The In-Forest team co-organised a Special Session at the 27th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI-ENID 2023), taking place in Leiden (The Netherlands) from 27.-29. September 2023. The session was entitled “Researching (in-) equity, diversity and inclusion in science through bibliometric, mixed- and multi-method studies”. It aimed at providing a space to discuss how we generate evidence of inequalities that structure global science and understand their implications (read the full session abstract on the program - see Friday). 

The session started off with an input talk by Dr. Ismael Rafols, a senior researcher at CWTS and UNESCO Chair on Diversity and Inclusion in Global Science. He raised conceptual challenges in investigating and differentiating between social and epistemic diversity, pointing out the crucial question of which definitions and categories we rely on. Ismael’s talk was followed by a short presentation by the In-Forest team, in which we shared the first results from our bibliometric analysis on capital distribution in global forest science. After the two scientific talks, Dr. Dorothy Ngila, Director of Knowledge Networks and Strategic Partnerships at the South African National Research Foundation (NRF), brought a science funder perspective into the picture. As an invited discussant, she emphasised the importance of considering social and epistemic inequalities also from a justice perspective, and shared how they are addressed in the South African context.  

Dorothy’s reflections and the two talks prompted an engaged exchange with the audience centered around the question how to come up with meaningful conceptualisations of diversity and (in-) equity in science, and how to operationalise them in research and science funding practice.