 Hi, I'm Renee, I'm Sylvia, I'm Keon, and I'm Chris. We're from the WIRE Creative Design Team at the UCLA Library, and in this tutorial, we'll explore a relationship between our social identities and research. So, what comes to mind when you think of the research process? What does your research process look like? When the research process is being referred to or illustrated, the external aspects of research are usually highlighted. You might have imagined one of these aspects. Working in a lab, conducting an in-depth interview, or searching through a library database. While these are the more well-known parts of research, there are also the internal factors that influence where we search for information, how we evaluate the resources we find, and what information we produce ourselves. We often refer to these factors as our social identities, which can include our educational background, race and our ethnicity, our first language, gender, sexual orientation, geographic location, and more. These identities are given meaning and social influence by the societies we live in, and they affect how we interact with other people and how other people see us. Researchers refer to this interconnection between place, identities, self-understanding, and relations to people as positionality. Our positionality comes with experiences and perspectives that afford us unique insights that we bring into the research process. These experiences and perspectives also bias us in the research journey by influencing which resources we do or don't select, shaping our criteria for determining what counts as a good source, and affecting how we choose to present or articulate our own research. We often hear that research should be a neutral or objective process. The reality is that we can never achieve full neutrality or objectivity. We'll always carry these experiences and identities as well as the biases they come with, and this is okay. The goal is to be aware of how and where our biases are at play in our research so we can make sure we're not overlooking certain voices for our research or make assumptions about experiences that are not our own. Before moving on to strategies that help us remain mindful of our positionality in research, let's spend some time reflecting on the identities that make up our positionality.