Essential Actions in Artificial Life
5 steps the Artificial Life community can take towards racial justice in our community.
View the Project on GitHub alackles/era-actions
5 Steps for Racial Justice in Artificial Life (US-Centric)
This page is a living, working document based on community feedback and needs. Make a pull request of the repo in order to add your own thoughts and suggestions.
Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life stands with Black communities in America in their struggle for equity and condemns police brutality in all its forms, overt and covert.
There is much work to be done inside and outside our communities. See the bottom of this page for additional resources.
Below are five essential actions to build equity within the Artificial Life community. ERA recognizes the challenges inherent in taking these steps. However, we must take them in order to creating lasting and meaningful change within our home institutions, our home communities, and our academic society as a whole.
Essential Actions for the ALife Community
Within Academic Institutions
1. Eliminate standardized testing as a barrier to academic entry.
Standardized testing is ineffective at best and dscriminatory at worst. As one example, the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) is a requirement for application to most US graduate programs. It is also widely recognized as a barrier for underrepresenated groups. Many members of the Artificial Life community have power within their institutions to change program requirements for their department, college, or even university. ISAL members in the US should advocate for dropping GRE scores as an admission requirement. ISAL members elsewhere should advocate to eliminate similar standardized requirements.
2. Establish paid work for equity and diversity.
Too often, well-meaning organizations set up chairs of equity and diversity or create diversity committees which consist of the very people that those committees are trying to protect. These committees rely on the unpaid labor of people of color to point out and fix the problems of white people. Those who do point out these problems are then pushed out and undervalued. To combat this, we need to acknowledge diversity and equity work for what it is: work. ALife members with strong standing in their community can make this happen. ISAL members should advocate for their academic units to hire and pay diversity and equity leaders, and hold themselves accountable to the suggestions of those leaders.
Within ISAL
3. Invite Black keynote speakers to ALife conferences.
In the past three years (the entirety of the merged ALIFE-ECAL conference history), only one of twenty-one keynote speakers has been a Black scientist. Indeed, only two have been underrepresented minorities in science. The most important thing ISAL can do to diversify its community is recognize and uplift the existing diverse voices within our own community. ISAL should commit to increasing the racial diversity of keynote speakers at ALife 2021.
4. Invest in Black scholarship.
ISAL has the power to invest funds in those areas of our community which are in greatest need. Recently, ISAL started a student and postdoc travel fund, with the understanding that these communities are in greater need of funding. ISAL can and should make a similar commitment to fund Black scholars; research has shown that simply investing money in Black scholars greatly improves retention rates. ISAL should set up a scholarship/travel fund to invest in Black scholars in Artificial Life, particularly early-career scholars.
The other important aspect of investing in scholarship is investing time and mentorship opportunities. Black scholars are often isolated and left without the same resources as their non-Black colleagues. A mentorship network will take time and extensive conversation to make sure the burden is not falling just on those who we are trying to uplift, but the conversation must start somewhere. ISAL should begin creating a digital network for mentorship to more effectively connect early career scholars with advanced scholars, and listen to past pitfalls about the inequity of such networks.
5. Refuse to host conferences in locations without protections against police brutality.
ISAL chose not to host an in-person conference in Summer 2020 when it would have been a grave public health concern. This decision was well-made and shows ISAL’s commitment to their members’ safety. Likewise, ISAL should refuse to host conferences in states or countries where some of its attendees run high risk of being subject to police brutality. There are measurable steps to combat police brutality and ways to track what policies have been adopted. Locations which do not meet Campaign Zero’s criteria for defunded and demilitarized police should not be considered for ISAL conferences.
Signatures
Create a pull request to add your name, or email acacia.ackles [at] gmail [dot] com.
Organizations
Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life
Individuals
| Acacia Ackles | PhD Student, Michigan State University |
| Lauren Gillespie | PhD Student, Stanford University |
| Alexander Lalejini | PhD Candidate, Michigan State University |
| Matthew Andres Moreno | PhD Student, Michigan State University |
| Kasia Kozdon | PhD Candidate, University College London |
| Emily Dolson | Postdoctoral Fellow, Cleveland Clinic |
| Dennis Wilson | Associate Professor, University of Toulouse |
Additional Resources
Organizations
Readings
White Supremacy Culture in Organizations