strINgCLUSION: a humanifesto for a better academy
Science or our principles is a false dichotomy.
This week was the inaugral event of a new initiative setup by me and some of my colleagues from the string phenomenology* community, with a variety of backgrounds and at differing stages of our academic careers, and we’ve named the collective strINgCLUSION. D’ya get it?
Our group is predominantly women and/or racialised minorities and, having discussed topics of inclusivity and diversity amongst ourselves over the years, we finally took the leap to establish a space in which we can bring these conversations to the wider community — we wanted to strINgCLUDE everyone. Okay, I’ll stop now.
Neoliberal Science
First it’s useful to identify why I think diversifying our research groups is so necessary for improving our science and that requires me to talk not about the theories but the theorists.
I’d characterise our current cultural paradigm as strongly aligned with that of ‘Western democracies’, including the US, UK and Western EU, namely: suffocating from the effects of late-stage capitalism. We, as scientists — and theorists in particular, aren’t necessarily suffering from the direct negative effects like reduced funding and austerity. Our projects are growing and, for instance, more and more of us are interested in developing machine-learning and AI techniques, which certainly gets investment. It’s more that our infrastructure has become the smothering pillow: power and authority lies with white, male gatekeepers and our ‘scientific’ practices are specifically designed to prop up this status quo in perpetuity — whether its through our archaic publication system or highly opaque grant application processes. Any actions or movements against this decrepid system are readily dismissed as ‘emotional’ or ‘not of the concern of scientists’ or ‘non-quantitative’. We’ve built our own system of neoliberal capitalism — with papers, grants, and citations as our currencies — and have marketised the knowledge economy, copying and pasting flawed economic policies into our scientific practices. And, thus, comes the rub: fewer women due to the whack-a-mole holes in the ‘leaky pipeline’; racialised minorities disenfranchised by our cronyist old boys’ club; and exploitation of all involved with burnout and mental health problems endemic among our junior colleagues. Peter Higgs categorically stated in today’s academic system he would not be afforded the freedom of thought to write down his theory. In an environment of peacocking hypercompetition, what impression are we giving to the next generation of hopeful theorists? Spoiler: it’s not a good one. But they’re not welcome here anyway.
I won’t attempt to deconstruct how or why we got here, though these are certainly important questions that require closer examination. What we can do, however, is use our understanding of where we are and set a course for where we want to be.
Academy is sold to us as a creative, open, collaborative space where free-thinkers and solutionists ask the big questions of nature. Institutions are sold as outside-the-box idea factories with noble, duty-bound workers lengthening the knowledge scrolls handed down and responsibly disseminating them to anyone who’s interested. Unless, of course, we deem you uninterested because of your skin colour and/or lack of dick(ish attitude). But why?
The story goes that because white men from the Euro/North American sphere dominate our science, they must be the best at it. We can’t have quotas because this would damage the progress of science. Really? If I wrote an algorithm simulating coin tosses and ran it a hundred times and 93 were heads would you assume my algorithm was fair and uniform? Or would you be suspicious that the system was rigged? What about if I ran it a hundred times annually and it never came up with more than 15 tails, would you say it was fair?
People in our field, and other hepsters, say the distribution of skill and ability is uniform after the PhD/first postdoc phase. That being the case, why are the (shamefully few) 25% of undergraduates who are women not proportionately represented in faculty? Perhaps we should abolish the quotas for white men?
The socio-political system that brought us here is, to some degree, irrelevant. The system of neoliberal science is of our own making and its perpetuation is also up to us.
Collaboration Not Competition
The future of science is not pale, male, and stale, despite that being very much the flavour of the past and present. Young scientists from underrepresented backgrounds will no longer stand for this and their senior allies are saturated in disappointment having seen generation after generation drop out. Let us unite.
Change is coming and strINgCLUSION is a part of it.
It can become a conversation space for sociopolitical issues that we have the power to better. Future generations shouldn’t need to be experts in their chosen scientific field and experts in the betterment of their socially-ascribed identities. Future generations should spend their time doing better science.
In the meantime, it’s up to all of us, together, to balance just doing science with doing just science. As theorists we’ve spent so long writing everything from first principles. It’s high time we put our principles first.
*String Phenomenology: though seemingly a contradiction in terms, this subject began as the study of aspects/models of string theory — a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity that extends the 0-dimensional point particle into a 1D object: a string — that could lead to experimentally viable signatures, e.g. supersymmetry. It evolved into questions of how, in fact, the space of string theories can be heavily confined and, often, is characterised as a kind of metaphysics. As a string phenomenologist myself, I’m fine with that.
