On Monday, the symposium “Measuring Racial Representation in Dutch Universities”, hosted by Gerwin van Schie and Anastasia Hacopian, took place at Universiteit Utrecht. Our IDEA Center researchers, Jule van den Berg and Helen Tibboel attended insightful presentations and participated in profound discussions.
One important topic was the concept of ‘race’, that in Dutch evokes discomfort. This was reiterated by participants and led to conversations on how we can deal with and learn from this discomfort. Eventually, this will help us to answer the question of whether, why, and how we should measure racial representation in academia, a topic Helen Tibboel also addressed in her presentation: “Numbers can help us fight racism in academia. However, it is important to note that numbers are imperfect and should not be taken out of context”.
Jule van den Berg adds: “We also need to consider our positionality, specifically as white researchers, who are in a privileged position. We constantly have to ask ourselves why we do the research that we do, and how we can ensure that our research goals, methodology, interpretation and follow-up steps are not harmful and do not mirror or maintain the inequalities we see in the world.”
