The myth of neutrality in science has got to go

A few resources for articulating and embracing the personal values you bring to your professional work

If you’ve followed my work for long, you’re familiar with my stance that the myth of neutrality in science is just that—a harmful yet persistent narrative that insists:

• neutrality is a collective ideal,

• humans can be neutral,

• your capacity for neutrality reflects your intellect and fit in society and science,

• your capacity for neutrality is intrinsic, though performative neutrality can be trained (ahem indoctrinated) into you if necessary.

I’m not saying anything new here. Critiques of this harmful hogwash have been issued for decades (if not centuries).

And yet, here we are, still training and evaluating scientists as if our neutrality is going to somehow keep us above the distasteful mess of public distrust in science, political backlash, active revenge against science (which isn’t at all new, by the way; just talk to Galileo!), and the current, on-going effort to dismantle science funding and research in the U.S.

So many people, for so long, have said that science is social, not neutral.

As contemporary events demonstrate, we are lonnnnngggggg overdue for a shift in how we train and evaluate scientists that actually takes this social reality into account. This shift needs to equip scientists at all career stages, in all sectors, to connect their understanding of scientific methods and facts with the realities of social dynamics, political discourse, and capitalism.

I can’t wave a magic wand and overhaul training and evaluation metrics (though that is what a lot of my work is about these days!). Instead, here are resources (including some of my own work) that I bring to the table (in some way) when I teach, lead a workshop, or give a talk. Many have a scicomm bent to them, but the overall utility should be transferable to other fields. (Although, I do see scicomm as an intrinsic part of the necessary shift to doing this all better!)

Discerning your own values

• Step-by-step process for identifying your values. Sharing science through shared values, goals, and stories: An evidence-based approach to making science matter (PDF)

• Series on self-determining your metrics of success in academia [1]. Specifically:

  • What can self-determined metrics look like in academia?

  • Get yourself a no-buddy

  • People make it possible: Making the world a better place is about relationships, not awards

  • No, you do not have to love your job (even if you still believe that science can help save the world)

  • If student evals suck, how do we know we’re doing a good job teaching?

• Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Now workbook

• Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year workbook

• Jorden Cumming’s book Sustaining Your Well-Being in Higher Education: Values-Based Self-Care for Work and Life

• Beronda Montgomery on framing your own metrics for success as an academic

• Pooja Lackshmin's discussion of boundaries (in this interview with Tressie MacMillan Cottom)

• Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's insight on needing to balance efforts to make the world better with demonstrating your expertise 

Hopefully you can use these personally and work to embed them (or resources like them) into your own work.

And, I really do think, THIS IS WHERE WE NEED TO START. Until we, as scientists and science trained people, reckon with, acknowledge, articulate, and embrace what motivates us individually, we will probably just keep acting like cogs in the wheels of corporate academia. Once we recognize that we care about people and the world, and affirm this helps us be better scientists and better humans, only then can we meaningfully review how we operate and shift to working in and beyond science in ways that make the world a better place…together!

How about you?

What do you do to understand what motivates you, as a scientist who is also a person in this world? A person with relationships and likely with interests beyond (and perhaps relevant/perhaps not to) academia?

---

[1] If you “color outside the lines,” you can translate the scicomm or academic framing of these to also have relevance for many other careers/sectors.