Diversity has become increasingly important as an analytic concept and organising principle in the general scientific community. Advancing diversity is seen to be even more essential in a global science-policy interface such as the IPCC. Being able to claim to speak from a broad perspective of geographies, genders and experiences is considered to be important if the IPCC is to produce legitimate and authoritative climate knowledge for policy. This chapter applies a critical lens to examine the IPCC’s procedures and practices in selecting its authors with respect to securing a diverse base of expertise across gender, geography and experience. It then considers how diversity is important, identifying different logics – substantive and instrumental – that have guided the IPCC’s efforts to date. The chapter concludes by considering why diversity should matter and what possibilities are opened for global climate knowledge-making through enhanced capacity building.

The impetus for this article began with a question I was tasked to answer: “Is Freedom of Speech Harmful for College Students?” The query came from my alma mater California State University, Fullerton, for a 2015 symposium they were hosting on the title question, partly in response to a controversy the year before captured in this headline in the Orange County Register: “Cal State Fullerton Sorority Sanctioned for ‘Taco Tuesday’ Party” What was the sorority’s sin? “Cultural appropriation.” That is, appropriating someone else’s culture as your own. Seriously? How could free speech possibly be harmful to anyone, much less college students whose introduction to the invigorating world of ideas begins with the premise that any and all topics are open for debate and disputation? I shouldn’t have been, given that signs had appeared the previous few years – starting around 2013 – with the deplatforming of controversial speakers; the emphasis on protecting students’ feelings from ideas that might challenge their beliefs; the call for trigger warnings about sensitive subjects in books, films, and lectures; the opening of safe spaces for students to retreat to when encountering ideas they find offensive; and the dispersal of lists of microaggressions – words, phrases, statements, and questions that might offend people. This article is my hypothesis of what went wrong.

This chapter examines the role of media and publicity in Turkey’s failed attempt at popular constitution making. The project of writing a new constitution through an inclusive, participatory, and consensus-driven process was mediated by an illiberal press in Turkey, where the AKP government routinely fortified its own media bloc and undermined critical voices. Based on a combination of newspaper content analysis and institutional history from 2011 to 2013, this chapter demonstrates how the Constitutional Conciliation Commission ‘Anayasa Uzlaşma Komisyonu, AUK’ first intended to break out of the polarized and repressed news cycles by instituting control over journalistic work. As the internal disagreements intensified and external actors became vocal about the new constitution, however, the AUK loosened its hold on the press, leading to a more polarizing narrative that reduced complex constitutional debates to simple ideological sound bites. By juxtaposing Turkey’s popular constitution-making experiment with its highly divisive, illiberal media, the chapter concludes by questioning some of the deeply held assumptions between democracy and media in contemporary theory.

The political atmosphere on US college campuses is overwhelmingly left-leaning and liberal, with the vast majority of faculty self-identifying as socially progressive. Considerable research on cognitive biases has demonstrated the pervasive role of people’s attitudes, which act as filters during thinking and reasoning – particularly about politically-valenced topics. The prevalence of faculty from one side of the political spectrum coupled with the omnipresence of cognitive biases means that college campuses and the research done by their faculty runs the risk of favoring one side during what should, scientifically-speaking, be a process of fair and open inquiry. We discuss these phenomena and document numerous examples in which lack of genuine viewpoint diversity has spelled trouble for sound science. We advocate a more ideologically-diverse scientific workforce to better enable true diversity of thinking on key issues of our time.