This is a page with resources for promoting anti-racism and supporting diversity and inclusion in STEM. If you're looking for information on anti-racism in general, please check out our Anti-Racism Research Subject Guide.
On this guide, there are five sections, each with a selection of resources and a link to a larger list: Articles & Web Resources, Books, Podcasts, Organizations, and Support at Northeastern. If you're not finding what you need, you can get help from your subject librarian.
You can also find subject specific guides for the following disciplines: Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Chemistry, Engineering, Environmental Science, Health Informatics, Health Sciences, Marine Science, and Physics.
The resources listed here are not comprehensive, and they inevitably reflect the biases of the various creators. They are intended to provide guidance to a wide variety of resources within STEM. This page is by no means exhaustive and will be continuously updated. Please reach out to us with your feedback and suggestions.
Below are a selection of articles and web resources related to anti-racism and supporting diversity in STEM. It is not meant to be comprehensive. For more research articles, try searching within the library's databases related to your discipline. You can also try some of the suggested databases on the Anti-Racism Guide.
Below are a selection of podcast episodes, series, and seasons relevant to racism in STEM. This is not a comprehensive list. For more resources, please visit our Anti-Racism Research Subject Guide.
For other groups and support at Northeastern, please click here to view the Support page on our Anti-Racism Guide.
Northeastern Resource and Cultural Centers:
Student Groups and Organizations:
Below are a selection of books relevant to racism in STEM. This is not a comprehensive list. For more books, search Scholar OneSearch or visit our Anti-Racism Research Subject Guide.
A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life and threaten to rip apart our social fabric. We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives--where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance--are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can't get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he's then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a "toxic cocktail for democracy." Welcome to the dark side of Big Data. Tracing the arc of a person's life, O'Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These "weapons of math destruction" score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health. O'Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change.
Below are a selection of organizations to support students, researchers, and faculty in STEM as well as groups dedicated to social justice and anti-racist efforts. This is not a comprehensive list. To find many more organizations, click here.
Reading, listening, and supporting the STEM-related organizations and initiatives included on this page are a great start.
Want to do more? Check out this page for other ways you can fight racism, including voting, volunteering, keeping up with the conversation, attending campus events, plus training and organizations beyond STEM that you can get involved with.
If you're looking for more resources or for something different, please reach out to one of our STEM Librarians: