PhDivas: Recent Episodes
PhDivas
Podcast about academia, culture, and social justice across the STEM/humanities divide. Dr. Liz Wayne and Dr. Christine "Xine" Yao are two women of color Ivy League PhDs navigating higher education. Biomedical engineer meets literary critic. Both fans of lipstick.
Good luck with the start of another academic year: you are not alone. Mental health is often falsely presented as irrelevant to people of colour. Dr. Samara Linton and Dr. Rianna Walcott's brilliant The Colour of Madness explores mental health for and by people of colour across art, essays, poetry, and stories. Together with PhDiva Xine they discuss bridging the STEM/humanities divide through their collaboration and the uses of the book to communities, teaching, and health care professionals.
The Colour of Madness https://linktr.ee/TheColourofMadness https://www.instagram.com/colourofmadness/?hl=en https://twitter.com/madnesscolourof?lang=en
Support PhDivas on Patreon: www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Dr Samara Linton (she/her) is an award-winning writer, researcher, and multidisciplinary content producer. Her work includes The Colour of Madness: Mental Health and Race in Technicolour (2022) and Diane Abbott: The Authorised Biography (2020). Samara writes for various publications, including gal-dem, Huffington Post UK, The Metro, New Economics Foundation, Fawcett Society, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Her published research includes an influential report on Ebola-affected communities for the Africa All-Party Parliamentary Group (2016). She also sat on the editorial board for the British Medical Journal’s award-winning Racism in Medicine special issue (2020). Samara worked as a junior doctor in east London before joining the BBC, where she worked in production. A University of Cambridge (BA Hons.) and University College London (MBBS) graduate, she is currently completing an MA in Health Humanities at University College London. You can find out more about Samara's work at www.samaralinton.com, and she tweets at @samara_linton.
Rianna Walcott (she/her) is an LAHP alumna and PhD candidate at Kings College London researching Black British identity formation in digital spaces. Rianna combines digital work, decolonial studies, arts and culture, and mental health advocacy in her work, with a deep commitment to outreach work and public engagement. She co-founded projectmyopia.com, a website that promotes inclusivity in academia and a decolonized curriculum, and is the UCL writing lab's Scholar-in-Residence for 21-22. Rianna frequently writes about race, feminism, mental health, and arts and culture for publications including The Wellcome Collection, The Metro, The Guardian, The BBC, Vice, and Dazed. Rianna is co-editor of an anthology about BAME mental health - The Colour of Madness (2022), and in the time left over, she moonlights as a professional jazz singer. Rianna will be based at The Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab at the University of Maryland-College Park. Research at this new lab will focus on race and technology, as well as the development of a pipeline program to introduce undergraduates and those in the wider community to the field of Black digital studies with the aim of working toward a more equitable digital future. You can find out more about Rianna’s work at www.riannawalcott.com, and she tweets at @rianna_walcott.
Adversity and the power of friendship! In the second half of the interview, PhDiva Xine talks with historian Cassie Osei about pedagogy during the pandemic and life lessons from Sailor Moon. Do you watch anime? How does it affect how you engage in the world?
For show notes see our blogpost: https://phdivaspodcast.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/s6e9-pandemic-pedagogy-sailor-moon-solidarity-w-dr-cassie-osei/
Support PhDivas on Patreon: www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Dr. Cassie Osei (she/hers) is a historian of Latin America and African diaspora. She earned her PhD in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022. She specializes in modern Brazilian history through the lens of race, class, and gender. Dr. Osei was a 2019 – 2020 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellow in São Paulo, Brazil. Beginning August 2022, she will be an Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University.
Where to find Cassie: Grad profile: history.illinois.edu/directory/profile/cosei2 Twitter: @tropigalia IG: @brasilianista Blog: tropigalia.net
Wherever they are, Black women have always theorized about race and gender, says Dr. Cassie Osei. In the first of two eps, PhDiva Xine interviews Cassie Osei, historian of Afro-Brazilian women's history, longtime PhDivas Podcast listener, and newly minted PhDiva (!). Cassie talks about archival methodologies, Black feminist theorizing beyond the US, and about the personal importance of what she playfully refers to as 'low femme theory.'
For show notes see our blog post: https://phdivaspodcast.wordpress.com/2022/05/27/s6e8-afro-brazilian-womens-history-low-femme-theory-with-dr-cassie-osei/
Support PhDivas on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Dr. Cassie Osei (she/hers) is a historian of Latin America and African diaspora. She earned her PhD in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022. She specializes in modern Brazilian history through the lens of race, class, and gender. Dr. Osei was a 2019 – 2020 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellow in São Paulo, Brazil. Beginning August 2022, she will be an Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University.
Where to find Cassie: Grad profile: https://history.illinois.edu/directory/profile/cosei2 Twitter: @tropigalia IG: @brasilianista Blog: https://tropigalia.net
Let's talk about feelings, unfeelings, boundaries, and emotional labour! How do we build solidarities beyond what Black feminist Audre Lorde calls 'the master's house'? In part 2, PhDiva Liz chats to Xine about her book Disaffected and how her own positionality as a Chinese diasporic queer person led to how she navigates a feminist approach to feeling and unfeeling that is mindful of comparative racialization. They talk about 19th-century anti-Asian and anti-Black racisms alongside their own experiences of these racisms today. How do we build solidarity? How do we avoid the exploitation of our emotional resources? What kind of work can we do if we recognize -- and are critical about -- all research is secretly 'me-search'?
Support us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
DISAFFECTED won the Duke UP Scholars of Color First Book Prize. For a 30% discount use the code E21YAO on the following sites North America: www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific: www.combinedacademic.co.uk/97814780148…isaffected/
You can read the intro for free here: www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected
So much and yet so little has changed for women of colour since the 19th century... PhDivas Liz and Xine discuss Xine's first book DISAFFECTED. Xine shares the challenges of writing a monograph (a fancy academic term for research book). Chapter 4 is kind of an homage to Liz: it discusses Black feminist approaches to STEM in the nineteenth century by analyzing a novel by a major Black woman writer alongside the writings of the first two Black American women to receive medical degrees. Liz and Xine delve into the everyday life strategies of disaffection, care, and uncaring that persist in the archive and in our everyday lives.
Support us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
DISAFFECTED won the Duke UP Scholars of Color First Book Prize. For a 30% discount use the code E21YAO on the following sites North America: www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific: https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478014836/disaffected/
You can read the intro for free here: www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected
If the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house, what can we build instead? Since emotional labour is racialized and gendered, what if minoritized people say 'no'? Listen to several brilliant WOC scholars discuss PhDiva Xine's new book DISAFFECTED: each of them was given a chapter of the book to respond to in order to give the audience a sense of the overall argument as well as a chance for each scholar to discuss their own research. 170+ people attended from around the world!
0:00 to 6:15 Xine's overview of the event and Christine Okoth's introduction
6:15 to 26:50 Xine reads a section of DISAFFECTED's argument
26:51 to 38 Chapter 1: white sentimentalism, unsympathetic Blackness, and Herman Melville's Benito Cereno Respondent: Christine A Okoth (King's College London) is working on a brilliant manuscript that will revolutionize ecocriticism: _Race and the Raw Material: Black Aesthetics as Extractive Form_
38:10 to 53:04 Chapter 2: on Black-Indigenous counterintimacies, science, and global revolution in Martin R. Delany's work Respondent: Rianna Walcott (King's College London) who researches Black women's identity formation in digital spaces. She co-founded projectmyopia.com which promotes inclusion in academia and decolonised curriculums. She co-edited The Colour of Madness, an anthology about BAME mental health. www.riannawalcott.com and @rianna_walcott on Twitter
53:05 to 1:02:35 Chapter 3: on queer frigidity, medical science, the limits of white feminism, and the subgenre of (white) women doctor novels Respondent: Lara Choksey (UCL) who works on STS, critical race and decolonial studies with particular interest in speculative fiction. She is the author of Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (Bloomsbury 2021). https://www.bloomsbury.com/.../narrative-in-the-age-of.../
1:03:50 to 1:13:35 Chapter 4: on Black women doctors, transformative love, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy Respondent: Jade Bentil (Oxford) is a Black feminist historian whose first book REBEL CITIZEN uses oral history interviews to explore the lived experiences of Black women who migrated to Britain after WW2. Forthcoming from Allen Lane. https://www.jadebentil.com/
1:13:31 to 1:26:25 Chp 5: Oriental inscrutability, Chinese diaspora, the first Asian North American woman writer Sui Sin Far Respondent: KerryMackereth(@CambridgeGender) works on racialization of AI, AsAm studies; co-host of @TheGoodRobot1 @KerryMackereth on Twitter
1:26:30 Coda: Toward a Disaffected Manifesto Beyond Survival. PhDiva Xine highlights respondent Lucia Lorenzi who was unable to attend. Lucia trained as a Canadianist and trauma theorist, working on how artists and writers use silence to reshape, resist, reimagine experiences of violence. Their artwork is featured on the cover of the book! @empathywarrior on Twitter and Instagram
DISAFFECTED won the Duke UP Scholars of Color First Book Prize.
