Theories of Institutional Change
Integrating feminist and anti-racist philosophy into engagement, communication training, and structural support
Sarah E. Myhre (Essay attends #AGU18 poster)
Institutional change is not an act of pointed moral neutrality. Institutional change is often discussed as if it is occurring inside of a vacuum and divested from the ambient and dominant culture. And yet, these same institutions were built on colonized land, are actively fighting worker unionization, are unwilling to provide maternity leave and trans health care to researchers, are harboring and promoting sexual predators, and are perpetuating the normalization of white supremacy. Quite obviously, these are fundamentally political positions which perpetuate the discriminatory systems in the ambient culture.
Moreover, institutions are massive emitters of carbon, waste, and externalized environmental and labor costs to society. And yet, paradoxically, these same institutions are bright, shining beacons of knowledge, empiricism, and cultural change. These same institutions are training generations of scientists to pursue the bleeding edge of scientific knowledge. Many of these researchers go on to steward public policy, train new generations of public leaders, and build public and private institutions. Indeed, academic science institutions are beloved cultural touchstones of hope, clarity, and leadership.
These disparities produce a paradox of problems and conflicts which are, in the long term, untenable. Moreover, many individual scientists are leaps and bounds ahead of institutional progress in their advocation for justice, climate action, and worker’s rights. Individuals who voice criticism of dominant academic culture are often viewed as problematic troublemakers who should be silenced. And yet, criticizing an institution, especially for those who sit at lower rungs of hierarchical power, often do so at great personal and professional risk.
Criticizing an institution does mean an individual scientist stands in opposition to that institution. Rather, publicly criticizing an institution is an act of deep love and alignment with the health and future of that same institution
So. What to do?
How do we steward academic science institutions to move towards restorative justice, stop externalizing harm, and support scientists engaged in the most difficult of public problems?
- First is to recognize that institutions are vehicles which can be employed to perpetuate, or dismantle, unjust and oppressive systems. In this framework, a clear acknowledgement of the colonial, misogynistic, and white supremacist forces that have characterized the history and development of scientific institutions is a prerequisite.
- Under these systems, and the ahistorical pseudo-meritocracies that develop within, the legitimacy of the voices of marginalized scholars is down ranked and deprived of credentials, esteem, or pride. This down ranking can come in the form of threats of violence, condescending, mansplaining, moralizing, belittling, blaming, punishing, silencing, lampooning, sexualizing, or erasing.
- This is because the moral attention of institutions is oriented, through the social frames of misogyny and supremacy, to build narratives and social scripts which reward the contributions of certain scholars and punish the engagement of others.
- Structural support of scientists who participate in climate science communication, public engagement, and direct advocacy requires institutional change. The use of feminist and anti-racist philosophy as a framework to evaluate public scientific speech can steward engagement and also ensure that such engagement is evaluated fairly.
- Feminist philosophy is an evidence-based framework for evaluating how systemic discrimination, harassment, and the normative centering of specific identities and behaviors produces compounding intersections of injustice, racist and misogynistic punishment, and devaluing for specific individuals based on their identity.
- Moreover, integrating moral and feminist philosophy into science communication training can ensure that individual scholars are equipped with an appropriate tool kit to understand how their public speech will be received inside of institutions and with the general public.
The process of combating ineffective, inefficient, and unjust institutional practices is a messy, piecemeal business, which is exactly why a robust feminist, anti-racist theory of institutional change can provide a sightline for the iterative and ongoing process of institutional change.
Structural and institutional support and investment are necessary to ensure that scholars are not eliminated or punished by the culture for simply existing and for advocating for their values and acting inside of their integrity. To enact this support and investment requires moral courage by academic leadership.
RESOURCES:
Gendering Institutional Change
Social Justice SOS: 16 Social Justice Leaders Respond to the 2016 Election
