scholarly journals Overcoming racism in the twin spheres of conservation science and practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 288 (1962) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren F. Rudd ◽  
Shorna Allred ◽  
Julius G. Bright Ross ◽  
Darragh Hare ◽  
Merlyn Nomusa Nkomo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Colonial History ◽  
Conservation Science ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Conservation Practice ◽  
Advancement Opportunities ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Do So

It is time to acknowledge and overcome conservation's deep-seated systemic racism, which has historically marginalized Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities and continues to do so. We describe how the mutually reinforcing ‘twin spheres’ of conservation science and conservation practice perpetuate this systemic racism. We trace how institutional structures in conservation science (e.g. degree programmes, support and advancement opportunities, course syllabuses) can systematically produce conservation graduates with partial and problematic conceptions of conservation's history and contemporary purposes. Many of these graduates go on to work in conservation practice, reproducing conservation's colonial history by contributing to programmes based on outmoded conservation models that disproportionately harm rural BIPOC communities and further restrict access and inclusion for BIPOC conservationists. We provide practical, actionable proposals for breaking vicious cycles of racism in the system of conservation we have with virtuous cycles of inclusion, equality, equity and participation in the system of conservation we want.

scholarly journals Permanent Black Immigrants’ Experiences of Working in Ontario

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Coleman-Bryan
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Career Advancement ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Black Immigrants ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Advancement Opportunities ◽  
Black Employment ◽  
Income Status ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
Stable Employment

This Major Research Paper is a qualitative study that utilizes a narrative approach through an anti-Black racism lens to investigate the cultural, historical, political and socioeconomic factors that influences the career advancement and employment journey for Black immigrants in Ontario, specifically those from the Caribbean. This study follows the employment journey of two adults of African descent in Ontario. Through their stories, the two participants detail their experiences with subtle systemic racism and resulting precarious employment. Other common themes that emerged amongst the participants were low income status, blocked career advancement opportunities, maintaining multiple jobs, lack of training specifically for Black immigrant adults, and low wage employment. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of changing policies and structures in order to remove the barriers to stable employment and career advancement faced by people of African descent. Keywords: Anti-Black Racism, Narrative, Ontario, African, Caribbean, Black, Employment Stability, Systemic and Policy

Engagement, Disability, and Hard-to-Reach Students

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 189
Author(s):  
Peter Felten
Keyword(s):  
Student Engagement ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Cultural Expectations ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Do So

Cultural expectations and institutional practices mark off certain students and communities as those most likely to be easily engaged or to be the hardest to reach. We and they then often act within that construct, behaving in ways that reinforce the norms. Adopting a new perspective on familiar frameworks like ‘hard-to-reach’ is rarely easy. To do so, we need to identify and question tacit beliefs and long-standing institutional structures. Yet many of us who work in student engagement have demonstrated our ability to imagine and enact just that kind of culture of transformation.

Challenges for the computer vision community

2021 ◽  
pp. 224-238
Author(s):  
Dan Morris ◽  
Lucas Joppa
Keyword(s):  
Computer Vision ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Camera Traps ◽  
Conservation Science ◽  
Conservation Practice ◽  
Aerial Surveys ◽  
Core Technology ◽  
Tremendous Progress ◽  
Core Concepts

Computer vision (CV) is rapidly advancing as a tool to make conservation science more efficient, for example, by accelerating the annotation of images from camera traps and aerial surveys. However, before CV can become a widely used approach, several core technology challenges need to be addressed by the CV community. Taking into consideration several case studies in CV where tremendous progress has been made since the emergence of deep learning, this chapter will introduce core concepts in CV, survey several areas where CV is already contributing to conservation, and outline key challenges for the CV community that will facilitate the adoption of CV in mainstream conservation practice.

scholarly journals Person, Place, Time and COVID-19 Inequities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina S Schnake-Mahl ◽  
Usama Bilal
Keyword(s):  
Population Distribution ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Mortality Data ◽  
County Level ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Do So

Abstract In their commentary, Zalla et al. argue that the approach taken by Centers for Disease Control (CDC) comparing the proportion of COVID-19 deaths by race/ethnicity to a weighted population distribution ignores how systemic racism structures the composition of places. While the CDC has abandoned their measure, they do so because of the changing geographic distribution of COVID-19, not because the measure underestimates racial disparities. We further Zalla et al.’s argument, advocating for a relational approach to estimating COVID-19 racial inequities that integrates the reciprocal relationship between context and composition through the interaction of places and people over time. To support our argument, we present a series of figures exploring the heterogeneous relationships between places, people, and time, using US county-level publicly available COVID-19 mortality data from February to December 2020 from Johns Hopkins University. Longitudinal and more geographically granular data that allows for disaggregation by person, place, and time will improve our estimation and understanding of inequities in COVID-19.

scholarly journals Permanent Black Immigrants’ Experiences of Working in Ontario

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Coleman-Bryan
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Career Advancement ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Black Immigrants ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Advancement Opportunities ◽  
Black Employment ◽  
Income Status ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
Stable Employment

