Inclusion and diversity

I’ve been ruminating on writing about this for some time, and found Liz Garnett putting it perfectly:

inclusiveness is something that you can directly act upon. You can make choices about your rules for membership… the kinds of jokes it is socially acceptable to make in your organisation, and you can action those decisions… Diversity is about the people who aren’t yet in the room, about the choices that other people are making to not be there with you.

Her post is relevant to many contexts beyond its immediate intended audience of musicians.  With her comment “Diversity… is a performance indicator, not a goal” in mind, I will leave you with some further reading:

• Universal design refers to broad-spectrum ideas meant to produce buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to older people, people without disabilities, and people with disabilities.  Universal design emerged from slightly earlier barrier-free concepts, the broader accessibility movement, and adaptive and assistive technology and also seeks to blend aesthetics into these core considerations.
• Defining Impairment and Disability (University of Leeds): “A disabled person is a person with an impairment who experiences disability. Disability is the result of negative interactions that take place between a person with an impairment and her or his social environment. Impairment is thus part of a negative interaction, but it is not the cause of, nor does it justify, disability.”
• The social model of disability and the medical model of disability – applicable to organisational culture, i.e. is the environment hostile to underrepresented groups, or do individuals need to conform to existing culture in order to fit it (or not)?
• Design is not neutral, e.g.
• • Legal algorithms – Artificial Intelligence and the Law (BBC Law in Action series) and also racism and class politics and crime in this book review of “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil
  • Facial detection and black people – Here’s Why Facial Recognition Tech Can’t Figure Out Black People
  • Seat belts and women – The World is Designed for Men: how bias is built into our daily lives
  • How shirts are buttoned – The Curious Case of Men and Women’s Buttons
• “The evidence suggests that changing the language of job ads ‘works’: it helps to diversify the applicant pool for jobs… But in the end I think feminism does have to be about changing mindsets rather than just devising procedures to work around them.” – Debuk, One word, two words, pink words, blue words

Open in order to… challenge inequality

The theme of International Open Access Week 2017 is “Open in order to…”

My response is open in order to challenge inequality, as many barriers exist to equitable participation in learning and research.

Some actions such as positive discrimination can increase diversity, but do little to address structural inequality.  Unless these approaches then transform systems from the inside, they can be little more than box-ticking quota exercises.

Examining the roots of inequality (a radical approach) allows barriers to be identified and tackled.  Such a strategy creates a more inclusive environment, and diversity increases as a result.

Removing paywalls from publicly-funded research ouputs is a good way to address systematic exclusion from access to research on the basis of ability to pay (often linked with operating within a higher education institution).

This Open Access Week, how can you contribute?

Read, think, learn

• Fair Open Access: returning control of scholarly journals to their communities by Alex Holcombe and Mark C. Wilson
• Open access and development: Research findings by Elisa Liberatori Prati
• Open Research Glossary by Jon Tennant et al, The Right to Research Coalition

Do

Make Wikipedia easier to verify, and more Open Access.  Take a closed/toll-access reference and add an open version to it.

1. Go to oabot.org and log in (create a free account if you don’t already have a Wikipedia account)
2. You will be presented with a single citation and a single suggested open citation to add to the Wikipedia entry.
3. Review the citation, and click Add link if the citation is a match (same document and legitimate source). If it’s not a match or you’re not sure, click Skip.

A quick, simple, and fun way to improve Wikipedia and access to OA research. Learn more at Celebrate Open Access Week by adding open citations to Wikipedia.