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This post diverts from the purpose of the blog, but it is important to me to make my stance clear.

My week (last week) started at the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) meeting on Monday and Tuesday. Two big takeaways were a desire to decolonize/diversify my teaching, course by course, and another to switch to a “The New Statistics” style undergrad statistics course focusing on Estimation rather than Hypothesis Testing. Consider these recorded here for posterity.

Later in the week, I read Dr. Simine Vazire’s incredibly timely piece on her experiences and opinions in the peer review process in psychology, and I was somehow taken by surprise. It seems like the message that something is deeply broken and has been for decades shouldn’t come as a surprise, especially given how snipey and ego-based early academic publishing was. It shouldn’t be surprising that the system that came out of that culture is also heavily ego-laden and interested in keeping up the status quo. No disrespect to the current editorship, but Dr. Vazire’s piece makes me wish so hard to have seen the world in which she was selected to EIC Psychological Science.

Though (white) academics like to think of ourselves and our institutions as bastions of open-mindedness and Liberal/Liberating Arts, it’s pretty clear by now that the academy is just as racist as every other place in American (and Western, even global?) society. White members of the academy may not feel that we are racists, but we’ve waited far too long to become actively anti-racist. The act of restructuring our system begins with decolonizing our courses. Then, effortfully and without tokenizing, hire and promote and recommend and award BIPOC faculty whenever you can. Maybe we discuss a racism checklist for reviewers in the short term, then entertain real ways to completely change the system in the long term (paying reviewers and establishing some system for reviewer recruitment randomized within subdiscipline seems to do a lot at once).

Edit: Can’t wait to work on the suggestions from this excellent Inside Higher Ed article!

I’ve started my list with Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory (see prev post), and wanted to put up a little post to keep the blog going.

My copy of On Collective Memory contains a lengthy forward by the editor and translator, Lewis A. Coser, written in 1992. In his short biography of Halbwachs, he tells the story of the sociologist’s first university job, in which the University of Strasbourg changed from German to French hands after World War I and was restaffed with young professors who were all eager to push their disciplines and academia forward through interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration. I wouldn’t stoop to an ageist hot take that such a university sounds ideal, but I am compelled to wonder what might happen if a few experimental places gave a group of green professors complete run of a fully accommodated and studented university (or, to bring it back around, a journal). What would they do differently? What would that place look like in ten years?

I’m enjoying Halbwachs’s perspective on the idea that memory is a culturally-defined mental faculty. He argues that dreams are the feeling of memory with no net, no framework on which to organize itself. The reason memories have no scaffolding in dreams is that they are the experience of the individual with none of what Halbwachs sees to be necessary input from other people and the outside world in general. It is only through the act of remembering with someone else that we can begin to make sense of our otherwise-random recollections bouncing around in our heads. Our memories sit in a primordial pool and cease to make sense the moment we stop actively using them with someone else. It’s fun, compelling, dense reading! Good summer fodder for any memory researcher. Looking forward to continuing.