For a 30% discount use the code E21YAO on the following sites North America: https://www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific: https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478014836/disaffected/
You can read the intro for free here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Have you watched Netflix's The Chair? Join PhDivas Liz and Xine as they talk about all the uncomfortable resonances between their experiences as women of colour in academia and the short 'comedy' series starring Sandra Oh. (Yes, Xine even had a student describe her as 'if Sandra Oh were an academic.') They discuss antiblackness, model minority failings, sabotage, emotional labour, and sympathies with student activists and beleagured staff.
Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
For another great take on The Chair, see Koritha Mitchell's CNN piece: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/26/opinions/the-chair-sandra-oh-netflix-protagonist-mitchell/index.html
Just because they are both systems of oppression does not mean that casteism ≠ racism! Postcolonialism developed as a field of study established by predominantly Indian intellectuals -- but only understanding them as non-Black people of colour erases their caste privilege. Shaista Patel, a professor in Critical Muslim studies at UC San Diego, chats with PhDiva Xine about the nuances of Islamophobia, Hindu nationalism, and casteism that are often misread or overlooked by outsiders.
Image used with the permission of Snehal P Sanathanan
For more on caste: Ambedkar, B.R. (1936). Annihilation of Caste. http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/02.Annihilation%20of%20Caste.htm(accessed June 9, 2021). Arya, Sunaina. (2020). “Dalit or Brahminical Patriarchy?: Rethinking Indian Feminism.” CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion. 1, no. 1: 217–228. Guru, G. (2002). “How egalitarian are the social sciences in India?.” Economic and Political Weekly, 5003-5009. Rawat, Ramnarayan S., and Kusuma Satyanarayana. (2016). Dalit studies. Duke University Press.
Support PhDivas on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Mother's Day Special! Liz interviews her mom about what it's like to raise a PhDiva. Learn about Liz's childhood career aspirations and their intergenerational experience of education in Mississippi.
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Springtime is the season of success for a few... and rejection for the majority. PhDivas Liz and Xine revisit the perennial topic of the many, many forms of rejection in academia -- from grants, students, programmes -- as early career scholars and attentive to disparities of power. Failure isn't only personal, but can be structural especially for BIPOC academics: is the problem with your individual proposal or is it a broader institutional issue? What is at stake?
'Branding' and the academic equivalent of being influencers are necessities for junior and minoritized academics, but this doesn't necessarily translate to economic security. Liz and Xine also discuss codeswitching how they present their research to potentially hostile audiences/strangers.
Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
2021 has been a rough start for the PhDivas. Liz and Xine recorded this in the week after the white supremacist insurrection at the US Capitol -- and then somehow we had to go about academic 'business as usual.' So here the PhDivas discuss the conflicts between our exhaustion, our new curious status as inspirations, the start of term, the resumption of our research, the continued cruelties of academia as institution. All contributing to this delayed launch!
You can support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
PhDivas Dr. Xine Yao and Dr. Liz Wayne get together over American Thanksgiving to talk about the challenges of working during COVID19. Supporting our own self care as we support our students, or research efforts is no trivial feat. All the best as the term and the year are winding down!
Learn about the Indigenous peoples and their treaties of the land you're on if you are in a settler colonial nation: https://native-land.ca
Support PhDivas on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
"This belongs in a museum!" Indiana Jones's catchphrase inspired generations of young archaeologists like Alex Fitzpatrick who are now critical of their discipline's colonial and imperialist pasts and presents. In this second part of their interview, PhDiva Xine chats with Alex about Napoleon's influence and approaching archaeology through animals, rather than humans. Alex works on pre-historic Britain, asking about the difference between wild and domestic animals. They also chat about the videogame Animal Crossing as self-care
Learn more on her podcast Archaeo Animals @ArchaeoAnimals! https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/animals @ArchaeologyFitz https://animalarchaeology.com/
Support PhDivas Podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Handing in your PhD dissertation and disrupting the field of archaeology is exhausting enough... but during a global pandemic? Archaeologist Alex Fitzpatrick talks to PhDiva Xine on the cusp of earning her degree about precarity, post-dissertation depression, and the strangeness of a Chinese diasporic migrant in the United Kingdom.
Twitter @ArchaeologyFitz https://animalarchaeology.com/ Image by Molly Lester https://mollypukes.com
PhDivas Podcast Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Imagine an interdisciplinary volume collecting advice and experiences of women of colour in graduate school. PhDiva Xine discusses Degrees of Difference with co-editors Denise Delgado and Kimberly McKee (Grand Valley State University). The project grew out of their friendships during their PhDs at Ohio State: other related collaborations include a conference roundtable and writings on feminist pedagogy. We discuss community-building, microaggressions, and how their collection can help support Black Lives Matter-inspired calls for institutional change in higher education.
Support PhDivas on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Buy Degrees of Difference: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/37xtz2qt9780252043185.html https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/05/01/three-ways-help-women-color-and-indigenous-women-graduate-students-thrive-opinion
COVID-19 presents new challenges and possibilities for disabled students. Thousands signed an open letter asking grant agencies to automatically extend student funding and for grants for assistive equipment needed to work remotely. Conversely, many shifts to coronavirus teaching are only too familiar to disabled people who have long been advocating for change. "Access is a relationship," says space scientist Divya Persaud in this continuation of her interview with STS colleague Ellie Armstrong and PhDiva Xine. Learn about disability activism in academia -- we all gain from improvements to access.
On the open letter: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/may/21/were-being-fobbed-off-why-disabled-students-are-losing-out-in-lockdown Sick Woman Theory: http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory You can still check out their conference Space Science in Context: https://spacescienceincontext.wordpress.com/
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
"To boldly go to where no man has gone before" -- the classic Star Trek slogan reflects how colonialism informs space exploration. NASA's technologies are the same used for American imperialist ventures today. Even space rocks in museums are procured because of British colonialism. Planetary scientist Divya Persaud and STS scholar Ellie Armstrong organized Space Science in Context, an online interdisciplinary conference in May 2020. PhDiva Xine discusses with Divya and Ellie the legacies of colonialism in space science and fantasies about space exploration. They highlight exciting scholarship and activism by female and nonbinary BIPOC scholars as well as share strategies for making conferences more accessible.
For more on the conference Space Science in Context: https://spacescienceincontext.wordpress.com/
@ellietheelement // ellietheelement.squarespace.com/ @Divya_M_P // divyampersaud.com
Support PhDivas on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Some of us have additional care responsibilities at home. Some of us are all alone at home. How do we care for ourselves and each other during lockdown? In this second part of our interview, Professor Charissa Cheah draws upon her expertise in psychology to talk about managing child care and the paradoxes of digitally connected loneliness. The PhDivas also discuss the status of research, lab access -- and timeline and funding extensions for students and faculty.
Support PhDivas on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Why do we talk about our immune systems using the language of warfare? Let's discuss immunity from two perspectives that may seem very different: biomedical engineering and biopolitics. In this episode PhDivas Liz and Xine educate each other about their disciplinary knowledge of what "immunity" means. Cells at Work! is a recent anime about what goes on in the human body: Liz explains the science behind their portrayal of viruses and immune processes. Xine talks about how political and legal immunity came before our knowledge of the immune system by drawing upon Ed Cohen's A Body Worth Defending.
