By: Theresa Wizemann, Kyle Cavagnini, Alex Helman, and Carolyn Shore

As stated in the 2022 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (National Academies) report Improving Representation in Clinical Trials and Research: Building Research Equity for Women and Underrepresented Groups, “An equitable clinical research enterprise would include trials and studies that match the demographics of the disease burden under study. However, we remain far from achieve this goal” (NASEM, 2022). Despite decades of work and ongoing efforts on the part of policy-makers, patient groups, nonprofits, and industry sponsors to improve racial and ethnic diversity in clinical trials, there has been little change over time (Dzau, 2022). Furthermore, inconsistencies in data collection and reporting makes it difficult to track progress of demographic group participation in the United States for clinical trials. Given the urgent need, there have been calls for collective action across sectors and organizations “to align on goals for system-wide sustainable change.”

On May 20, 2024, the National Academies Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation, in collaboration with the National Cancer Policy Forum, convened a public workshop to explore opportunities to improve racial and ethnic diversity with a focus on system-level change and collective efforts across organizations and sectors that no one entity can effectively take on alone (see Box 1-1). The workshop builds on meetings hosted by the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative (CTTI) in June 2023, the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials (MRCT) Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard University in September 2023, and Faster- Cures of the Milken Institute in November 2023.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2024.

By: Laura Castillo-Page

We are pleased to share the third Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) Annual Report. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) established the ODI in 2021, and the ODI released its first Annual Report in 2022. This year’s Annual Report documents continued institutional efforts to build momentum in the ODI’s implementation phase—which began with the launch of its inaugural, comprehensive 5-year DEI Action Plan in 2023—to further advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the National Academies.

In the midst of shifting social and political contexts around DEI, our commitment to upholding the values of DEI in National Academies’ programs, policies, and products remains steadfast. As an organization, we have reaffirmed our commitment to DEI, antiracism, and accessibility by publishing an updated, more robust DEI statement and new guiding principles to consider in all of our work at the National Academies. Putting our commitment into practice, we have prioritized four domains of our DEI

Action Plan:

1. Measuring progress on our DEI goals and objectives

2. Strengthening staff development and capacity

3. Increasing diversity in programmatic activities

4. Promoting communications and transparency

To advance our work in these four areas, the ODI has fostered internal and external partnerships as well as drawn from evidence-based strategies and best practices in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields.

This Annual Report highlights the milestones, projects, and activities achieved in partnership with our colleagues and partners in 2023–2024 and outlines goals for the upcoming year. With the implementation of our DEI Action Plan in full swing, our efforts focus on building momentum, taking advantage of timely opportunities, and adapting to the changing needs of the institution by creating new tools and enhanced capacity. In partnership with the National Academies’ units and divisions, the ODI has made significant progress toward its DEI goals and applied lessons learned to better position the organization to fulfill its mission of providing objective analysis and advising the nation on complex issues facing society and the world. We look forward to continuing our journey of learning and improvement, shared responsibility, and collective impact toward a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive National Academies.

The National Academies Press 2024

By Arun Kundnani

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and anthropologist Ruth Benedict called for teaching people, especially poor people, to be less prejudiced. Here lies the origin of today 39 liberal antiracism, from diversity training to Hollywood activism. Meanwhile, a more radical antiracism flowered in the Third World. Anticolonial revolutionaries traced racism to the broad economic and political structures of modernity. Thinkers like C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, and Frantz Fanon showed how racism was connected to colonialism and capitalism, a perspective adopted even by Martin Luther King.Today, liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression. As Arun Kundnani demonstrates, white liberals can heroically confront their own whiteness all they want, yet these structures remain.This deeply researched and swift-moving narrative history tells the story of the two antiracisms and their fates. As neoliberalism reordered the world in the last decades of the twentieth century, the case became clear: fighting racism means striking at its capitalist roots

London: Verso, 2023. 304p.

By Victor Viruena

The global economy has driven companies to develop strategies, adopt and promote diversity as a core value in their organizations. The blend of ethnicity, gender, and age strengthens internal ties, boosts productivity, creativity, and innovation. According to Esvary (2015), the sharing of best practices in managing and promoting workplace diversity is intended to strengthen diversity policies further. All around the world, discrimination is rejected by society, but at the same time, businesses still reluctant to incorporate women, LGTB, young and people of different races and cultures on boards and top management positions. Lately, the raising of nationalism, racism, and political polarization has polluted the environment, making it more challenging to integrate minorities as decision-makers in organizations. The national protests against police brutality and racism have opened a new chapter in the U.S. civil rights movement; for the first time in history, Fortune 500 corporations were obligated to publicly stand against racism and take concrete actions to boost management diversity medium-level positions in their organizations.

Academia Letters, Article 430. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL430.. 5p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

Edited by Shlomo Deshen and Walter P. Zenner

FROM THE PREFACE: “This work sterns from many decades of effort and affection which we, as social anthropologists, have invested in research on Jews from Muslim lands for over thirty years. We have been engaged in uncovering the present-day life of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel, the United States, in other countries in Europe and the Americas, as well as North Africa. Together with our interest in the present, we both have a lively interest in the social history of these people. In 1982, we published a volume of selections which tried to reconstruct the lives in Jews in traditional Middle Easter societies, as well as syntheses by anthropologists and historians. Jewish Societies in the Middle East: Community, Culture and Authority was well received at the time. But, since 1982, much has been published on the Jews of North Africa and Southwest Asia, both by professional historians and anthropologists. Anthropological thinking has become more critical of earlier theoretical approaches. The perspectives of scholars have been affected by political changes in the relationship of Israel and her Arab neighbors. We decided to respond to these developments by editing a new volume.”

NY. New York University Press. 1996. 297p.

By Éléonore Lépinard

For more than two decades Islamic veils, niqabs, and burkinis have been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal regulations in many Western countries, especially in Europe, and feminists have been actively engaged on both sides of the debates: defending ardently strict prohibitions to ensure Muslim women’s emancipation, or, by contrast, promoting accommodation in the name of women’s religious agency and a more inclusive feminist movement. These recent developments have unfolded in a context of rising right-wing populism in Europe and have fueled “femonationalism,” that is, the instrumentalization of women’s rights for xenophobic agendas. This book explores this contemporary troubled context for feminism, its current divisions, and its future. It investigates how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectionality politics, and the feminist collective subject, and how feminists have been enrolled in the femonationalist project or, conversely, have resisted it in two contexts: France and Quebec. It provides new empirical data on contemporary feminist activists, as well as a critical normative argument about the subject and future of feminism. It makes a contribution to intersectionality theory by reflecting on the dynamics of convergence and difference between race and religion. At the normative level, the book provides an original addition to vivid debates in feminist political theory and philosophy on the subject of feminism. It argues that feminism is better understood not as centered around an identity—women— but around what it calls a feminist ethic of responsibility, which foregrounds a pragmatist moral approach to the feminist project.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 337p.

by Steven R. Smith.

Value incommensurability and the politics of recognition. “One of the primary objectives of this book is to redefine elements of contemporary Anglo-American liberal egalitarianism that promote the universal values of liberty and equality, however conceptualised, and to articulate how these elements are central to the radicalised political agendas of new social movements.The concern is that these agendas have become too firmly associated with the ‘identity politics’ of postmodern and poststructuralist thought, and what has been dubbed continental philosophy, which frequently rejects the universal claims of liberal egalitarianism.

Bristol University Press. (2011) 208 pages.