We propose the following session on Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE), which aligns well with many sections of the AGU strategic plan but particularly the strategic goals: “Promote and exemplify an inclusive scientific culture” and “Partner broadly with other organizations and sectors to address scientific and societal challenges.”

Session description:

Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE, urgeoscience.org) has fostered coordinated learning and action across our geoscience community during a time of heightened awareness of systemic racism and injustice. Inequities have been advanced by the COVID-19 pandemic and marked overtly by the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Daunte Wright, who join the growing list of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color killed at the hands of the police in the United States. In addition to recent national events, URGE is also motivated by the lack of progress towards diversifying the Geosciences despite decades of efforts and good intentions.

URGE participants worked through an anti-racism curriculum, read and discussed papers, and developed policies and resources together. The common experience of URGE has united people across our Geoscience community despite the isolation imparted by the pandemic. This session serves as an accountability check for all URGE pods and an opportunity to report back on progress, highlight resources, and identify potential future collaborations for continued work. We welcome contributions that provide a broad overview of the development, implementation, and impact of anti-racist policies and resources, as well as focused contributions on key aspects such as pedagogy, mentoring, and creating inclusive environments; submissions will be organized into appropriate themes. The oral session will include presentations from URGE leadership as well as a subset of submitted abstracts.

This special session would be ideally formatted as a 90 minute Union oral session with both invited and contributed talks and a poster session with contributed abstracts. The 90 minute keynote session will include invited talks from the URGE leadership team, speakers who participated in the URGE sessions, and selections from the contributed abstracts. Additionally we would like to have a poster session where all URGE pods will be encouraged to submit abstract(s) to report on their progress on URGE, share ideas and resources that were developed within their pods, and highlight opportunities to collaborate on future initiatives. The in-person poster session would allow for ample networking, whereas a virtual poster session would be better formatted like the 2020 AGU virtual oral sessions with pre recorded videos and 1-hour live session(s) or using something interactive like Gather.town. It would be better formatted with programming on different days of the conference rather than the half-day, “meeting within a meeting” format.

This has the opportunity to be a very dynamic session with both submitted abstracts and presentations as well as significant audience participation due to the common experience fostered over the past year through URGE.