A VISION FOR A DIVERSE AND EQUITABLE ENVIRONMENT THROUGH THE LENS OF INCLUSIVE EARTH

The current social climate calls for more justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in geosciences. Inclusive Earth is a four-year-old, student-led organization that addresses JEDI issues within the College of Mines and Earth Sciences at the University of Utah. We aim to create an inclusive environment through professional development workshops, community building, and more. However, there are two main challenges that we, and likely similar organizations, have faced.

Challenge 1: Inclusive Earth leadership is tasked with continuously navigating complex political landscapes. Our initial aims were ambitiously transformative, but we have had to consistently downscale our goals to an incrementalist approach due to pushback.

Challenge 2: We often find ourselves straddling a line between reward and punishment. The rewards are often internal (e.g. seeing the results of hard work) and the punishments are often external (e.g. longer graduation times, fewer publications, interpersonal conflict, etc).

We believe Inclusive Earth faces these challenges due to the underlying perception that JEDI work is independent of scientific work. The vocabulary surrounding JEDI “organizations” (also referred to as “movements”, “committees”, and “task forces”) allows folks to prioritize predominantly White scientific/industrial institutions over JEDI interests and goals.

Here, we argue that meaningful change will happen when the geoscience community overcomes the notion that JEDI and science are separate. Meaningful JEDI work means incorporating JEDI ideas into everything that we do, rather than another meeting or mandatory training on a to-do list. Under “distributed JEDI”, professors would include JEDI context for the material that they are teaching in a classroom, or presenting to an audience. Hiring committees would view a lack of JEDI participation as detrimental to an application, rather than viewing the presence of JEDI activity as a bonus. Organizations would not only regularly conduct climate surveys, but be transparent about the findings and subsequent accountability action items. As Inclusive Earth leadership, we believe the focus should pivot from “organizational JEDI” to “distributed JEDI”, and we share our vision for a just and equitable transformation of STEM.