More than 4,000 scientists and some scientific organizations, as well as universities and academic journals such as Nature and others, have stopped research activities this June 10 to reflect and take action on systemic inequalities in science. Organizations that joined the strike include the server preprint of physical sciences arXiv, which discourages authors from submitting manuscripts on Wednesday.
The event is carried out by two groups that use hashtags such as # Strike4BlackLives, #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia.
Strike4BlackLives
The event comes after two weeks of demonstrations in the United States and around the world, to commemorate the death of George Floyd and other African Americans who have died at the hands of police.
Black scientists have mourned these losses openly sharing their experiences with racism in science, and many major scientific organizations have published public messages of support for the Black Lives Matter movement and against racism in general.
Brittany Kamai, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, came up with the idea of suspending her academic work last Monday and sent an email to a group of colleagues who supported the initiative. These included Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, who is part of Particles For Justice, and Yilen Gómez Maqueo Chew, astrophysicist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. They all launched ShutDownStem.com on June 5, along with a letter and a petition in ParticlesForJustice.org.
Although the movement began in the United States, it has quickly spread throughout the world.
However, some critics of this event argue that science should not be politicized in this way and remain more outside of activism on non-strictly scientific issues.
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The news
Today science is on strike over racism towards black people and the death of George Floyd
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.