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IWD 2024: Inclusion and Community-Engaged Projects at UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences.

By b.isibor, on 4 March 2024

The theme of International Women’s Day 2024 is ‘Inspire Inclusion’. With that in mind, this blog celebrates the work of brilliant colleagues at UCL in developing a new module ‘Exploring Power, Inclusion and Exclusion with Local Communities’. They are: Stefanie Anyadi (Team Manager, Teaching & Learning, Psychology & Language Sciences), Anne Laybourne (Head of Volunteering, UCL), Sophie Scott (Director for EDI, Psychology & Language Sciences), Victoria Showunmi (Associate Professor of Education, Practice & Society, Institute of Education), and Marie Xypaki (now Head of Teaching and Learning Enhancement, SOAS).

This Masters-level module is attached to the Division of Psychology and Language sciences but it is truly interdisciplinary, bringing together students from across UCL with community partners to work on a project. The current module convener is Vincent Walsh.

How did the module come about?

The module came about because through my work with staff on implicit bias and EDI related issues, it became apparent that there was a gap for UCL students interested in this area: there were no modules available for them to study issues of exclusion, privilege and power and their current, local impact. Marie Xypaki, who was then working at UCL Arena, was a keen collaborator in developing a module proposal under the umbrella of the UCL East modules. These are a suite of elective modules designed to be interdisciplinary and focusing, where possible, on working with several boroughs in East London. We soon linked up with Sophie Scott and Victoria Showunmi, who designed the content of the module and ran its first presentation in 2022/23. 

Stefanie Anyadi

We had a range of meeting over a period of 2 years. It was an exciting way to bring together different thoughts and disciplines to enable the students to deliver something for and with the community. Wonderful way to do Blue Sky Thinking with colleagues who wanted to make an impact with student voices.

Victoria Showunmi

What do students do and what is the role of the community partner?

 The students have lectures and discussion sessions around – for example – disability, identity and difference, the point of public engagement and coproduction of research, and they also work on projects with community groups and associations.

Sophie Scott

Much of the thinking was based around Victoria’s  work on ‘Who Are You?’ which engages students with critical reflectivity and thinking beyond one’s own individual boundaries. It was risking yet very powerful. Understanding themselves helps with understanding others.  Sophie’s work on happiness was core to the work. Students selected roles which included leadership so this could be added to their portfolio.  They needed to reflect on how there group worked as a team along with how they were including challenges and solutions.

Victoria Showunmi

Last year the students worked with the Black Women’s Kindness Initiative on organising a fashion event. They worked on many different aspects of the project, from designing posters and pamphlets, encouraging local businesses to donate items for goodie bags, helping with the logistics of the actual evening. They were so enthusiastic and engaged, it was fantastic.  

Sophie Scott

It was an incredible aligning of the stars initially; I was meeting with Cherrill Hutchinson anyway, about students doing their dissertations on something that could be useful for Black Woman’s Kindness Initiative. Cherrill mentioned an event she was trying to pull of for IWD 2023, which was around 12 weeks away at the time. I had a lightbulb moment and joined the dots – Cherrill’s event and ideas are all around black women and empowerment and breaking down stereotypes about the strong black woman and needed support as a small community organisation. I had 10 amazing students on a module, who needed a real life, impactful community-based project.

Anne Laybourne

Further information can be found at https://studentsunionucl.org/articles/learning-through-volunteering

How did the participants react? Were there any positive impacts?

From the students’ reflections, it was clear that they really loved the opportunity to do community work, and many of them singled out Adam Rutherford’s lecture on racism in science as something that really made them think differently! From my perspective, it was a very positive experience and it was great to work with the students alongside Victoria and Anne.

Sophie Scott

Cherrill was fantastic and really embraced and understood the learning experience of the students. My favourite thing was Cherrill telling me she had recorded herself arriving at UCL for her Instagram as no one would believe she was turning up to the new gorgeous East campus to teach!! It was a powerful moment. I know Cherrill was nervous but she was incredible in the classroom and brought a totally different perspective and angle than any of us UCL ‘providers’! We are really grateful to Cherrill for putting her faith in our students last year and jumping into the unknown with me.

Anne Laybourne

Watching the students grow and think differently.  More work needed to be done on the benefit of the critical reflective journal. 

Victoria Showunmi

Do you have any thoughts on how inclusion and community involvement could be embedded within other parts of UCL?

