Information Regarding the SEB Members' Vote on Possible Name Change
We are currently holding an important member vote on what the future name of the Society will be. We hope you will consider becoming a current member of SEB so you can take part in this historic moment. The deadline for voting is March 28, 2022.
We recently held an SEB Members' Forum on the prospect of changing the name of the Society. To see the recording of this forum click here.
If you renew your membership before the voting deadline you will receive a link to the SEB Name Change Ballot as well as a unique Survey ID (not your SEB ID) that can be used to vote. The ballot will include a list of names compiled from member input as well as the choice to keep the name, Society for Economic Botany, the same.
More information:
As members of the Society for Economic Botany, our primary responsibility is to the mission of the organization: “to foster and encourage scientific research, education, and related activities on the past, present, and future uses of plants, and the relationship between plants and people, and to make the results of such research available to the scientific community and the general public through meetings and publications.”
To those ends, I believe we have begun to make great strides to modernize and open up the Society for maximum impact.
However, for several years, large segments of the Society have debated the continued use of the term “economic botany” in our name, which culminated in a majority vote in 2017 to change it to either The Society for Ethnobotany or The International Society for Ethnobotany. The vote was split on the specific replacement name so no further action was taken at that time. In the intervening years, a student survey was taken in 2020 which showed a clear majority of students wanting to move away from the term Economic Botany and toward Ethnobotany.
As a result, the Council voted last year to set in place a process to definitively settle this important, recurring matter. We charged the Ethics Committee, the Student Committee, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee to meet separately and then jointly to provide recommendations to the greater Council on how we should move forward.
The Council voted in December to accept the recommendations of that joint group. Specifically:
- We will hold a Members' Forum to discuss the proposed name change options with members, gather ideas and recommendations.
- We will then hold a ranked-choice vote of the full membership on the name change in March.
We want to include as many people from the SEB community as we can for this vote, we hope you will consider becoming a current member of SEB so you can take part and help shape the future of the Society.
John de la Parra
president@econbot.org