IBS's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE) Committee was just awarded the 2020-21 Diversity and Inclusive Excellence Grant. Erin Kelly from the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence and member of the DEI Committee and Fernando Riosmena, Director of DEI at IBS, put together the proposal on behalf of the DEI Committee. They were awarded $3,000 for their proposal titled “Interrupting Structural & Institutional Racism by Centering Equity throughout the Research Process.” This will be used towards implementing a workshop on how to center equity throughout the research process from design to dissemination. All IBS staff and other CU Boulder research staff will be invited and encouraged to attend these workshops beginning in Spring 2021. A brief description and goals of the project are listed below.
“Centering equity in research has the power to interrupt important forms of structural and institutional racism. How we ask research questions, collect, analyze, and interpret data, and disseminate findings can reproduce forms of inequity by ignoring or tacitly accepting problematic aspects of the status quo, thus reproducing it in interpretation.
This project will create an explicit focus on asking research questions, conducting research activities, and sharing research findings with an understanding of the structures and systems that shape different groups’ experiences, such as racism, discrimination, and other forms of exclusion. In this way, we will draw attention to the need for research that addresses the problem and its root causes within marginalized communities. Researchers will be better equipped to self-examine and identify biases, better incorporate community voices in all research stages, share power in decision-making at critical stages, critically consider data ownership, respond to cultural sensitivities and context, and share findings directly with communities who are the focus of research studies more productively.
Our goal is thus to build the capacity of social science researchers (faculty, research faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students) on centering equity in four key research stages: planning and research design, data collection, data analysis, and reporting and dissemination. We will hold a series of professional trainings on how to center equity within each of these stages, each paired with facilitated workshops where one or more researchers (faculty, research faculty, or graduate students) will share an example of their current or future research projects to consider how the lessons earned from the trainings can be applied to real-world research projects. This project will inform institutional guidelines on how research institutes can center equity in their research activities, and will be open to and shared as a proof of concept for other CU research institutes, centers, departments, and programs to center equity in research.”