Well it did occur to me that, although the course ran out of UCL East, we also have a local community here in Camden! I think the sky is the limit for this kind of work – it’s such a positive experience for students, as well as staff, and there is so much more we can do. In reality, the actual limit is Anne Laybourne’s time – she’s amazing and is fantastic with the community groups but she is just one human being and there are only so many hours in a day!

Sophie Scott

Having a panel of community members (something like dragons’ den) and a prize for the most effective group is something I wanted to do but ran out of time. would be great, I am so pleased that sister systems is now part of the programme.

Victoria Showunmi

This year has been quite the step up – it has been a very different experience, pulling together five projects, as the module has grown. I brought in Molly McCabe this year, who is currently managing the Community Research Initiative. Molly has done an amazing job, working up project ideas with our community partners – the offer being what can we do with and for you with a team of four student volunteers over 6-8 weeks? It hasn’t been easy as there a lot more moving parts! We’ve had our first ‘fail’, with illness and some inexperience plus miscommunication contributing factors. But this is also a success – it’s messy real life, right?! It is SUCH a strong element of this module that there is a reflective assessment. This means the students will always be rewarded. Our specialism is to hold and repair relationships with our community partners so that something is salvaged for them when things go ‘wrong’.

Anne Laybourne

For more information about the UCL Community Research Initiative, and how to get involved in community-engaged projects, see https://studentsunionucl.org/volunteering/cris/ or contact the UCL Community Research Initiative Manager Molly McCabe.

Many thanks to the contributors to this blog for their generous help!

Welcome our New Faculty Equity Leads Sam & Elise

By b.isibor, on 3 May 2023

The Faculty of Brain Sciences is delighted to announce the appointment of our new Gender Equity Lead, Sam Gilbert, and our new Disability Equity Lead, Elise Crayton.

To provide you with an idea of who will be representing the interests of gender and disability equity at the Faculty level, we asked Sam and Elise to briefly introduce themselves and tell us what they are looking forward to in their respective roles.

Professor Sam Gilbert

I am a Professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, currently working on the relationship between human memory and technology. I’ve been at UCL since coming here over 20 years ago as a PhD student, and a member of my divisional Career Development Equality and Diversity committee since 2016. In that time I’ve seen increasing work towards Gender Equity at UCL but clearly there is still a long way to go.
I am excited to work across the diverse institutes and departments in the Faculty to help co-ordinate actions, share best practice, and develop new initiatives.

Dr Elise Crayton

I am a Research Fellow at the Centre for Behaviour Change and the Faculty Disability Equity Lead. In my role as the Faculty Disability Equity Lead, I want to understand staff and student views on what the barriers and enablers are to disability equity and start to generate and implement recommendations for inclusive change. I am also looking forward to continuing the positive work carried out by those in post before me. I am here to help, so encourage you all to get in touch with any disability equity matters.
If you want to work with either Sam or Elise or have any queries for them, contact fbs.edi@ucl.ac.uk.

IWD 2023: Equality is the goal, Equity is how we get there!

By b.isibor, on 3 March 2023

The Faculty of Brain Sciences is proud of its progressive inclusive culture that celebrates diversity and aims to ensure gender equality in all its activities. International Women’s Day (IWD) celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women and marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality.

The IWD 2023 campaign theme on #EmbraceEquity maintains the reasoning worldwide understanding why moving beyond Equal opportunities is important. Equity recognises that each person has different circumstances and allocates the necessary resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. Below are tips on how to make equity achievable:

Challenge your own assumptions

Reflect on your own unconscious or implicit biases to meaningfully engage with others whilst embracing diverse communities and conversations.

Get involved

The Faculty encourages colleagues to join and engage with committees and projects that involve improving women’s equity. Under the equality charter mark framework and accreditation scheme, committees such as Athena SWAN exist in each Institute and Division to advance gender equality, representation, progression, and success for both women and men. They perform this by creating and progressing Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) action plans.

Don’t just understand ‘women’, understand the intersections of women too!

Acknowledging differences is what makes equity real. Therefore, seeing women through a homogenous lens may be harmful when trying to reach an equal outcome. The experiences of a white disabled woman are distinctive from the experiences of a black queer woman.

Whether it’s leadership, research grants, recruitment, or promotions- the more intersections you explore, the more potential to solve problems may occur.

