Session 1: Diversity 101

In 2021, the Cognito Board organized Diversity in Science: Why, What & How, a talk and workshop series on diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.

The first event, Diversity 101, featured talks and discussions with Dr. Sinan Çankaya and Dr. Bia Labate.

Speakers:

Dr. Sinan Çankaya is a writer and cultural anthropologist, and currently works as an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, department of public administration and political science. He earned a Ph.D. on processes of in- and exclusion of ethnic minority police officers, and went on to research racial profiling. In the past, his journalistic writings were published each month at De Correspondent. His main research topics are racial profiling, race, racialization, diversity policies, and in/exclusion within organizations. Putting public anthropology into action, he recently published a non-fiction book My Innumerable Identities.

Dr. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate) is a queer Brazilian anthropologist based in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines (http://chacruna.net, https://chacruna-la.org). She is Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and Adjunct Faculty at the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She is also co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) in Brazil. She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twenty-one books, two special-edition journals, and several peer-reviewed articles.

Thank you to Grassroots Science4All for supporting this initiative.