Graduate students in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering have formed working groups to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in our department. As part of this effort, we want to curate and share recommendations for resources that discuss struggles for justice and equity – with a particular emphasis on how these struggles intersect with STEM, healthcare, education, and other topics related to the work our department does.
Every month, we’ll post a long read (a book, long article, or documentary), a short read (a short article or podcast episode), and an MIT highlight (an example of anti-oppressive work and scholarship in the MIT community).
Please note: This is a student-run web page, not an official MIT BE department website.
Monthly recommendation blog posts are back! Our blog has been on hiatus while our working group has focused on developing a curriculum for what we hope will become a discussion-based workshop offered during the January term (Independent Activities Period) at MIT. However, this fall we’re resuming our blog posts and hoping to bring you lots…
Long Read: Transcendent Kingdom “Transcendent Kingdom” is a fictional book about Gifty, a black female Neuroscience PhD candidate studying reward-seeking pathways in mice. Themes and behaviors Gifty observes in her science are closely mirrored by the trauma, relating to addiction and depression, experienced by Gifty and her family. While much of the present-day plot is…
Long Watch: Kiss the Ground documentary (1 hr and 24 mins on Netflix and Vimeo, available free to schools, students, and teachers.) Kiss the Ground is a 2020 documentary focusing on how sustainable farming practices can be used to sequester carbon from Earth’s atmosphere. While it is cheesy at times (with some gratuitous celebrity cameos),…
MIT BE grad DEI 