Bonus: PhDiva Liz's genius comparisons between immune system functions and social media platforms!
Cells at Work is on Netflix. Cohen's book is available from Duke University Press.
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Who is seen as the disease or the diseased? Psychologist Charissa Cheah received RAPID grant funding from the National Science Foundation to study the forms of anti-Chinese racism from COVID-19 and their impact on Chinese-American individuals, families, and communities. PhDivas Liz and Xine discuss with Professor Cheah the politics and histories around racial identification health in research and how people, especially immigrants or international students, understand their own racial positioning. Race conscious research is necessary: the media is finally recognizing the disproportionate mortality rate among African Americans. However, Professor Cheah discusses how such research can be distorted to eugenic ends to blame Black people as a distraction from structural racism.
More on Professor Cheah's NSF grant: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/uomb-rts030520.php Support PhDivas on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Even scientists face deportation in an anti-immigration environment. But Dr. Furaha Asani cautions that academics shouldn't think of themselves as "one of the good ones." Biochemist Dr. Asani is now one of the migrant precariat because her visa was denied for questionable reasons. PhDiva Xine Yao interviews Dr. Asani about reimagining STEM PhD training and the scientific method. It's okay to be a "very average scientist" -- Dr. Asani questions putting scientists on pedestals in terms of their claims to objectivity and upholding colonial standards of meritocracy.
Dr. Furaha Asani on migrant solidarity: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/25/phd-migrants-good-immigrant-deportation Dr. Furaha Asani on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrFuraha_Asani
Support the Work of PhDivas Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
Do you have questions about #COVID19? Or even basic questions about viruses in general? Dr. Kishana Taylor is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis. She studies the rate of reassortment between influenza viruses during co-infection. Listen as Dr. Taylor breaks down how viruses are named, with #COVID19 is so bad and what songs we sing when we wash our hands.
You can follow her on twitter: @KYT_ThatsME Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
PhDivas Podcast interviews Computational Biologist Dr. Laura Boykin. We talk about Tree Lab, the project bringing sequencing capabilities to farmers in Uganda. Also mentioned, being nervous before a TED Talk, doing science on her own terms, and dancing.
You can follow Dr. Boykin on twitter @Laura_boykin and learn about Tree Lab at cassavavirusactionproject.com
Here is her recent TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_boykin_how_we_re_using_dna_tech_to_help_farmers_fight_crop_diseases
Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast
There are currently fewer than 30 Black women full professors in the UK... in any discipline. If you know Angela Davis and Kimberle Crenshaw, do you also know about Gail Lewis and Olive Morris? PhDiva Xine interviews Jade Bentil, a historian of Black British women's activism, and Paulette Williams, who heads initiatives to support current and aspiring Black academics. Jade and Paulette discuss staying critical of the "British" in Black British feminism, family oral histories, and the co-optation of Black studies by white saviours and colonial institutions.
Jade Bentil: https://twitter.com/divanificent Paulette Williams: https://twitter.com/pwi11iams
Leading Routes: www.leadingroutes.org www.twitter.com/leadingroutes
How do we evaluate the value of our work? PhDivas is finally launching a Patreon in order to sustain this project. Liz and Xine decided to sit down and record why it has taken them so long to put this together. (Awkwardness!) Sometimes we are so used to giving free labour to our institutions and our field of study that, combined with imposter syndrome, it is hard to ask for the support we need to continue that work. For some of us even the act of asking for any form of support is terrifying because of the fear of rejection -- so it feels safer not to try at all. Stop procrastinating and put the same faith you have in others into yourself!
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast We appreciate your follows, ratings, and reviews!
Job security, unequal pay, excessive workloads, gender and racial inequality: this is the state of academia everywhere. How do we push for change when institutions don't want to? In the UK the University and College Union is on STRIKE to fight for the soul of the university and that means PhDiva Xine is too. Xine interviews Dr. Francesca Brooks about the history and demands behind the strike as well as the tactics and lived experience from the perspective of precarity. If you are elsewhere in the world, may you learn something useful from this struggle!
You can show your solidarity by donating to the union's fighting fund which provides financial support for those going without pay, with emphasis on the most vulnerable: https://www.ucu.org.uk/fightingfund
Or you can join the #digitalstrike by not posting about any work that benefits your institutional employer during this time. Use #UCUStrike #UCUStrikesBack, reshare this information about the strike widely!
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/nov/07/university-staff-dont-want-to-strike-for-fair-pensions-and-pay-but-were-being-forced-to
it's time for a wellness check! PhDivas Liz and Xine talk about getting sick while navigating challenges as new faculty in STEM and the humanities -- and adulting. What are our new privileges and limitations on our research and advocacy? It's also a wellness check for the health of academia. Just because you are well does not mean the system is working! And enjoy the discussion of Avatar: The Last Airbender aka the greatest show of all time. Check in with yourself and those around you. As we have to remind ourselves, just because it is the final push of the semester and year doesn't mean you should push yourself to breaking...
To learn more about the protests on Mauna Kea against the Thirty Meter Telescope, see Keolu Fox and Chanda Hsu Prescod-Weinstein's article: https://www.thenation.com/article/mauna-kea-tmt-colonial-science/
In the eyes of Western art all brown girls are the same. "Annah the Javanese" by the famous artist Paul Gauguin depicts a nude young brown girl with a monkey at her feet. She was his "mistress." In her PhD in Visuals Cultures Indonesian artist Khairani Barokka (Goldsmiths) uses her own art practice to question the inconsistent histories about Annah and to imagine her story in the midst of colonial exploitation. Okka and PhDiva Xine discuss disability studies, performance, poetry, and art history as two postcolonial subjects now living in the former heart of empire.
Pic credit: Christa Holka. http://khairanibarokka.com @mailbykite
Debut poetry collection Rope: http://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/rope.html
Poetry-art book Indigenous Species: http://www.tiltedaxispress.com/indigenous-species/
Annah: Nomenclature at the ICA https://www.ica.art/on/live/khairani-barokka-annah-nomenclature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsIoIawX01s https://www.ica.art/on/live/khairani-barokka-performance-qa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ejnAxXS_Yo Selected Annahs at SALTS Basel http://www.salts.ch/#/en/exhibition/bhanu-kapil-khairani-barokka
None of us in STEM or humanities should ever take libraries for granted! PhDiva Liz Wayne interviews Dr. Elaine Westbrook (Vice Provost of UNC Chapel-Hill Libraries) about the knowledge economy, peer review, and the invisible, exorbitant cost of journals. Scientists pay to have their articles published and then their universities can spend up to $40,000 on a single journal to make that research available to their community. This is an ethical matter of access and inequality on a geopolitical level.
Follow Dr. Elaine L Westbrooks @UNC_Librarian!
More about PhDiva Liz's new job! What happens to your personal life when you get that coveted academic job and have to move away? We advance in our careers but family advance in age. Liz and Xine talk about how the academic job market affects dating and family. How are we treated professionally and socially if we are single versus coupled academics?
PhDiva Liz is now a tenure track Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering! After preparing for the job market, how do you prepare for the anxieties of negotiation and starting the job? In this first part, Liz talks to PhDiva Xine about the rapid professional growth that can only happen through this major career transition.
Are Asians apolitical? What is the term "Asian American" anyway? PhDiva Xine talks to Rachel Kuo of the Asian American Feminist Collective about racial identity in online spaces and histories of Asian American political organizing. Rachel gives us insight into the latest wave of digital activism in the Asian diaspora galvanized by Black Lives Matter. How can Asian American feminists work in antiracist solidarity with other peoples of colour rather than colluding with white supremacy or falling into ethnonationalism? #notyourwedge #notyourAsiansidekick #modelminoritymutiny
Artwork of the Asian American Feminist Collective by Angel Trazo Website: https://www.asianamfeminism.org/ (specific links to our zine here and our First Times series here) Insta: https://www.instagram.com/aafc.nyc Twitter: https://twitter.com/aafcollective Donation: https://www.paypal.me/aafcollective
Grad school is trash for POC. The whisper campaign of academic trauma. Ciarra Jones's essays went viral in 2018, drawing from her experiences during her MA at Harvard Divinity School. This is not just about white antiBlackness or white fear about speaking out, but also how BIPOC students can internalize their own oppression and undermine others under the guise of care. PhDiva Xine learns from Ciarra about the hope, grace, and love those in progressive circles can get from faith practices like queer womanist theology.
