Inclusion was a central aspect in the development of our project. First, in our branding we considered color blind people when choosing our color palette, which was used for all our social media posts and our wiki, making them available to everyone. For more inclusion, we developed the role of “collaborator”, someone who helps in the team without necessarily being a team member. This role allowed us to build a strong community and open the project to anyone that was interested in helping, breaking more barriers in science and truly making it available for all.
There are many barriers on science communication and education when it comes to language. In Mexico and in many other places, there is lots of misinformation about indigenous communities, which is why we’re working on our short story “Tatei Niukieya: The story of Mother Earth”. In this book (short story) we share with the rest of the world some of the indigenous views and cosmovision on agriculture and nature, as well as their experience as field workers. We stayed in touch with wixárica people (an indigenous culture in the “Sierra Madre Occidental”) to know about their culture, and the knowledge they have about agriculture, fields, and Earth. We want to be the most respectful to Earth, and we need to practice these traditions of preservation and care.
Throughout the process of building the book we held close contact with people that could guide us on cultural appropriation and respect towards ethnic diversity in our country. Even though we are all Mexicans, the reality indigenous people face is very different and involves challenges around discrimination, racism, and clasism that vary from the ones we face on our day-to-day life. We knew this was their story to tell, not ours. This is the reason why all “Tatei Niukieya” was developed with the focus of making visible a reality that is often dismissed and overlooked. The book will be printed and made available to kids in these communities, and everyone involved will be fairly remunerated.
Also, we want to encourage the role of women in science, our team is led by women, as we know women doesn´t have mostly management positions so we wanted to encourage and promote with our classmates, and university that women's can do it. We also had team talks about gender perspectives and how to avoid male chauvinism. For this reason, we made two special episodes about the history of women in STEM in our podcast SYN Sentido. We talked about how the path was in the past for women scientists, we talked about our personal experiences like young women in STEM, we included men team members to rebuild their position on this, and what to do to close the gender gap.
We are constantly learning about the advances that women are making day by day in science. That´s why the team members attended the informative talks at the 8M “Women´s day” where the invited doctors Sarah, Mariana and Silvia told us about their research in health areas and technological development and share to us about their academic and work trajectory.
We faced situations where the perspectives and positions of women in the team were being dismissed with sexist reasons. Feminism is a crucial part of how we make science, and it is something that we brought to everything we did throughout the project. Our team has a zero-tolerance policy towards sexism developed to protect and empower women in the team and in our university through equality.