Welcome

Discussions around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have become commonplace in academia and have resulted in new institutional policies to promote the success of underrepresented populations. But how do we, as a vision science community with various subfields, theoretical constructs, and methodologies, address DEI issues in our research? This symposium provides a critical lens to the history of vision science as a knowledge production process, identify biases and discrepancies in our current methods, and highlight specific solutions to make vision science, as well as our community, more inclusive and impactful.

This is the landing page for our Symposium at the Annual Vision Sciences Society (VSS) Meeting in 2023, where we share our history, goal, and resources discussed or related to our symposium talks.

About

This symposium started from a conversation at last year’s “Celebrate Diversity” event at VSS, when asked how VSS could be more inclusive and come up with ideas that fit our needs as historically marginalized scientists.

Our grassroots symposium is organized by early career, historically underrepresented researchers and allies:

  • Vassiki Chauhan, Ph.D. (Post-doctoral Scholar at Barnard College)
  • Sholei Croom, BSc. (Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University)
  • Kathryn Graves, BA. MS. MPhil. (Ph.D. candidate at Yale University)
  • Jasmine Kwasa, Ph.D. (Post-doctoral Scholar at Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Eline Kupers, Ph.D. (Post-doctoral Scholar at Stanford University)
  • Kimele Persaud, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor at Rutgers University)

More information about speakers and organizers can be found here.

Our goal

As (vision) scientists, we think of our work (and ourselves) as being ‘objective’ and separate from society. In this symposium, our goal is to critically evaluate our scientific process—theories, methods, practices, knowledge production—to identify biases and discrepancies that perpetuate or mitigate subjugation across racial, ethnic, gender or class lines. By critically evaluating our scientific practices, we want to challenge the ideological status quo of scientific objectivity and argue that there is no science abstract enough to be removed from the society that creates it.

When asked to report the social relevance of our work, as vision scientists, we often default to thinking about clinical and industry applications. But what are some other ways in which science and society interact in shaping the questions we ask as vision scientists and the practices we use for asking them?

  • How do social context and historical contingency shape our current scientific practices?
  • How can we practice science to better understand and confront systemic oppression without perpetuating or reifying this oppression?
  • Whose interests does our science serve? Whose experiences are prioritized and whose are silenced?

We hope that these questions will encourage you to take a critical perspective at our research practices, tools, frameworks, etc., feel empowered to address systematic biases in science, medicine and education, and promote diversity and inclusivity in your own research and scientific community.

Talks

Watch the recording now!

List of talks:

Talk 1: Sholei Croom

Making the Case for Critical Vision Science: Beyond Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Talk 2: Pawan Sinha

Looking Beyond Parochial Participant Pools

Talk 3: Jasmine Kwasa

Addressing Racial and Phenotypic Bias in Human Neuroscience Methods

Talk 4: Joel E Martinez

Facecraft: Race Reification in Psychological Research with Faces

Talk 5: Vassiki S Chauhan

Scientists in Context

Check out our Speaker & Organizers page for more details!

Social Media

Tag us! #CriticalVSS #CriticalPerspectivesVSS2023 #CPOVS2023 #CPOVSSymposium #VSS2023

Resources

  • UM Fon. (2021). Brief History of Perception: From Ancient Greek to the Cognitive Turn - and a bit what happened next. Link to website
  • Critical Psychology: An Introduction. (1997). (first edition) Ed. by D Fox & I Prilleltensky. Sage Publications. London, UK. Link to Preface
  • Demographic reporting and phenotypic exclusion in fNIRS, by JA Kwasa, HM Peterson, K Karrobi, L Jones, T Parker, N Nickerson, S Wood. (2023). Frontiers in Neuroscience. DOI:10.3389/fnins.2023.1086208. Link to article
    • Above article is part of the Frontiers in Neuroscience Research Topic: “Authentic Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Neurosciences”. Link to ToC
  • Addressing racial and phenotypic bias in human neuroscience methods, by EK Webb, JA Etter, JA Kwasa. (2022). Nature Neuroscience. DOI:10.1038/s41593-022-01046-0. Link to article
  • Hair Project from UCF – an online guide on how to prepare Afro-textured hair for EEG. Link to guide
  • Webinar on “Scientific Oppression, Biological Reductionism, and the Future of Neurotechnology” (Feb 2021) organized by the International Neuroethics Society. Link to recording
  • S Browne (2010). Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics. Critical Sociology. DOI:10.1177/0896920509347144. Link to article
  • M Cikara, JE Martinez, NA Lewis (2022). Moving beyond social categories by incorporating context in social psychological theory. Nature Reviews Psychology. DOI:10.1038/s44159-022-00079-3. Link to article
  • KE Fields, BJ Fields (2022). Racecraft: The soul of inequality in American life. Verso Books, Brooklyn NY.
  • B Hesse (2016). Preface: Counter—Racial Formation Theory. In PK Saucier & TP Woods (Eds.), Conceptual aphasia in black: Displacing racial formation (pp. vii–xi). Lexington Books, Lanham, MD.
  • A Hochman (2017). Replacing Race: Interactive Constructionism about Racialized Groups. Ergo. DOI:10.3998/ergo.12405314.0004.003. Link to article
  • A Hochman (2019). Racialization: A defense of the concept. Ethnic and Racial Studies. DOI:10.1080/01419870.2018.1527937. Link to article
  • A Hochman (2021). Further defense of the racialization concept: A Reply to Uyan. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X21000254. Link to article
  • M Kahn (2021). Notes On A (Dis)continuous Surface. Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, issue 9. Link to article
  • JE Martinez (2022). Facecraft: Race reification in psychological research with faces [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. Link to article
  • J Rosa, & N Flores (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society. DOI:10.1017/S0047404517000562 Link to article
  • MK Scheuerman, M Pape, A Hanna. (2021). Auto-essentialization: Gender in automated facial analysis as extended colonial project. Big Data & Society, DOI:10.1177/20539517211053712. Link to article

Cover Image: Glowing stripes of rainbow by Ben Mack - Pexels 6775241