@ciarra_milan: Ciarra Jones is a master's candidate at Harvard Divinity School studying African and African Religions with an emphasis in Gender and Sexuality. Ciarra is a writer, speaker, and activist who is particularly concerned with how to cultivate belonging and disrupt the reproduction of trauma in academia. You can find Ciarra's work on Huffington Post, the Tempest, Black Youth Project, and Medium.
The Whisper Campaign of Academic Trauma: https://mystudentvoices.com/the-whisper-campaign-of-academic-trauma-fc917686fcc3 Grad School is Trash for Students of Color and We Should Talk About That: https://mystudentvoices.com/grad-school-is-trash-for-students-of-color-and-we-should-talk-about-that-af672814b3ee
Who was actually scandalized by the 'scandal' about rich people using their money to get their questionably gifted kids into elite American higher education? PhDiva Xine discusses structural inequalities in US and UK higher education with Maryam Toorawa who works in Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion and whose experiences span Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Oxford, Yale, SOAS. Initiatives to combat inequalities are vastly different on either side of the Anglophone Atlantic -- and the level of recognition about what problems exist in your own society as opposed to what you can loudly and easily decry elsewhere. Are you really cynical if you are recognizing the truth?
It's application season! PhDivas Dr. Liz Wayne and Dr. Xine Yao share strategies for applying to graduate school in the humanities and STEM -- and how to make an informed decision about whether to apply at all. A how-to advice episode that reveals disciplinary differences amidst the shared stresses of the application process.
Why are the PhDivas interested in tarot cards and the art of divination? PhDivas Liz and Xine separately delved into tarot: this is their first full conversation about their practices of self-care. The classic Western deck has been reimagined by disenfranchised peoples. Xine draws from her research about the importance of QTPOC tarot, especially the Asian American Tarot and Dusk || Onyx Melanated Tarot for the African diaspora. Liz the scientist challenges the dichotomy between tarot, forms of belief, and STEM. They talk skepticism, the Queen of Swords card, the Death card. How do we care for ourselves as scholars, as vulnerable people in this world? Will you try out a new practice of self care you might be skeptical about after this episode?
Asian American Tarot by the Asian American Literary Review: https://aalr.binghamton.edu/special-issue-on-asian-american-mental-health/ Dusk II Onyx Melanated Tarot by Courtney Alexander: https://dust2onyx.com/
For an easy introduction check out the free Golden Tarot app. Little Red Tarot is a queer feminist tarot website with lots of tutorials: www.littleredtarot.com Asali Earthworks curates and reviews QTPOC tarot decks: https://www.asaliearthwork.com/tarot-of-the-qtpoc/
Poetry can be for everyone! PhDiva Xine interviews 2017 Green College Writer-in-Residence Anne Simpson about dying well, pedagogy, and publishing -- and lifting heavy weights as a feminist act. Winner of prestigious Canadian literature awards like the Griffin, Anne has published poetry, novels, and essays. Featuring brief segments with Tiara Kerr (economics) and Wes Yocom (law)as glimpses into how a poetry workshop environment can be enriching regardless of your disciplinary background. How can medical students benefit from creative writing? How might drawings of neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, groundbreaking neuroscientist, inspire poetry that allows us to work through our relationship to memory? As Audre Lorde once wrote, poetry is not a luxury.
You can find out more about Anne's work here: http://www.annesimpson.ca/
How can we address global inequalities in this era of climate change? What disciplines, methods can we use – and how can we do this research ethically, collaboratively? UBC Forestry PhD student Saori Ogura is working with Indigenous peoples in Zimbabwe and the Himalayas to support their knowledges about traditional nutritious crops as a counter to monocultural cash crops like cardamom. Saori tells PhDiva Xine about her research journey from Japan to Berkeley to UNESCO involving agricultural sciences, political science, ethno-ecology, and art. And most importantly, living with communities and learning from them, not just extracting knowledge as capital. Networks of ecologies mean considering the ethics of these transnational relationships. What does diversity mean across these different contexts? How is art integral to Saori’s project and what are the vital differences between drawing and photographing plants?
Ep image combines 2 drawings by Saori
Saori won the 2018 Nikon Miki Jun Inspiration Award for Photography. You can view more of her work here: http://saoriogura.info/ https://www.grad.ubc.ca/campus-community/meet-our-students/ogura-saori https://expeditioneducation.org/ https://ced.berkeley.edu/events-media/news/ced-alumna-saori-ogura-receives-prestigious-nikon-salon-photography-award
Here come the trolls! Degrees, peer-reviewed publications, respect in the field -- markers of academic respectability do not shield scholars, especially BIPOC women, when people don't want to hear what we have to say. Remember PhDiva Xine's naivete in our previous episode? A month after recording, she tweeted a critique about Asian American appropriation of Blackness tied to the erasure of antiBlack, antiLatinx racisms when the media takes the Harvard affirmative action case as solely about anti-Asian sentiment. And then the racist and race traitor tweets began. PhDiva Liz interviews Xine about coming under attack from both alt-right white supremacists and MRAsians (men's rights activists Asians). When should we become concerned about backlash? How can we protect ourselves? We talk practical tips from friends and our previous episodes.
Apologies for some audio quality issues -- Xine had packed her equipment since she was moving to London just a few days later!
Image from Xine's research at the American Antiquarian Society
Earlier episode with Drs. Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne on alt-right attacks after the Washington Post raised the profile of their research: https://soundcloud.com/phdivas/politicsofcitation
From ABD to the verge of becoming faculty: PhDivas Liz and Xine have been doing this podcast for 3 years strong! We had no idea what impact, good or bad, this might have on our lives as junior scholars. In this episode we reflect upon public scholarship from scicomm to public humanities to TED Talks. We're proud to build a public stage to help raise other women in academia -- and you can join in too!
(Enjoy Xine’s naivete before listening to part 2.) Images taken from a gif by Libby VanderPloeg: https://giphy.com/gifs/cute-feminist-girlpower-3o7abBphHJngINCHio
Geosciences are the least diverse of all STEM fields. But is it enough to track statistics about gender and race given the discipline's colonial, masculinist history? Quantitative scientists experiment with qualitative methods in order to examine experiences at a Canadian geoscience conference. PhDiva Xine interviews marine biologist Sara Cannon and fluvial geomorphologist Leonora King (UBC Geography) about their paper that tracked posters vs. panels, behaviour at talks and on panels, and the division of labour. What are the limits on such a study? How can this translate into institutional change?
Since recording this episode, the CGU executive has created a committee to determine the current state of diversity within the CGU membership and to establish a plan going forward to promote diversity within the CGU and Canadian geosciences.
"Diversity in geoscience: Participation, behaviour, and the division of scientific labour at a Canadian geoscience conference" in the journal Facets by Leonora King, Lucy MacKenzie, Marc Tadaki, Sara Cannon, Kiely McFarlane, David Reid, Michele Koppes http://www.facetsjournal.com/doi/10.1139/facets-2017-0111 Leonora King (@Leonora_King) www.leonoraking.com Sara Cannon (@secanno) www.saraecannon.com
The 1970 student massacre at Kent State is iconic in the United States and beyond. Days before the 2018 anniversary, at least 65 students at Aligarh Muslim University in India were brutalized by the police for peacefully protesting the police dismissal -- without charges -- of the armed Hindu nationalists who had threatened their campus. PhDiva Xine talks with Wajiha Mehdi (PhD student in Social Justice at UBC) to raise Western awareness of the protests in India by students, farmers, and many other parts of Indian society against state neoliberalism, Hindu nationalism, the abuse of the lower castes. Why has this barely been covered in Western media? What kinds of narratives make international headlines from a country like India or about Muslims?
