Building a Kinder and More Just Research System
Author: Aisling Rayne and Catherine Febria
Article: Rayne et al. 2023. LINK to publication https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01635-4
Meet Dr. Aisling Rayne! Aisling (she/her) is Pākehā (European-descended Settler) and early career researcher based at the Cawthron Institute in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work broadly explores how environmental knowledge can support nurturing relationships between people and place. She has worked for many years with HHL PI Dr. Catherine Febria and colleagues in the Kindness in Science collective and HHL alumni and fellow Kiwi Roland Eveleens.
Kia ora, boozhoo, hello!
It’s a serene autumn day here as I write from our family farm in Te Waipounamu, the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. I’m visiting home on my way south to chat with local people about their connections with freshwater fish and introduced species as part of the Fish Futures program (https://fishfutures.co.nz/). These interviews are one of the great joys and privileges of my work as an emerging social scientist and Pākehā (non-Indigenous New Zealander). My research journey is one I attribute to the guidance of extraordinary mentors, such as Dr Catherine Febria and my PhD supervisor Dr Tammy Steeves, who have shown how care for community and place can be brought to bear in research and practice.
An important part of my journey to date has involved the Kindness in Science initiative. This initiative began as a collective of people – including Cat – focused on leading a culture shift in the science community. Today, Kindness in Science exists primarily as the Kindness in Science project led by Tammy and funded by Te Pūnaha Matatini, a national Centre of Research Excellence in Aotearoa.
Why Kindness in Science? Here in Aotearoa, our research system seems to be falling into disarray. Years of underfunding have come to roost in the shape of job losses and institutional restructures. Our new central government has promised serious cuts to public research funding, along with priorities that are deeply antithetical to social justice and ecological care. It’s a worrying situation for much of our research community. It’s also a familiar pattern elsewhere in the world.
To quote Tammy, our research system isn’t broken – it was built this way. Despite claimed values, our institutions are designed to promote hypercompetitiveness over collaboration, individualism rather than collective action, and productivism at the cost of careful scholarship and community relations. It’s a system designed to create ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ rather than to benefit society. With the cracks clearly showing, now seems an opportune moment for rebuilding.
In 2023, we co-authored a commentary ‘Collective action is needed to build a more just science system’ in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behaviour. As lead author, I had the privilege (and challenging) task of weaving our diverse backgrounds and disciplinary languages into a shared vision for a better, more just research system.
In 2017, Kindness in Science initially focused on the levers of change available from individuals to groups with the aim to shift cultures at the institutional level. But acting only as individuals can be slow, tiring and costly in terms of research time and career progression. In addition, equity and care work is often borne by those already on the margins (e.g., the notion of a cultural double-shift). The Kindness in Science project needed a broader lens and language for thinking about systemic change, at a whole research ecosystem level.
When birds flock for flight, they move from individuals into a highly ordered structure that enables them to move together, aiding their collective journey. To be responsive to the critical challenges of our time, the research community also needs to travel forward in a shared and purposeful direction. This is the concept of collective action.
So where should we focus our efforts? Many scholars argue that there are multiple, connected layers at which we can work toward change. These range from everyday practices to institutional structures; from our relationships with each other to our most inner beliefs and values. Systemic change also involves shifts in resourcing and power, as well as the ways in which we express ideas or communicate (as I’m doing right now).
The key point is that remaking our research system can and should be a collective and multifaceted effort. This is the call to action that our team, and many others, have made (e.g., here). Of course, this idea is complicated by the increasingly global nature of our research system and of issues like climate change, biodiversity loss and Indigenous justice. Any form of global collective action around these issues necessarily involves many diverse contexts. This raises some key questions: what kind of research system do we want to collectively reimagine? And how can we build connections and solidarity – a shared direction of travel – across different contexts, such as those in Aotearoa and Turtle Island?
Perhaps these are questions to explore in future visits and collaborations including in Turtle Island/North America with the Healthy Headwaters Lab … For now, I’m excited to see the vision and ethic of Kindness in Science continue to grow, in Aotearoa and beyond. I’m also heartened by important work happening elsewhere (for example, I loved this recent paper featuring Cat). And of course, there’s always joy to be found in conversations about freshwater fish.
HHL and the Sister Lab network
In so-called Canada, we still have a long way to go in our research ecosystems. Some bright spots include that NSERC Canada identified contributions to scholarship that extend far beyond peer-reviewed publications. But that isn’t enough. Funding schemes haven’t changed and grants in support of relationship building and boundary spanning are few and far between. That’s why we’ve invested in a network of sister labs which have enabled a community of like-minded (mostly women-led) research labs to support one another through open and ongoing conversations, collaborations and efforts in support of a shared value on a more just and research system.
Regardless, we remain committed to leading and conducting all projects with care, spreading lateral kindness in how decisions are made, and how to navigate hardships in research and the partnerships needed to support them. Our recently-launched UWindsor National Urban Park Hub is one such example, and is Catherine’s ongoing involvement as a ISAP member with New Zealand’s Biological Heritage National Science Challenge. Systemic change takes time, but as HHL alumni Dante Bresolin once said, every single step towards progress is still progress.
