How biologists are making fieldwork more equitable

Imagine being stuck in close quarters with your coworkers 24 hours a day, far away from your home, under conditions that are stressful and unfamiliar. Scientists have a name for that: fieldwork.

Doing research outside of the lab is important to career advancement in some fields of science, but it comes with a host of unique challenges. That’s why a team from the Pitt Department of Biological Sciences developed a guide for making fieldwork safer and more equitable, especially for researchers from marginalized groups.

“Fieldwork is inherently risky,” said Elizabeth Rudzki, a graduate student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the paper. “You have risks that everyone has to deal with, whether it’s bee stings or the terrain or satellite reception, but you also have other risks that become an even bigger concern for students who have a different gender expression, or are Black or a person of color. If we want to increase diversity in the sciences, we need to also make risk more equitable.”

The process at Pitt started around two years ago, when Dietrich School Professor Cori Richards-Zawacki started to assemble a group of colleagues who were having conversations about equity in fieldwork. As director of Pitt’s Pymatuning Lab of Ecology, a research station in Northwest PA, Richards-Zawacki saw the need to gather a broad range of perspectives on the kind of guidance needed for doing fieldwork.

“The field is a place where we have a long way to go,” she said. “One of the things we wanted to do is talk about that potential for negative experiences and the things that we can do to try to head those off.”

Many field stations don’t have any such field guide, Richards-Zawacki said, and those that do exist tend to focus narrowly on issues like first aid or accidents — and don’t engage with broader issues of identity and structural inequality.

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