Photo (right) by Wajahat Jilani More information here: http://thecompanion.in/amu-chalo-to-save-academia-from-hindutva-terror/
PhDiva Xine is moving to London, England as a #NewProf! Liz and Xine catch up after an exhausting spring to talk about Xine's new position as Lecturer at University College London, differences between STEM and humanities public outreach, illusions of meritocracy -- and complicated feelings to kind cliches. "I always knew you would make it." "Are you excited?"
Creating or conjuring? Junior scholars Emmanuelle Andrews and Katrina Sellinger were inspired by a public dialogue on the work of words between poet Dionne Brand and critic Christina Sharpe moderated by writer David Chariandy. Emmanuelle and Katrina co-edited a special issue of The Capilano Review extending that conversation on Blackness through their curation of essays, interviews, poetry, sculpture, and tattoo art. PhDiva Xine talks to these up-and-coming scholars at UBC about Black love, mentorship, Canadian and English moral exceptionalisms about race, and how people create but do not think of themselves as creators.
The Capilano Review 3.34 (physical or digital copies available): https://thecapilanoreview.com/featured/
Emmanuelle Andrews (@Elle_Drews) co-directed the short film Coming to Love. Her MA thesis in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice (UBC) is entitled "Reading the Threat, Imagining Otherwise: Notting Hill Carnival, the London Riots and a Global Issue of Blackness." Katrina Sellinger (@space_femme) is working on diasporic Black queerness through studies of Janelle Monae and the film Moonlight. She is completing her MA in English (UBC) and will be starting her PhD at McMaster University.
"Dead, drunk, or dancing": Kavelina SnowGiggles Torres (Yup’ik/Iñupiaq/Athabascan) seeks to challenge the usual media representations of Indigenous peoples. PhDiva Xine Yao interviews Kavelina about her work as a writer and filmmaker selected for the Sundance NativeLab Fellowship. What can narrative do that documentaries can't? Yugumalleq/Shades of Life (2014) is currently on exhibit at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her play "Something in the Living Room" will be performed spring 2018 at Green College, UBC on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Musqueam people. This episode contains references to Star Trek, Firefly, The Fifth Element, and much more scifi geekery.
Duncan McCue is attributed to the quote “drumming, dancing, drunk or dead”. He heard it from an elder. His rule is called the WD4 rule. A Indigenous/Aboriginal will make it in media if they are a “Warrior, drumming, dancing, drunk or dead”. He is an Anishinaubae, from Ontario, a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation.
Kavelina's Twitter: @SnowGigglesAK Vision Maker Media: https://www.visionmakermedia.org/bios/kavelina-torres "Yugumalleq" is part of "The Abundant North: Alaska Native Films of Influence" at the Institute of American Indian Arts: https://iaia.edu/event/abundant-north-alaska-native-films-influence/
Who gets cited in your discipline? What if exploring that question led to death threats? "Why these professors are warning against promoting the work of straight, white men" is the Washington Post's take on Drs. Carrie Mott(Rutgers) and Daniel Cockayne (UWaterloo)'s peer-reviewed article on the politics of citation. The alt-right was not happy. PhDiva Xine talks to these feminist geographers about the dangers of public scholarship, academic vs. mainstream media timelines of production and attention, and their allyship as white scholars trying to center conversations led by women of color. What happens to academic freedom for junior scholars, especially those underrepresented, in an increasing precarious profession?
On Twitter check out @citeblackwomen #citeblackwomen Tressie Cottom McMillan's essay "Everything But the Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, and Institutions": https://tressiemc.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/everything-but-the-burden-publics-public-scholarship-and-institutions/ Mott and Cockayne's article "Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’": http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1339022?journalCode=cgpc20 Washington Post's representation of their work: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/16/feminist-scientists-say-citing-research-by-straight-white-men-promotes-a-system-of-oppression/?utm_term=.166bfc119367
Dr. Carrie Mott: https://geography.rutgers.edu/people/faculty-core/472-mott-carrie Dr. Daniel Cockayne: https://uwaterloo.ca/geography-environmental-management/people-profiles/daniel-cockayne
Race is messy, literally and figuratively, as Professor Brigitte Fielder (Wisconsin-Madison) argues in her project on the non-linear transferability of race in nineteenth-century America. Shakespeare's Othello in America became a minstrel play warning against the dangers of miscegenation -- what does it mean with Othello's blackface makeup begrimes Desdemona? At the 2017 conference of the American Studies Association, PhDiva Xine chats with Brigitte about anti-racist mentoring, pedagogy, and colleagueship in higher ed and their discipline as a dynamic entity. How can we change a field of study and whose shoulders do we stand upon? (Shoutout to work in early Black studies, like the the Just Teach One-Early African American Print Project: http://jtoaa.common-place.org/ and the Colored Conventions project: coloredconventions.org/)
More on Brigitte Fielder's work: http://www.brigfield.org/
How do children of immigrants survive in the wake of diaspora? Punjabi is Canada's 5th most spoken language. As a PhD student in Asian Studies at UBC, Kiran Sunar reads, translates, and speaks multiple languages as a part of reclaiming Punjabi literary forms from Orientalism. Kiran and PhDiva Xine discuss Rupi Kaur and the power of Instagram poetry, disgraceful Canadian histories, and the importance of ice cream to BIPOC friendship. "How do we keep our wounded?" asks Kiran in this conversation about generosity, kindness, and creation in activism and literature.
Keep an eye out for Kiran's novel currently titled "Nerve"! If you're looking for some good reading, peruse the writers mentioned here: Audre Lorde, Hiromi Goto, Dionne Brand, Larissa Lai, Cherrie Moraga, Nalo Hopkinson. More on Kiran Sunar: http://asia.ubc.ca/kiran-sunar/
How can we empower teen girls of color? PhDivas Liz and Xine talk to Eden and Ellisa Oyewo about how their C.O.R.E. work supports girls in those formative years before university. These sisters from Indiana collaborate from different cities and careers (engineering vs. fashion) to create and run C.O.R.E. (Creating Opportunity to Reach Empowerment), an online magazine and on-site programming at schools to bring career resources, financial planning, fashion tips, and relationship advice catered to girls of color 12-18. We talk about the struggles of girlhood and it turns out even the PhDivas have things to learn from C.O.R.E.!
C.O.R.E. Magazine: http://thecorereader.com/ You can also find them on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest!
800,000 undocumented young people in the US will be endangered if the DACA(Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program ends. PhDivas Liz and Xine interview DREAMer Dory Castillo, an amazing undergrad furthering children's science education who hopes to become a physicist herself. But because of her undocumented status, she has to live with the threat of deportation to a country she's never even visited. From Dory's dreams about studying fluid mechanics and her love of teaching, we turn to discussing issues of respectability, immigration, and the many, many misconceptions about undocumented immigrants, particularly the DREAMers. We support the DREAMers because they are #HeretoStay.
Help to defend DACA: https://unitedwedream.org/
After the events of Charlottesville what has changed or SHOULD change for the start of the school year? How do we navigate family legacies if you're descended from the enslaved or have Confederate ancestors? What if these issues are in your face on campus? These debates hit close to home for PhDiva Liz and Dr. Jill Spivey Caddell at UNC Chapel Hill where the Confederate statue Silent Sam stands. Topics include Jill's research on Civil War monuments, revisionist histories, #NoConfederate, and the problems with teaching and representing the Civil War. How do you navigate being a Southerner in the North? Do monuments reflect the past, the present, or the hopes of the future? (Check out Charles Chesnutt's short stories and novels!)
PhDiva Liz's essay "Are Universities Prepared?": https://medium.com/@liz.wayne/are-universities-prepared-eb01d3c1bd0 Dr. Jill Spivey Caddell's article on Melville and Civil War monuments: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00370 More on Dr. Jill: https://jspiveycaddell.com/ Charles. W. Chesnutt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_W._Chesnutt
What happens when your project fails? Dr. Erica Pratt, researcher at University of Texas MD Cancer Medical Center, talks about the bias against discussing negative results in science and the struggle to succeed as a nontraditional student. If you aren't what people expect a scientist to look like AND are rather modest, you need mentors to go the extra mile as coaches. We discuss Erica's trajectory from her undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, which required all undergrads in the new biomedical engineering to have a second engineering major just to be safe, to her current postdoc work on liquid biopsy in pancreatic cancer. Liz, Xine, and Erica talk about evaluation beyond traditional metrics, morbid humor, depression, perfectionism, and pet peeves about science in popular media.
