Abstract
The Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of
Michigan formed an Unlearning Racism in GEosciences (URGE) pod composed
of six graduate students, three postdocs and eight faculty in the
beginning of 2021. The department’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
(DEI) efforts have been building in the preceding years. Our first DEI
committee was formed in 2017 and increased its activity since
initiation, hosting DEI discussions and initiatives with participation
from students, postdocs, staff and faculty. Existing DEI activities
include a Fall Preview event for prospective graduate students, DEI
office hours and book discussions, adding DEI resources to the
public-facing Department website, student grants for DEI related
activities, and hosting workshops. The formation of an URGE pod provided
new, focused energy to our DEI efforts and bolstered ongoing work by
creating a bigger, critical mass of people who met regularly and were
focused on action. The scope of URGE, the NSF support for it, and the
interactions with other institutions that came from it, helped give our
pod momentum, legitimacy, and contributed to broader departmental
support for the recommendations that it produced. It also helped our
department identify our most critical deficits on a DEI front and
concrete ways that we will respond to them, which parallel needs
articulated in a recent report from our college’s anti-racism task
force, a major focus of our Dean. Actions emerging from the URGE pod
include, but are not limited to, hiring a Wellness and Inclusion
Advocate staff member, creation of field safety training and guidance,
and building a workshop series to address issues centered on creating a
culture of wellness and inclusion (anti-bias training, ally training,
etc). The formation of our pod coincided with and complemented the
finalization of our department’s self-study as part of a decadal
strategic planning process. Many recommendations related to hiring,
inclusive teaching, reporting, and deliberate mentoring practices that
our URGE pod discussed were incorporated into our department’s strategic
plan that was finalized in July 2021. We are eager to translate these
recommendations for anti-racism work into actions, building on and
contributing to the momentum and resources of the URGE community.