process: the assembling (or not) of diverse research teams. We explore the benefits that diversity in research teams brings to the integrity of the data as well as the obstacles to both assembling a diverse research team and managing it successfully. Specifically, this paper focuses on the myriad ways in which diversity in research teams is treated as a set of boxes to check, rather than an epistemology that underscores positionality and power. We present a series of case examples that highlight the ways in which diversity, equity, and inclusion are successfully and unsuccessfully achieved in research teams, both in terms of outcomes and experiences. These case examples focus specifically on power relations along all forms of diversity, including race and gender as well as rank. The case examples also serve to unpack the ways in which research teams can rely on positionality as a tool for addressing power at three distinct levels: in conducting social science research generally, between the researcher and the “researched,” and among the research team itself.

Anti-racism in Criminology: An Oxymoron or the way Forward?

“…Without actual, resource-backed commitments and actions to make changes within our departments, our classrooms, our syllabi, our policies and practices, our mentoring, our admissions practices, our promotion practices, and our service allocation practices, we will continue to maintain the status quo to our detriment (Blount -Hill, et al, 2022;Carter & Craig, 2022;Casellas Connors & McCoy, 2022;Hattery, et al, 2022;León, 2021;McCoy, 2021;Montgomery, 2020;Parmar, et al, 2022a;Russell-Brown, 2021;Stockdale & Sweeney, 2022;Sykes, 2021;Taylor Greene, et al, 2018)…”

“…How are we intentionally incorporating policies and practices to retain who we admit to our graduate programs? How are we training the next generation of researchers to consider how racism – and other manifestations of oppression – affect what we decide to study, how we conduct our research, who are considered experts, how we interpret our findings, and how we disseminate our research? How are we combatting implicit and explicit biases that white faculty possess toward Black students/colleagues and other students/colleagues of color? In what ways are we unnecessarily “gatekeeping” instead of “groundskeeping” in academic mentorship? (see Montgomery, 2020) To what extent is invisible service of minoritized faculty made visible, or how can service load allocation be more equitable for minoritized faculty in your department? How are we allocating resources to back up any university or departmental statements with promises to make changes toward anti-racist practice? How are we disrupting and addressing hostile environments for students and faculty of color? Without actual, resource-backed commitments and actions to make changes within our departments, our classrooms, our syllabi, our policies and practices, our mentoring, our admissions practices, our promotion practices, and our service allocation practices, we will continue to maintain the status quo to our detriment (Blount-Hill, et al, 2022; Carter & Craig, 2022; Casellas Connors & McCoy, 2022; Hattery, et al, 2022; León, 2021; McCoy, 2021; Montgomery, 2020; Parmar, et al, 2022a; Russell-Brown, 2021; Stockdale & Sweeney, 2022; Sykes, 2021; Taylor Greene, et al, 2018). It is up to us to make a new status quo, where it is clear - and not questioned – whether Black Lives Matter in our discipline (Russell-Brown, 2021).…”

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“…First, although each paper included a historically underrepresented population or context, the authorship teams were all based in the United States. Despite greater inclusion over time, the US remains overrepresented in scientific research (Thalmayer et al, 2021 ), while researchers from the Global South remain underrepresented (Macleod and Howell, 2013 ; IJzerman et al, 2021 ; Bernardo et al, 2022 ; Hattery et al, 2022 ; Lin and Li, 2022 ). This may partly be due to the relative marginalization of subdisciplines in some regions outside the US and Western Europe (e.g., social psychology; Saab et al, 2020 ).…”

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“…Turing to the discipline, Palmer et al (2022) question whether anti-racism is possible in criminology, and offer possible ways forward for the discipline if it wants to undo past harms. Meanwhile Rajah et al (2022) offer concrete suggestions for a more intersectional, anti-racist praxis in feminist criminology. Beyond the discipline of criminology, there is a lot of additional work to be done.…”

“…They offer suggestions about how to critically examine our curriculum to assess the underrepresentation of authors from marginalized communities and redress this wrong. Hattery et al (2022) turn their attention to research teams. Using a set of case examples, they discuss how diversity, equity, and inclusion are successfully and unsuccessfully achieved in the context of scholarly work.…”