Learn more about Erica's work here: https://pratted.wordpress.com/ Follow her on Twitter: @pratt_ed
Katti Horng's path to studying HIV in the combined DVM/PhD degree at UC Davis began with a Chinese tradition for babies: infants are presented with objects symbolizing different professions to see what their futures will hold. PhDivas Xine and Liz talk to Katti about cow rectums, animal rights vs. animal welfare, and the difference between the cultures of professional and graduate degrees. We get a new perspective on sexism: even though women are now the majority in veterinary medicine, we learn that the gender gap is not so easily overcome. What does interdisciplinary medical research look like? Katti and Liz talk about the unexpected connections between their research on HIV, cancer, and chronic inflammation.
More on Katti Horng's research: http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/whatsnew/article.cfm?id=3631
Student protests inspired by Black Lives Matter have swept across American universities. What did these undergraduate activists want? PhDiva Dr. Xine Yao interviews Kristi Carey, one of the leaders of the 2014-5 protests at Colgate University. Kristi and her fellow women of color activists organized in the wake of Michael Brown's killing to draw attention to systemic problems on campus and to demand real change from the university. Sit-ins, death threats, candle light vigils -- what has happened since this momentous unsettling in the name of making the corporate university a safer, more livable space for marginalized students? Kristi talks about the aftermath having just finished a scholarly article and thesis reflecting on the extent of protest and change in the neoliberal higher education as part of her MA in Gender, Race, and Social Justice at UBC. What inspires a student to change from a major in math to one in education?
Kristi Carey's article "On Cleaning: Student Activism in the Corporate and Imperial University": https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.92/
Image: a poster from the Colgate protests depicting a person with a raised fist and "RECLAIMING OUR EDUCATION" in the background. Drawing by Anna Ríos-Rojas and design by Natasha Torres.
Summer vacation: when academics look forward to spending quality time... working on their research. Over the "holiday" weekend Liz and Xine talk about structuring their time and the unexpected emotional labour that comes when you do take a "break" only to frantically play catch-up on your personal life. We discuss the idea of breaks in a wider sense as well: figuring out strategic vulnerability, burning out because of social media, allowing ourselves to ask for help. How can we take a break from high expectations and over-achievement?
To decolonize or Indigenize the university? Sereana Naepi, an Indigenous Pacific Islander, takes on this question through her doctoral studies in Education at UBC on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. PhDiva Xine interviews Sereana about Education as a discipline unto itself and how she brings Indigenous methodologies into her work on Indigenous women's experiences as higher ed staff. As a Fijian scholar from New Zealand, Sereana explains how her community and family inform her work: the PhD gives you a right to serve, not a right not to lead. In this episode, we discuss the various erasures of Pacific Islanders in culture, climate change, the category of Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. And we had to talk about Disney's Moana!
More on Sereana Naepi's work: https://www.grad.ubc.ca/campus-community/meet-our-students/naepi-sereana Watch the Pasifika Samoan movie Three Wise Cousins: https://www.threewisecousins.com/ Free West Papua: https://www.freewestpapua.org/ Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's essay "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor": http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630
If you survived the academic job market, what comes next? Xine catches up with Dr. Nadia Chernyak who will be tenure-track at UC Irvine in the Cognitive Science department. Nadia does amazing research on cognitive and moral development in children, but as it turns out, nothing truly prepares you to be a #newprof. What is involved in setting up a lab, which could be described as running your own small startup?
We want YOU to help #SavetheNEH. If Congress passes this budget, the National Endowment for the Humanities will be eliminated in 2018. What do we, as a society, stand to lose for savings of a mere .006% of the federal budget? Liz interviews Xine about the devastating impact this would have on the cultural, historical, artistic, and ethical lives of communities of every size everywhere in the US. The PhDivas share the specifics of the "human" in the "humanities." Xine put out a call for stories from academics who received funding from the NEH -- and in less than 24 hours, received an overwhelming response. We try to do justice to these stories from scholars from every rank and institution who wrote in about their innovative NEH-funded research, teaching, and archival projects. This work has directly and indirectly contributed to mentoring and training, the lives and concerns of local and international communities, and the public understanding of everything from historical and present sciences to media to immigration to personal artistic practices. We end with recommendations on how to TAKE ACTION.
National Humanities Alliance on what you can do: http://www.nhalliance.org/take_action Interactive visualization of NEH impact created by CUNY Digital Fellows: https://digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2017/04/04/visualizing-neh-open-data/
Many thanks to those who responded to our call on social media and on the C19 Americanists listserv. We did our best to represent your work and to pronounce names properly! In no particular order, thanks to Jonathan Senchyne, Rose Casey, Catherine Gouge, Kevin Modestino, Sandra Petrulionus, Edlie Wong, Anne Boyd Rioux, Lucinda Damon-Bach, Stephanie Ann Smith, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Phyllis Weliver, Hsuan Hsu, Michelle Tong, Linda Luu, Seth Perlow, Dana Luciano, Katy Chiles, Michele Currie Navakas, Peter Reed, Evan Cortens, Matt Fellion. And special thanks to Jennie Row and Brittany Pladek who first brought Xine's attention to the NEH Appropriations report.
Conferences are like icebergs: there's a lot going on below the surface. We give you insight on the secret life of academic conferences. First, Liz and Xine cover the obvious considerations about STEM and humanities conferences. But in the majority of this episode we discuss the hidden dynamics: institutional privilege, social ecosystems, and how cliques make visible professional power dynamics. In some ways, academic conferences can be like a teen movie! You enter as an overwhelmed junior person trying to break into the scene and you hope to eventually become prom queen. Who do you eat your meals with? Can you make connections with the "cool kids," the superstars in your field? What do you do about the pressure to drink? Does social media change the game? What do you wear? What are the very real financial costs to conferences, not to mention the toll it can take on introverts, the chronically ill, or those who can't get childcare?
Senior scholars, please take conferences as an opportunity to help junior and contingent scholars! Just buying someone a coffee and chatting with them can go a long way.
Here's the inside scoop on #TED2017 in Vancouver from TED Fellow and PhDiva Dr. Liz Wayne who delivered a TED Talk about her research on cancer drug delivery. Xine interviews Liz about the application process, preparation process, and life-changing experience of the TED Conference. What is it like to take science communication to the next level? What entrepreneurs and creatives did Liz rub shoulders with? Congratulations to Liz on continuing to develop her black excellence!
Liz's TED Talk was highlighted as one of the Big Ideas of the first day of #TED2017: http://blog.ted.com/in-case-you-missed-it-the-big-ideas-from-day-1-of-ted2017/
April is the cruelest month! It's a rough time in higher ed: originally our theme for this episode was just "being tired." Work, travel, bills, dying houseplants. We push through our exhaustion to talk about the musical Hamilton, Get Out, Ghost in the Shell, and that awful Pepsi commercial with Kendall Jenner. The PhDivas just came back from their visit to Earlham College where they gave talks on their individual research and on bridging the STEM/humanities divide. Connecting with students and our listeners helps to give us energy! ...but we still need to get enough sleep.
You can view our joint talk at Earlham College on Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/EarlhamPsychology/videos/1090781751068369/
Our latest guest Brianda is at a turning point: pursue a PhD in STEM or follow her dream of growing Flyy Science, which combines science communication with hip hop and style. This is a coming-of-age in academia episode that everyone can relate to! Liz and Xine chat with Brianda about her current work as a certified Medical Laboratory Scientist, the gap between STEM degrees and jobs, and the journey from realizing you love something to what it means to develop a career. Why don't kidneys get the same attention as hearts in popular culture? Brianda asks the PhDivas for advice on the next steps as a possible pre-PhDiva and what the best path might be for someone who describes herself as a mix of Bill Nye the Science Guy, Aaliyah, and Left Eye.
