Gender

• KANSAS CITY, Mo., Nov. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Water.org is pleased to announce that 60 million people around the world can now access safe water or sanitation.
• "The scalability of our financial solutions has redefined how the global community can make safe water and sanitation universally available.
• "Lack of affordable financing is one of the critical barriers to safe water and sanitation access," said Vedika Bhandarkar, COO of Water.org.
• Having impacted 60 million lives, Water.org is now poised to leverage the power and scale of its solutions to reach 200 million people with access to safe water and sanitation.

• Graduate students are especially vulnerable to online hate, because cultivating a visible social media presence is considered essential for mobilizing their research, gaining credibility and finding opportunities as they prepare to compete in an over-saturated job market.
• Our research has examined the experiences of graduate students who have encountered online hate while conducting their research or disseminating it online, and a wider landscape of university protocol and policies.

New policies needed to support researchers

• Research by communications scholars George Veletsianos and Jaigris Hodson, who are part of the Public Scholarship and Online Abuse research group, finds that scholars online may be targeted for a range of reasons, but “women in particular are harassed partly because they happen to be women who dare to be public online.” Online hatred disproportionately affects women, Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, trans and other marginalized scholars.
• New frameworks and policies are required that protect and care for increasingly diverse academic communities to foster equity and diversity.

Impacts and inadequate support

• Online harassment restricts which research projects are able to proceed and who is able to pursue them.
• It affects not only researchers’ well-being and career prospects, but by extention, their fields of study and members of the public served by it.

Lack of clear and accessible structures, procedures

• Ketchum addresses challenges related to public scholarship in her book Engage in Public Scholarship!
• Without clear structures and procedures for reporting harassment and supporting community members at an institutional level, harassment is treated by universities as isolated incidents without grasping the scale of the issue.

‘Bearing Witness’

• We have facilitated a number of workshops and events that foreground experiences of online harassment among graduate students.
• This work has been done with support from the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies, under the direction of Natalie Coulter.

Researcher experiences of harassment

• Participants also said research methods seminars, research ethics board certification courses and conversations with supervisory committees had not addressed the possibility of encountering online harassment.
• The online harassment students encountered also derailed or significantly curtailed their research projects.

Resources to help protect from harassment

• There are many online resources graduate students can consult to protect themselves from online harassment.
• Resources from PEN America and gaming communities provide cybersecurity tips to prevent doxxing, assess threats and report harassment to platforms and law enforcement.

Important work begins with witness

• This important work must begin with institutions bearing witness to graduate students’ experiences.
• University staff and faculty must listen to individual voices so that the issue of online harassment can be understood in its full scale and complexity.

Alex Borkowski receives funding from SSHRC. Natalie Coulter receives funding from SSHRC, as well as from internal grants at York University. Marion Tempest Grant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• "Young people have a right to feel safe and live freely," said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of Justice + Joy.
• Despite a decline in justice-involved youth, the proportion of girls involved has increased over time, and data shows Black youth experience more violent interactions with police than their white peers.
• 75.4% of Black girls and gender-expansive survey participants fear becoming victims of police brutality.
• "As a young Black woman, I'm in a constant state of fear which causes a heightened sense of awareness.

• DES MOINES, Iowa , Oct. 23, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The 2023 Borlaug CAST Communication Award (BCCA) will be presented to Dr. Alison Bentley, Plant Geneticist and Bayer Visiting Scholar in the Plant Breeding Center at The University of Minnesota, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to wheat research and her exceptional dedication to science communication.
• The Borlaug CAST Communication Award, named in honor of Dr. Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize laureate and author of the first CAST publication and Dr. Charles A.
• Please visit our landing page to register for the event and for more information about the 2023 Borlaug CAST Communication Award.
• What: 2023 Borlaug CAST Communication Award Presentation to Dr. Alison Bentley