Be an Active Bystander

We encourage challenging harmful stereotypes, biases, and behaviors within your personal and professional communities towards women. Knowing when a situation is a red flag and intervening when appropriate creates the opportunity for equity to flourish- this includes everyone.

Show compassion and understanding

Existing inequalities have been increasingly exposed among people during the pandemic when it comes to things like family life, workload imbalance, and more. If someone shares their struggles with you, flexibility and compassion make a world of difference.

Never underestimate the value of encouragement and empathy in achieving equity for women.

On that note, Happy International Women’s Day to the amazing women in the Faculty, and let’s not forget to #EmbraceEquity!

 

Gender Meta-Research in Neuroscience and Psychology

By ucjtkfo, on 19 May 2021

Written by A. Fotopoulou, FBS Gender Equity Lead

The majority of academics and researchers in the UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences are working on basic or clinical subfields of psychology and psychiatry, as well as basic or clinical subfields of the neurosciences and neurology. In recent decades, these fields have improvement in terms of gender parity and global access. Other areas, particularly positions of power and leadership, remain overly-represented by Western male academics. Recent reports on the editorial boards of top medical journals, and the sub-fields of psychiatry and neurology, have found them to be significantly skewed in favor of male editors (Amrein et al., 2011; Hafeez et al., 2019; Mariotto et al., 2020).

In a recently preprinted study (https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2021.02.15.431321v1), former FBS PhD student Eleanor Palser, Maia Lazerwitz and myself analyzed the editorial boards of the top 50 journals in each of the two fields of psychology and neuroscience, as listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) list in Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Citation Reports, in terms of the editors’ country of affiliation and gender. These lists are constructed based on journal impact factor, and therefore represent, for many, the most prestigious journals in these fields.  We wish to emphasize at the outset, however, that the implications of these findings are limited to inferred gender from publicly available information, not self-reported. Our study also did not address many other traits, identities and motives that may explain and enrich the implications of our data on gender and geographical affiliation, such as for example areas of double disadvantage and intersectionality; the consequences of membership in multiple discriminated against social groups (Cole, 2009). This study merely sets the foundations for much deeper EDI studies led at the Faculty and beyond.

Our results indicated that amongst the 2,864 editors in psychology and 3,093 editors in neuroscience, USA-based academics significantly outnumber those from other countries, and male editors significantly outnumber female editors (Figures 1 and 2). The situation was widespread, and not driven by a few “bad apples”, with ten times as many journals in neuroscience comprised of more than 70% male editors (40%) compared with the same proportion of female editors (4%). The ratio was similar in psychology, with 22% of journals comprised of more than 70% male editors compared to just 2% that had the same proportion of women.

Figure 1: Graph showing the proportion of male and female editors across 50 journals in Psychology and Neuroscience. Click graph to enlarge image.

Figure 2: Chart showing the location of the journal articles. Click chart to enlarge image.

When editorial boards were sub-divided into the categories of 1) editors-in-chief and their deputies, 2) associate and section editors, and 3) editorial and advisory board members, the only category where there was not a significant gender imbalance was in the editors-in-chief of psychology journals and their deputies. These findings highlight that some of the most powerful positions one can hold in academic psychology and neuroscience remain largely occupied by male, and Western, academics. We hope this paper will represent a call to journals in the fields of psychology and neuroscience to actively geo-diversify their editorial boards, and explicitly define their policies and selection criteria for editorial board appointment.

Of course, academic psychology and neuroscience are fields that have been traditionally dominated by men, and the US has a larger population than the countries. It is possible that psychology and neuroscience have also grown to a greater extent as academic disciplines in the US than elsewhere. Moreover, we considered only English-speaking journals, and journals associated with US-based societies were well-represented. While history, affiliation, language and size may explain some of the observed differences, it is of note that the gender ratios of undergraduate and graduate students entering these fields has dramatically changed in recent decades, and most science appears to be shared globally in English. Therefore, to the extent that academic fields wish to avoid restricting the progression and scientific interests of women and non-US based scholars, gender and affiliation diversity of leadership positions in these fields should also change. Journal editors exert considerable power over what is published, and by extension, the direction of an academic discipline and the career advancement of authors. It is important then, to minimize any biases extrinsic to the merit of the work that affect publication decisions. One way to achieve this to ensure a diverse pool of editors, such that biases are diluted, and their influence reduced.