5 Questions to Fabrizio Ghiselli and James Fleming, chairs of the Social Justice Committee

Read the full interview with Fabrizio Ghiselli and James Fleming below:

James: I'm James Fleming, I'm one of the two chairs of ERGA’s Social Justice committee. I'm a postdoc currently at Japan's Marine Science and Technology Institute (JAMSTEC). I've been here for just 6 months and before that I was working in Europe. At some point I'll work on European genomes again. As for why I am particularly interested in social justice matters I think for me it's kind of always been there. Both of my parents are quite committed trade unionists in the UK, so I grew up in quite a strong left wing background in that respect. The political difficulties of people from marginalized groups was something that I grew up in a way to try and be as aware of as possible.

Fabrizio: I'm Fabrizio Ghiseli and I'm an associate professor of zoology at the University of Bologna, Italy. I'm mostly interested in biodiversity genomics and molecular and genome evolution. There are two main reasons why I joined this committee: first because during my career and on the way to tenure I saw a lot of things that I didn't like and I want to change this reality or help changing it.  The second reason is that living in academia it's like living in a bubble and I wanted to get out of this bubble and learn about social justice applied to different scenarios - not only like to career paths - but also thinking of what is happening outside academia with minorities, with scientific colonialism and issues like these.

James:  I always really appreciate Fabrizio’s perspective on social justice issues because he is at a much later career stage than I am  (I'm still kind of starting things off) but also because we come from very different places in Europe. We have very different perspectives on what impacts who and how. I think that that's actually something that the Social Justice committee has that's nice but could always use more of. So we are always looking for more perspectives and more members.

Fabrizio: It’s the same for me. I'm learning a lot from James and the other members on some specific issues, while I can give a perspective on topics like teaching, for example. I teach a lot so I have experience with students and the relationship between tenure track or with the other people in academia so I think we complement really well.

Fabrizio: In ERGA we are studying biodiversity but we need to keep in mind that people are also made of diversity. Our goal is to make the entire diversity of people in ERGA feel welcome and included.

James: Yes, one of the different topics that we're interested in looking at are the effects of people's lived experiences within the biodiversity genomics community and how we can make ERGA and generally the universities and [research] institutions more comfortable, safer places to be. As part of that as well we're hoping to work a bit more with training and skills development and also with the outreach committees here in ERGA to look at how and to who we talk to when we communicate ERGA’s research, because we do a lot of really exciting stuff and it would be great to tell as many people about that as possible.

James: Something that Fabrizio started the last question with which I think is really important is this idea that ERGA is made up of people. We aren't just scientific robots who produce papers, we are people who have lived experiences and who experience different challenges within the academic and within our personal environments. And I think valuing the members of ERGA as people is a very important part of doing the research properly. I think that also means valuing the communities that we do that research with - the people that live alongside the animals, plants and fungi the ERGA plans to sequence, and the people whose traditions and cultures are wrapped up in the existence of those organisms. We also have to explicitly confront that academia is not always a comfortable environment for people from a variety of marginalized communities and sometimes that's very intentional and sometimes it can be due to biases that we overlook. There are people who are restricted from access to downstream analyses, for example, because they can't make it into the field for whatever reason, or individuals who don't feel comfortable joining up with certain consortiums, or with certain groups for various valid reasons. And I think that it's very important that we try to confront that head on as well and make ERGA and the Earth BioGenome Project as a whole a place that's comfortable and fun for all researchers to be.

James: I think from ERGA’s perspective and from a practical perspective as a member of the social justice committee the main challenge is that there is a lot of work to do. That makes trying to solve every problem at once really tempting. But considering we're a very small committee and that all of our funding comes from grants, of course our ambitions have to be commensurate with practicality in order to really make a difference. I can talk very loftily about the social justice principles and how it's important that we save the world but I think that it's important that we actually do something with that rather than just espouse our principles and I think for us that's really going to be our main challenge - particularly in the first two or three years. Another challenge is that achieving social justice in ERGA means making sure that the ERGA community takes us seriously, and that means achieving concrete provable positive results and I think that will hopefully start something that snowballs itself.

Fabrizio: Yes, what James just said is really true and important. In my opinion the most difficult thing is that we need to change a lot and people don't like changes. It's difficult to convince people to make changes and so I think that’s the biggest challenge. 

James: I think it's very easy when you ask people to make change - and this happens to me as well -  to get very defensive. I'm sure that there are some people who will read this interview and be like “oh well, he shouldn’t have said that” and I think that that's probably fine. I'm going to miss things out, but I think there are a lot of people in the community, myself included, who have very good intentions but every now and then we need to change what we're doing in order to make it better. I think particularly if you think you're doing the right thing, being told that you can do the right thing better is often one of the hardest things to take. 

Fabrizio: In the new social justice committee we need to be disruptive because a lot of change is needed and also we don't have much time. But changes need time and so it's a tricky situation - we need to be disruptive but in a positive way. We don't want to force people to do things. First because we can't and second because people don’t respond well to this kind of behavior. As James said, we need to showcase the positive results from this kind of behavior that we want to adopt and that is tricky. It's also exciting.

James: We also have grant applications that are currently in progress under evaluation, which is really positive. Some of these grant applications are examining whether or not EDI (Equality, diversity and inclusion) initiatives in Europe are actually working. There's often a lot of cynicism about top-down EDI tracking management and evaluation systems. So our grant proposals are themed around asking scientists and academics - the people who are affected by these schemes - whether or not they do think that these schemes are working for them. Or how they think these schemes could be improved. As we come into this new year we're also going to be building our online social justice resources library through the ERGA Knowledge Hub and helping build the early career research network with training and knowledge transfer. So hopefully we'll be able to start bringing more early career researchers into the ERGA Committees - I think it's important to acknowledge that early career researchers can often feel excluded from big groups like ERGA and can feel like these groups aren't for them or for them yet. So I think that it's important from a social justice perspective to be part of the career development of early career researchers as well.

Fabrizio: Yes, absolutely. Early career researchers and also minorities are more sensitive to this kind of problem and so we can learn from them and from their experiences. They are also generally more willing to change and so it’s very important to include them.

James: Yes, I think that's true and statistically with early career researchers each generation is always more diverse than the one before. I think that that's very important so we can try and address this leaky pipeline problem that we have in science: what happens is the older and older you get the more and more scientists end up looking like me because the more and more people who don't (look like me) tend to feel like they have been pressured out of the system. So making serious advances in the early career stages could be a way to help fix that problem.

Conclusion

James:  [Our final message is that] we're always looking for new members! We're energetic, we're quite young… There's one thing that I wanted to mention which is that we've been using these three buzzwords but they're not just buzzwords to make us feel better: solidarity, intersectionality and collective action: these things are the things that will actually make this social justice committee good. Listening to each other, working together and listening across our boundaries.  We’re always looking for new members and we're always excited for new members, wherever they're from, whatever they're interested in and whether they're people who have historically been activists or people who are just interested in these topics. We meet every first Thursday of the month at 11:00 Central European Time. Right now we're mostly discussing moving forward with grant proposals but we're also looking at preparing a new member session in the new year that will be a lot more focused for trying to welcome people in and get people to know each other a bit more in the committee to try and inspire some internal projects within us. 

Fabrizio: So if you want to make a change, just stop complaining, join us and let's try to make it happen!

Send an email to the Social Justice Committee and learn more about how you can participate!