Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives
Bronze
Medical schools and academic health centers across the United States have acknowledged the need to combat racism. Students, trainees, faculty, and staff have often not felt acknowledged for their anti-racist efforts in a culture that prioritizes scholarly output through publications and conference attendance when it comes to recruitment, retention and promotion. Recognizing this need, students at the Icahn School of Medicine designed, organized, and hosted Challenging Norms: Uplifting Anti-Racist Work to Transform the Landscape of Medical Education, a virtual conference uplifting anti-racist initiatives, promoting collaboration, connecting like-minded mentors and mentees, encouraging community-building, and providing opportunities for professional development. This conference, which is believed to be the first of its kind, utilized anti-racist principles in its approach to organizing content, people, and process. The conference was well attended (257 attendees) for an inaugural event and received positive feedback, with many saying the conference resulted in personal fulfillment, ideas for future projects, and a sense of community. This conference, which is now an annual event, uses anti-racist principles to redefine scholarly work and academic gatherings and serves as a model to further re-imagine the traditional conference format.
What was the most impactful part of your entry?
This conference was impactful for two reasons: it uplifted work focused on anti-racism in medicine and medical education in a format that the field of medicine values, and demonstrated that conferences built upon anti-racist principles can be successful.
Anti-racist transformation, defined as dismantling racism through a “strategy that is broadly transformative, ongoing, people-dependent, and responsive to the world around us,” is an inherently slow process because institutional and cultural changes require time to take effect. Moreover, anti-racist transformation is a relatively new endeavor with little to no validated models of measuring the success of anti-racist initiatives or policies. These two factors are obstacles that prevent the dissemination of anti-racist work through publications. The inability to learn from the work of others creates silos in which people feel like they need to constantly reinvent the wheel, stalling progress in the field. We not only broke down these silos and allowed for the much-needed cross pollination of ideas and community building, but also did so through a conference, a forum valued by the medical field, thereby validating anti-racist work.
Our conference was also impactful because it was designed according to anti-racist principles through its content (by accepting a broad range of submissions for presentation), people (by encouraging participation by students, trainees, staff, faculty, and community members), and process (by removing traditional barriers to submission, review and selection, and presentation) - we elaborate upon these principles in our project narrative. Our conference demonstrates that hosting a conference founded upon anti-racist principles is not only possible, but also can be successful.
What challenge did you overcome?
While our conference was largely successful, we did experience challenges getting additional students to engage in the planning and organizing processes. The conference was built upon an existing coalition of medical institutions that are dedicated to anti-racist transformation, guided by our institution’s established roadmap. While school administrators were engaged in the anti-racist transformation process, we had hoped to involve more students in planning and organizing the conference, especially through a student coalition where students across the different institutions could share ideas and learn from each other.
We realized that, given the widespread perception that residencies heavily value scholarship and the inherent difficulties for anti-racist work to be recognized through publications and conference presentations, students are not incentivized to participate in these endeavors. One of our hopes with the conference was to involve students in its planning and implementation, which they could then demonstrate on residency applications as a tangible project with a clear end result. However, we still found difficulty recruiting students, likely due to their limited time and myriad responsibilities. Fortunately, the students who created the conference were able to dedicate their limited time to handle the large workload needed to make the conference a success. They were aided in part by student coordinators who moderated conference sessions and received a stipend for their efforts.
We have learned from our experience with the first conference and have recruited a new cohort of students to plan and implement this annual conference, the second of which will be occurring October 28-30, 2024. We are very proud to have created such an impactful conference and are excited that it has become an annual event!
Contact:
Wayland Chiu
wayland.chiu@icahn.mssm.edu