On Friday, August 31, APSA annual meeting attendees gathered together for a Diversity and Inclusion Hackathon, initiatied by the APSA Presidential Task Force on Women’s Advancement. At the Hackathon, teams developed strategies to address key challenges facing the profession, build partnerships, and plans to move forward. The Hackathon also became a place for participants to broaden their social and professional networks and further a community built on diversity and inclusion amongst annual meeting attendees.
The workshop featured analysis and visualization of new data, research designs, consensus documents, policy proposals, and plans for social interventions, produced by different teams working on separate issues. The teams were as follows:
• “How Can We Elevate the Status of Contingent Faculty?” led by Veronica Czastkiewicz & Jennapher Lunde Seefeldt
• “How Can We Make Political Science Education More Intersectional?” led by Amy Atchison & Sherri Wallace
• “What are the ways in which political science departments can create an inclusive and productive climate for all graduate students?” led by Leah Rosenzweig & Yang-Yang Zhou
• “Developing Institutions to Encourage Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Reporting: Insights from Game Theory and Other Paradigms” led by Jenna Bednar & Michael Chwe
• “Using Genomics to Teach About Race” led by Niambi Carter & Christina Greer
• “What Can Men do to Advance Women’s Equality in the Discipline?” led by Jessica Preece & Macartan Humphreys
• “How Can We Improve Experiences and Training in Political Methodology to Recruit and Prepare Students for Grad School?” led by Suzanna Linn & Brian Pollins
Figure 1 Above: Rosalee Clawson and Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, far side center of the table, run their Hackathon team “Successful Strategies to Recruit and Retain a Diverse Faculty.” Top Right: The Hackathon welcome sign. Right: Co-chair Mala Htun, standing, speaks to a participant.
• “How, whether, and in what ways can we use citations as a metric of success when citations are known to be flawed?” led by Sara Mitchell, Michelle Dion & Jane Sumner
• “Successful Strategies to Recruit and Retain a Diverse Faculty” led by Rosalee Clawson & Valeria Sinclair-Chapman
• “Data Visualization Workshop: How to Visualize Data Effectively to Promote Diversity and Inclusion” led by Yusaku Horiuchi, In Song Kim & the MIT Media Lab
The Hackathon was chaired by Mala Htun, University of New Mexico, and Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Northwestern University. The event was sponsored by APSA, the National Science Foundation, 23 and me, MIT Political Science, MIT Media Lab, Northwestern Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, the Society for Political Methodology, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, the Commitee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession, and the Women’s Caucus for Political Science. A panel of esteemed judges including Danielle Duplin, Rodney Hero, David Lake, Skip Lupia, Melissa Nobles, Shayla Nunnally, and Frances Rosenbluth reviewed team results and distributed prizes at the end.
Figure 2
The APSA Hackathon was a huge success, featuring multiple outcomes certain to strengthen diversity and inclusion intiative implementation throughout the wider discipline. The excitement for the subject was palpable in the convention center room. As Hackathon Judge Skip Lupia recalls, University of Michigan and the National Science Foundation, “I’ve been attending APSA meetings for 30 years. That was the most exciting room I’ve ever been in.” Follow the Hackathon website in the coming weeks for more on what was produced at and reflections on the 2018 APSA Hackathon: https://connect.apsanet.org/hackathon/.