Brianda on Twitter: @flyyscience1 On Tumblr: http://flyyscience.tumblr.com/ On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKzUwVctzKHV6_VGB8cp1KQ
Black child joy is a fundamental reason Black History Month needs to exist. We recap Black History Month 2017 with Danielle Morgan, Assistant Professor of English at Santa Clara University, from Beyonce's pregnancy with twins to Moonlight, Fences, and Hidden Figures at the Oscars. The figure of the Black child is important to address beyond sentimentality: Danielle and Liz explain to Xine what celebrating Black History Month meant to them as children. How do we make space for respecting all forms of black excellence?
Danielle's piece on Black History Month for Al-Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/02/black-history-month-criticism-170210113100632.html
This week we have a double episode release for Black History Month! Historian Mari N. Crabtree is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the College of Charleston and works on lynching, narrativity, and memory in the South. She researches and teaches Black history not far from Emanuel AME Church, the site of the massacre committed by Dylann Roof, and in South Carolina, where Bree Newsome took down the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds. We talk with Professor Crabtree about how the past collapses into the present amidst the protests against and counter-protests for Bree Newsome's talk at the College for Black History Month. Mari, Liz Wayne, and Xine Yao discuss Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the institution of Black History Month, the North/South dichotomy -- and how Mari is teaching a class based on our episode about Asian American and African American crosscultural influences!
Mari Crabtree's reflections on Black History Month: http://blogs.cofc.edu/aast/2017/02/21/reflections-on-black-history-month/ More on Professor Crabtree: http://african-american-studies.cofc.edu/program/faculty-pages/crabtree-mari.php
What do power, society, and ideology have to do with science? PhDiva Liz Wayne interviews Associate Professor Sarah Richardson, speaker at the 2017 Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Harvard. Professor Richardson's research uses a multidisciplinary approach to analyze how scientists understand sex and gender. In this episode, she discusses her interdisciplinary journey through history, philosophy, genetics, and feminism. Richardson challenges us to go beyond the 'Women in STEM" pipeline inclusion model. What if biology doesn't determine gender, but gender -- and other forms of difference -- can change biology? In this conversation Liz and Professor Richardson talk about making science and the teaching of science better.
More on Sarah Richardson here: http://scholar.harvard.edu/srichard/home
Muslim fictions and fictions about Muslims: we talk politics, stereotypes, and histories with Dr. Noor Hashem, expert on Muslim American literature. What are the ordinary, everyday, boring lives of Muslims in the United States? What is it like to be a person of faith in the academy and how does it inform one's work? Noor, Xine and Liz discuss points of intersection, activism, and ethical emotions. If tough love isn't doing it, what do we need? We end with a more recent interview with Dr. Noor to discuss the #MuslimBan and the heartening support for activism in Boston.
Council on American-Islamic Relations: https://www.cair.com/ Massachusetts Chapter: http://www.cairma.org/
Preparations for the Science March on Washington are underway! Whose science is it anyway? Liz brings us a group interview with aspiring physicists from the 2017 Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Harvard. We get insight into how these young women are inspired to study different aspects of physics: from Instagram selfies to engineering to parental guidance to the thrill of knowing the wonders of the universe. How do you transition from a childhood love to your professional path? Xine and Liz frame this interview with questions about politics and intersectionality as part of the plans of the upcoming Science March on Washington and around the US.
CUWIP: http://www.aps.org/programs/women/workshops/cuwip.cfm SPIN UP: https://sites.google.com/site/harvardcuwip/application/spin-up-application
Crystal Springs, Mississippi: two girls graduated from their small town high school and grew up to be Dr. Shahara'Tova "Shaye" Dente, English PhD, and our own Dr. Liz Wayne, TED Fellow. Shaye gives us insight into the research and teaching of hip hop, social movements, and hip hop literature. Xine and Liz interview Shaye about pipeline programs for underrepresented minorities to the question of what makes good literature. We talk Jay-Z, Drake, Meek Mill, Nicki Minaj, Lil' Kim, Iggy Azalea -- and whether the vampires of Twilight suck. What does it mean to teach African American literature in the South, passing by cotton fields and former plantations, if you're Black?
Think positive, not punitive. How can we make resolutions that are not just individually-oriented? Make resolutions shared with friends, nominate good people for awards, buy a coffee/tea/drink/lunch for someone junior. We are trained in critique and then forget how compliments feed the human self. Xine and Liz are committed to making sure they lift others as they climb! The PhDivas are also dedicated to their own different approaches to body positivity -- but they're both aiming for unassisted pull-ups.
Oh, and Xine's theme song for the year is DMX's "X Gon' Give It to Ya." (Get it, X? We amuse ourselves...)
On New Year's Eve we go meta and reflect on our best moments, interviews, behind-the-scenes production, and the melanin contrast between us in our promo photos thanks to the inadequacies of phototechnology. We discuss what it means for us to be in public while academics are under attack in this post-Steven Salaita moment. How do we talk to each other in seminar, in question period, in our citations? As we climb, let's not forget to lift each other.
Thank you to our amazing interviewees and the support of our listeners!
Would a Black physicist have called it "dark matter"? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is the 63rd Black American woman to earn a PhD in physics and works on early universe cosmology and the dark matter problem. Xine and Liz talk to Chanda about the mysteries of the universe and the differing conundrums of being Black in the United States versus Canada. Literature emerges as a necessary form of education and survival -- shout out to the writings of Lawrence Hill and Langston Hughes! We discuss Star Trek, dissertation dedications, Janelle Monae, and the ambiguous worth of "diversity" in science and academia. What does it mean to decolonize science? Enjoy this special, extra-long episode!
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's work: http://www.cprescodweinstein.com/ Follow her for her wit, activism, and research on Twitter @IBJIYONGI Decolonizing Science List: https://medium.com/@chanda/decolonising-science-reading-list-339fb773d51f#.om5w2ivfq Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes: http://www.lawrencehill.com/the-book-of-negroes/
Blaming biased data and bad algorithms? Stop moral outsourcing to machines because data is a reflection of us! Liz and Xine interview Rumman Chowdhury, PhD candidate in political science and a full-time data scientist. We talk about how ethics, diversity, and social justice play an integral part in data, dubious robots, and the uneven development of data science through industry and academia. Beyond tin foil hats, we discuss everything from racist redlining in Chicago, philosopher Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, Netflix's Luke Cage, and menstruation apps. How can we approach data in a way that is not reductive? How can the quantitative not come at the cost of the qualitative?
Rumman works at Metis, an organization dedicated to data science training that has scholarships for women, people of color, veterans, and LGBTQ+ people. (www.thisismetis.com) Check out more about her work and for job postings in data scientist at www.rummanchowdhury.com and follow her on Twitter @ruchowdh
Nasty, sassy, bossy -- how do we criticize women? And how can we articulate valid criticisms without being accused of misogyny? In this pre-election conversation, Liz and Xine discuss Hillary Clinton, gender, and the politics of representation and, well, politics! Is it just about Hillary, or also a post-Obama moment that has transformed our ideas about hope and change? We talk political compromise, respectability, US imperialism, histories of suffrage and race, and the power of memes.
Since recording this conversation, we've been in a difficult place: trying to look after ourselves and others we care about on top of our usual work in academia. Love and solidarity to our listeners from the PhDivas!
Insecure, Broad City, and Girls: shows for and by women! These are shows that Liz and Xine watch as part of their lives as serious academics and researchers. What is the appeal? Well, we are still part of the much maligned Millennial generation. The PhDivas discuss how these female creators explore the trials and tribulations of work and love as Millennial women. What racial and gender barriers still exist despite the DIY innovations of Issa Rae, Lena Dunham, and Abbi and Ilana? We evaluate the first episode of Insecure, 5 seasons of Girls, and 3 seasons of Broad City -- talking about relatability, catharsis, humor, and ambivalence.
