You can enact justice when you participate!
Understanding the scholarly conversation and its context, practices, and ethical challenges is also an issue of justice.
In many disciplines, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), women, and LGBTQIA+ people were explicitly barred from attending or working within universities and therefore were barred from creating and engaging with scholarship. Even as people with minoritized identities gained legally protected access to engaging in scholarship, that scholarship was and still is unethically appropriated by those with dominant identities. While BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ people, and women have always been expert knowledge producers (even when unacknowledged), understanding and practicing scholarly conversations with integrity is a practice of accountability and justice.
Movements like #CiteBlackWomen and #DignidadLiteraria exist to counteract historical and ongoing inequities and lack of representation in academic discourse, academic publishing, and in the scholarly conversation.
- When you choose what to read or who to cite, you lift up and amplify voices within the scholarly conversation!
- When you're true to scientific evidence, you advance effective solutions to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic--in short to the problems of our times
- When you share reliable information online, you enrich civic life and help build trust in democratic institutions
