Understanding the history of how we studied our ocean in the past and how we study it now will help us develop approaches to make future oceanographic knowledge production more diverse, accessible, and inclusive. The motto of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) is, “The ocean we need for the future we want” (Singh et al., 2021). The Ocean Decade gives the ocean sciences community an opportunity to change the way it conducts research, to use ocean science to support sustainable development, and to energize the ocean sciences for future generations. With these goals in mind, we developed an introductory level, student-led graduate seminar that builds on the Ocean Decade framework. A research cruise involving seminar participants followed the seminar sessions. Here, we discuss how we conducted the seminar and highlight directions that are needed to energize future generations of ocean leaders and make ocean science more equitable, inclusive, and accessible.
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Assessing Diversity in US Ocean Science Institutions: Insights from Fifteen Years (2007–2021) of OSER Data
Increasing representation of racially underrepresented groups and women in the ocean sciences has been a priority for the last few decades. The Ocean Science Educators’ Retreat (OSER) data set is perhaps the only long-standing data set specifically focused, with subdisciplinary granularity, on the US academic ocean science landscape. We examine its valuable data on graduate student and faculty demographics across racial and gender dimensions to understand trends in diversity of graduate students (recruitment and retention) and faculty in US institutions over a 15-year period (2007–2021). We also discuss potential COVID-19 signals and attention to social justice in these data, based on the last year of data collection (2020–2021). Finally, we make suggestions for future studies to build on these findings and the OSER data set. This paper highlights opportunities for further broadening diverse participation in ocean sciences, such as through greater emphasis on retention, and makes a case for the ocean science community to continue demographic data collection.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2231647
- PAR ID:
- 10544032
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Oceanography Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Oceanography
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1042-8275
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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