This Major Research Paper is a qualitative study that utilizes a narrative approach through an anti-Black racism lens to investigate the cultural, historical, political and socioeconomic factors that influences the career advancement and employment journey for Black immigrants in Ontario, specifically those from the Caribbean. This study follows the employment journey of two adults of African descent in Ontario. Through their stories, the two participants detail their experiences with subtle systemic racism and resulting precarious employment. Other common themes that emerged amongst the participants were low income status, blocked career advancement opportunities, maintaining multiple jobs, lack of training specifically for Black immigrant adults, and low wage employment. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of changing policies and structures in order to remove the barriers to stable employment and career advancement faced by people of African descent. Keywords: Anti-Black Racism, Narrative, Ontario, African, Caribbean, Black, Employment Stability, Systemic and Policy

scholarly journals Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Susan T. Fiske ◽  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Interracial Interactions ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Racial Isolation ◽  
Racial Biases ◽  
Domains Of Life ◽  
Interpersonal Patterns ◽  
The Mind

AbstractSystemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

Medawar?s medicine: the local-global prescription for conservation actions

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Robert A. Leidy ◽  
Peggy Lee Fiedler
Keyword(s):  
Invasive Species ◽  
Habitat Fragmentation ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Natural Habitat ◽  
Conservation Science ◽  
Conservation Practice ◽  
Size Number ◽  
Conservation Actions ◽  
Effective Conservation

Duffy and Kraus (2008) provide a broadly relevant and generally insightful overview of what plagues implementation of effective conservation science. That their overview is true is largely because many, if not all, of their insights and proffered solutions to remedy the ineffectiveness of conservation science apply globally. That is, one could replace ?Hawai?i? with any number of other Pacific islands and continental venues, a depressing and rapidly growing list of threatened ecosystems. In essence, the conservation issues raised by Duffy and Kraus are not local, regional, or by any means, unique to Hawai?i, although Hawai?i does represent one of the more challenging places to implement conservation practice successfully. Distinctions between regional (viz., island) and continental environmental crises are becoming blurred as ecosystems become increasingly fragmented and isolated, and their supporting processes altered. For example, California at approximately 40.5 million hectares, 38 million residents, and 150 years of habitat fragmentation now consists of many much smaller natural habitat fragments surrounded by a matrix of human-altered landscapes than only 50 years ago. These island fragments vary in size, number and spatial orientation not unlike island archipelagos. Furthermore, current knowledge gaps are universal, invasive species are invading every island and continent, more species are endangered or extinct than we can possibly know, document or protect, millions of ecosystems worldwide would benefit from some type of protection, active restoration, and management, and all types of conservation activities are grossly under funded around the globe.

Aguirre, Caché, and Creating Anti-Colonialist Puzzles

2021 ◽  
pp. 165-180
Author(s):  
Yusuf Yüksekdağ
Keyword(s):  
Colonial History ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Western Intellectual ◽  
Wrath Of God ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ◽  
Do So ◽  
Normative Implications

This chapter explores the anti-colonial narrative potential of certain works of cinema taking Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Caché as a case in point. To do so, this chapter first and draws upon the theoretical and normative lens put forward by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the representation of the colonized other and her resulting political and intellectual call for self-reflection on one's privileged Western intellectual positioning. This lens has many normative implications for the ways in which the colonized subject and colonial history are discussed and represented. The partial lack of representation of the colonized other in Aguirre, the Wrath of God leaves the subjectivity of the colonizer in crisis and madness. Second, the narrative of Caché is explored and it is suggested that it resembles the rhetoric of Foucauldian disciplinary power of surveillance turned upside-down thus enforcing the complicit of colonialism to question her privilege.

scholarly journals Lessons from the conservation sector's response to a crisis environment in Zimbabwe

Oryx ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mxolisi Sibanda
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Development ◽  
Local Conservation ◽  
Conservation Practice ◽  
Political Expediency ◽  
Local Engagement ◽  
Wait And See ◽  
Conservation Organizations ◽  
Regional Conservation ◽  
Do So

AbstractHere I examine how conservation organizations responded to a crisis environment in Zimbabwe. Since c. 2000 Zimbabwe has gone through a political, social and economic crisis that has led to reduced support for, and in some cases disengagement by, international and regional conservation organizations. I explore five response types on a continuum of disengagement and propose lessons for wider conservation practice. The lessons include the need to recognize that political discourse often excludes biodiversity conservation and therefore any conservation decisions based on political expediency run the risk of impeding conservation progress. Progress in conserving biodiversity requires sustained investment regardless of changing political circumstances. Such investment should include support for institutional development, local engagement, and accountability that engenders ownership of local conservation initiatives. I conclude that conservation organizations must take a long-term view of conservation and commitment to enhance conservation outcomes. This kind of engagement must be adaptive instead of based on a wait-and-see attitude or other forms of disengagement, as has been seen in Zimbabwe. Conservation organizations that disengage do so at the risk of further loss of biodiversity in some of the most biodiverse but unstable places.

Federal Wealth Policies in Support of Jim Crow

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Survey Of Consumer Finances ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Racial Wealth Gap ◽  
Consumer Finances ◽  
Wealth Gap ◽  
Critical Aspects ◽  
Do So ◽  
Taxation Data

Recognizing the specific ways that systemic racism has and continues to function in our society is essential to developing a political economy that effectively examines contemporary problems and issues, whatever they may be. To do so, this paper identifies key elements of an anti-racist perspective and uses them to illuminate critical aspects of our racial wealth gap. Given the nature of wealth – its inherent durability and transferability across generations – this paper demonstrates how the current racial wealth gap is the result of past wealth policies that privileged whites. Further, it demonstrates how our current wealth policies are not simply encouraging the concentration of wealth among the 1 percent, but also recreating a system of racial segmentation. In a time in which overtly racialized policies and laws are often illegal, our wealth policies now function as a modern version of past Jim Crow laws and norms. This paper relies on the Survey of Consumer Finances and Joint Committee on Taxation data to document its claims.

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