Jaya Gajparia: Spotlighting global-majority voices – A new ACCESS interview series

In 2024, feedback from the ACCESS Annual Assembly was clear, there was a lack of racial and ethnic diversity among attendees, speakers, and within the project’s wider network which needed to be addressed (see also Golding et al., 2025). The ACCESS team had already acknowledged this gap but what changed following the 2024 Assembly, was the decision to move beyond acknowledgment and commit resources to creating change. ACCESS brought me on as a freelance advisor to help them understand and address this injustice moving forward. With the ACCESS Annual Assembly 2025 fast approaching, this is where the work began to take shape.

The approach wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was a start. One of the goals was to reshape the quality of the conversations at the 2025 Assembly by bringing in voices that might otherwise be overlooked to create opportunities for new perspectives. I invited a group of experts from global-majority backgrounds to speak and attend the 2025 event. This was not intended to be a one-off intervention, however, it was about starting the work, even if imperfectly, with the intention to keep pushing forward. For instance, to include more diverse experts in the ACCESS Expert Database (a resource developed by ACCESS to raise the visibility of social science experts), by making global-majority social science expertise on environmental issues more visible and accessible.

To create long-lasting change requires sustained effort, visibility, and infrastructure that ensures diverse voices aren’t just invited to the conversation once but remain central to it. Initiatives like The RACE Report show how data transparency can drive accountability. This annual reporting mechanism enables benchmarking and tracking meaningful progress over time – for instance, 161 organisations tracked their diversity metrics in 2024 – creating collective accountability to confront and address systemic injustices.  Just as The RACE Report creates accountability through tracking, ACCESS reviews both Assembly attendees (e.g. Golding et al., 2025) and the Expert Database for diverse representation. It is also where the series of interviews comes in, spotlighting some of the global-majority voices who had brought their fresh perspectives to the 2025 Assembly with the aim of hopefully brokering opportunities and facilitating introductions within the wider ACCESS Network.

The six social science experts that will be featured have a diverse range of expertise including legal scholarship in examining corporate accountability in energy transitions, unpacking the colonial legacies of marine conservation, rethinking how universities communicate climate action, and using storytelling to imagine different environmental futures. They are asking questions that matter: Who gets to decide what counts as knowledge? Whose voices shape policy? What does justice actually look like in practice?

Dr Irekpitan Okukpon grew up watching waste pile up in Nigerian gutters and now teaches environmental law in the UK, centring gender, community, and the knowledge systems that regulation so often ignores. Dr Aryo Feldman left crop science behind to explore food systems through philosophy, anthropology, and creative writing, believing that imagination is what allows us to see beyond what we’re told is possible. Rabin Doolub spent years in civil service shaping energy policy before moving to higher education, where he now argues that sustainability without wellbeing is incomplete. Anita Lateano noticed how wealthy tourists swam freely in marine reserves while local Mozambicans were kept out, a moment that set her on a path toward decolonial research methods. Dr Gerald Arhin watched his Ghanaian community’s water become polluted by mining and went on to study how power shapes energy infrastructure and who pays the price. And Nnennaya Nwali witnessed oil extraction devastate the Niger Delta and is now writing a PhD on Just energy transitions.

These spotlight interviews are about experts whose work has always mattered, whose expertise has always existed, but who haven’t always been invited into the room. Through the Annual Assembly, the spotlight interviews, and the Expert Database, ACCESS is creating social infrastructure to ensure experts from diverse backgrounds are visible, accessible, with wider reach where all voices have the space and platform they deserve.

If you would like to join the ACCESS Expert Database, please complete this online form.