In January of 2023, I joined the Feminist Research Institute (FRI) as a research assistant and worked on a project exploring the mobility justice movement. As an undergraduate student new to research, I was expecting to mostly observe the graduate students and FRI’s Director, Sarah McCullough, as they championed the project. In most research settings, undergraduate students play minor roles and mostly observe. Instead, I became a fully integrated member of the research team, an experience that has profoundly shaped my understanding of equity, mentorship, and learning.

I came into this project expecting to learn so much about research, mobility justice, and transportation, and I did. What I wasn't expecting was to have Sarah and my team members see me as a source of new and creative ideas that could significantly contribute to the project. In multiple discussions, Sarah and my team actively encouraged me to contribute to the conversation, share my opinions, and offer alternative ways of conceptualizing our work. They wanted to learn from me just as much as I wanted to learn from them. Through this project, I came to acknowledge and appreciate that everyone on a team, including myself, has value and insight to contribute regardless of their years of experience.

I graduated from Davis and left FRI before the project was finished. Once we were submitting the report titled, Mobility Justice: A New Framework*, for review, Sarah invited the team to meet and collectively determine the author order. The team included undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students, as well as staff. Traditionally, undergraduate students don’t receive as much recognition for their contributions and the most senior staff are listed first. Additionally, women, gender minorities, and people of color are consistently undervalued and underrecognized in certain academic disciplines. Under Sarah’s leadership, we took an approach based on Max Liborion’s process, which acknowledges these biases associated with academia.

To determine the author order, we began by writing down every single task for the project and identifying how everyone contributed. We then nominated team members to take certain author positions considering their contributions, as well as the degree to which this publication could impact their future professional opportunities. As we did this, we made sure we were all in agreement of a person's place in the author order. This process was holistic, collaborative, and consensual and accounted for the very real inequities that exist in academia and research. Through this process, I came to realize that my work, though not directly related to writing the report, contributed in a meaningful way to the project. 

This authorship process is reflective of the broader culture at FRI. By valuing lived experience, individuality, and new perspectives, Sarah has cultivated an environment that challenges the way that research is typically conducted. By humanizing the research experience and acknowledging that everyone has value to add, Sarah encourages a creative and collaborative process that ultimately leads to better project processes and outcomes. These are the lessons and experiences that I've carried with me even after leaving FRI. And it's because of FRI and Sarah's leadership that I've experienced the true value of mentorship and have come to a much deeper and fuller understanding of what equitable research and knowledge production looks like. 

*Smith, T., Herda, C. Hsu, M., Freeman, C., Sanchez Barba, M., Gadnis, R., & McCullough, S. (2024, August). Mobility Justice: A New Framework. A Research Report from the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center. https://doi.org/10.25554/skx3-9v41