Acknowledging Bias and Pursuing Protections to Support Anti-Racist Developmental Science: Critical Contributions of Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory
American racism is deeply engrained in the nation’s ecology including its chronosystem and contributes to the nation’s unavoidably shared vulnerability. Interrogating an accurate portrayal of the nation’s history is informative for securing anti-racist research. This special issue commentary discusses the role of Spencer’s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) as a means of providing an epistemic framing for disentangling and directly addressing the problem of structural racism in the conduct of science. Additionally it demonstrates the efficacy of PVEST and offers conclusions as opportunities for achieving anti-racist scholarship especially significant to adolescents’ well-being and the improved conduct of developmental science.