New Article on Making Conferences and Meetings more Inclusive

I’m excited to announce the publication of my first co-authored article since starting Lightoller: “Insights from the iEMBER Network: Our Experience Organizing Inclusive Biology Education Research Events” in the Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education. The article is part of special Inclusive Science issue and I recommend checking out the other articles there too.

The article centers around the idea of increasing participation of a diverse group of people and their perspectives in meeting or conference settings, using examples of practices currently used by the iEMBER network, of which I am a part (and founding member). iEMBER is a network of researchers, educators, policymakers and administrators focused on understanding how to create inclusive, supportive and engaging environments to foster the success of a diverse population of students. This work is primarily focused on undergraduate STEM classrooms - retention in biology majors is one of the two major bottlenecks blocking diversification of the biomedical professoriate (the other being the postdoc-to-faculty transition). Much of the work of the network takes place at conferences and meetings, including our own (read more about the inaugural conference forming the network here).

As part of the work to address underrepresentation of minoritized researchers, strategies to broaden participation are necessary across various environments - and this includes conference settings. This requires consideration of inclusive and equitable practices both in the preparation and execution of conference and meeting events. The paper goes into this in detail, and discusses previous examples of useful resources (I particularly recommend the 500 Women Scientists’ guide on inclusive scientific meetings) but below you can get an idea: Table 1 shows examples of considerations in the planning of iEMBER events, and Table 2 contains guiding principles on the day:

Part of the on the day work is making this mission to include participation of all present clear to those present - here’s a slide we used to describe this in our meeting at the National Association of Biology Teachers conference in Chicago, 2019:

Overall, the paper aims to provide a reflection on our own experiences, and to introduce concepts, considerations and links to other resources to help others in making conference and meeting events more inclusive. It is important to make conscious, intentional and well-informed efforts to address biased and exclusionary environments at such events, because (as we state at the end of the paper):

Such efforts can help improve underrepresentation in STEM, as they can help decrease environments which can negatively impact (especially minoritized) attendees’ participatory social capital, cultural models, and successes within STEM.