Hip hop artist and producer, video game heroine, PhD candidate -- how cool and brilliant can one person be? We talk to Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo who performs under the stage name Sammus, a reference to Samus Aran of Metroid who is the first woman game protagonist. She studies gender and music production through Science and Technology Studies and is also a noted nerdcore rapper who has performed at SXSW, Geek Girl Con, PAX East. We talk about Kanye West, Nintendo, questions of representation, in geekdom and the intersection of humanities and STEM. Sammus has also been a great champion for Black Lives Matter in Ithaca and an advocate for mental health. Pieces in Space, her new album is out October 28!
"I’m kind of scared of the academy/ I think my parents are proud of me/ I just wish I knew how to be comfortable here/ I never feel like I’m allowed to breathe/Rubbing shoulders with these old nerds/ Rockin’ sweater vests in they office hours/ Eating hors d’oeuvres while I soul search/ Tryna make some sense of the ivory tower" Sammus, "1080p"
Order: http://dongiovannirecords.11spot.com/sammus-pieces-in-space-pre-order.html Sammus's Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/sammusmusic/?fref=ts L.J. Alonge's Blacktop series: https://www.amazon.ca/Justin-1-Blacktop-LJ-Alonge-ebook/dp/B015DLURQC/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1476986820&sr=1-3
Wait, isn't getting a PhD supposed to set you up with a cushy professor job? We talk to Dr. Shyla Saltzman about the increasing phenomenon of PhDs ending up in adjunct positions -- temporary, underpaid, underresourced teaching positions. This episode is about the stresses of the adjunct life, the corporatization of the university, as well as a unglamorous side of alt-ac jobs. After fun and laughter as we commiserate about shared experiences as people of color, Shyla gives us a deeply personal, honest account of her struggles after graduation. Together we discuss the conditions of precarity that threatens higher ed as well as the world around us, strikes and the #LIUlockout, and small victories.
How does one complete a doctorate? Xine and Liz dispel myths about individual "grit" and "productivity" to talk about structural and psychological barriers to finishing the degree. Lack of resources, social norms, and administrative pressures on time-to-degree can all exacerbate the final years as a graduate student -- and we can internalize these problems as personal failures. While it's true that the best dissertation is a done dissertation -- and there's no such thing as a perfect one -- we also discuss how much can depend on your adviser. It's about managing relationships, where committee members are in their careers, their experiences of the job market, and their personalities. And sometimes it isn't writer's block, sometimes it's depression: don't hesitate to ask for help! Make sure you are surrounded by people who can support you as you dissertate but also when you need to take breaks. We share tips but also criticize how idealized advice can come off as prescriptive and add its own stresses. It may also be that finishing the degree is not for you -- and that's fine as well. Doubt is healthy. Be kind to yourself!
Art meets science = promoting women in science! Sara MacSorley of Wesleyan University is the creator of Super Cool Scientists, a Kickstarter project to create a coloring book featuring a diverse group of current women scientists. (Our own Liz Wayne is one of them!) We talk with Sara about what it means to support science as a non-scientist as well as community engagement and outreach through higher education. We are also excited about Hidden Figures and other media promoting histories of women in science -- Super Cool Scientists is about supporting current women in science and the coloring book medium is geared to both children and adults alike.
We also talk about the personal trials of public promotion and supporting marginalized people in higher ed. What does it mean to address anxiety? How do we make safe spaces? How do we make our identities or allyship visible and effective? Sara takes us into her personal experience taking part in an It Gets Better campaign during her undergrad -- and that's how she met her wife! Support the Kickstarter! Get a chance to color in Liz!
Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/saramacsorley/super-cool-scientists-a-women-in-science-coloring
It's Postdoc Appreciation Week! But what are postdocs anyway and how do they differ between STEM and the humanities? What comes after the dissertation? Liz is now an NIH postdoc at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, while Xine is a SSHRC postdoc in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia. In this episode we talk about our new postdoc lives on different sides of the continent. We break down the differences between postdocs in different disciplines and the role that postdocs play in the current structure of academia. Increasingly, people are having to go through not just one, but two or more postdocs before getting to tenure-track professor positions. It can feel like we are in a strange liminal space between graduate student and faculty. How do we make the most of this time for our personal and professional lives?
Wait, getting your PhD is not enough?! From scientist to science policy -- Liz Wayne talks to Dr. Catharine Young about alt-ac from the STEM side, developing skills from a postdoc in biomedical sciences to her current position as the Science and Innovation Policy Adviser for the British Embassy. Our different experiences in academia open us to new possibilities and equally legitimate ways to love the subject we study. Turns out that having a PhD is not enough for a job in 2016, even after all we've accomplished! Through the American Association for the Advancement of Science fellowship, Dr. Young traveled internationally to work on addressing Ebola and other biological threats for the US and other countries. How do we put our work into broader context for the betterment of society? Grad students need to be exposed to more opportunities beyond academia during their degree. From science benchwork to science communication, Liz and Dr. Young chat about taking science out of the ivory tower.
You can get in touch with Catharine Young through LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catharine-young-25959148
From seminar papers to pieces for The Guardian -- how do we write for the public and how can our graduate training prepare us for non-academic work? Meredith Talusan is BuzzFeed's first openly trans LGBT staff writer and was a PhD in comparative literature. We interview Meredith about what it means to be a professional trans woman in the media and writing for different audiences. How do we balance the complexity of our expertise with the necessity for simplicity in communication? If we're at the "tipping point" of trans issues, what battles must be fought against transmisogyny? How do we represent ourselves but also our communities? Meredith chats about everything from colorism to taking criticism online to relative privilege to (lack of) support for LGBT students in the academy.
As of this writing, Meredith has moved on from BuzzFeed and is working on a few books! Good luck, Meredith! You can follow her on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/demerith?fref=ts) and Twitter @1demerith
"YOU'RE the professor?!" What happens after the first day of teaching through to tenure and full professorship on top of positions as a program director and department chair? We talk to Xine Yao's Cornell PhD adviser Shirley Samuels about her 30+ year career journey as an acclaimed scholar of American literature, feminism, and visual culture. Shirley gives us her view of changes in the profession as a whole as well as the continued relevance of American studies as politics and education come together. Liz and Xine ask how do you advise graduate students given the current academic job market? How do we make our disciplines matter in the neoliberal university and translate our work into public visibility?
How do we approach the power of America's founding myths? Topics include class differences, fostering community, and students asking "YOU'RE the professor?!" The work-life balance question is a cliche for professional women, so what about imbalance? Choose your battles! Survive and try to be happy.
Many thanks to Shirley Samuels for her generosity and time! She is active on Twitter as @SRSamuels and you can learn more about her work here: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/srs8/
If you have every kind of privilege, how do you #staywoke? The PhDivas talk to their physicist friend Philip Smith Burnham III, a white upper-middle class straight cisman who is a staunch ally. How do you offer support without being a self-important savior? We discuss how to listen, the long, slow process of awareness, and how privilege should be leveraged as an asset for change and not just a source of guilt. An aspiring astronaut who is sometimes mistaken for a frat guy, Phil talks about the relationship between Indigenous ways of knowing, Cherokee basket weaving, and developing better scientific access and education for underprivileged communities. This episode is for all our listeners -- or our listeners's friends! -- who have wondered what the next step is after checking their privilege.
Note: when talking about American Indian blood quantum laws, Phil mentions that Cherokee people need a grandparent who is Cherokee. This applies to one specific band of Cherokee called United Keetoowah
www.philipburnham.com Cornell CCMR Outreach: http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/ Cornell O-stem: https://www.facebook.com/oSTEMatCornell/ http://ostematcornell.weebly.com/ American Indian & Alaska Native Genetics Resource Center (talks not only about the science but about the ethics): http://genetics.ncai.org/ Science Museum of Minnesota: https://www.smm.org/ One Laptop per Child: http://one.laptop.org/
Other stuff: Cherokee baskets - http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/Culture/CherokeeArts/CherokeeBaskets.aspx A piece on Phil's stepdad's basket weaving - http://indigeval.aihec.org/Shared%20Documents/2-WeavingTheBasket.pdf Phil's lab's website: http://devlaminck.bme.cornell.edu/ Wikipedia for blood quantum laws in case people want some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_quantum_laws Book Phil likes about an innovative kid from Malawi who fell in love with physics: https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Harnessed-Wind-Electricity/dp/0061730335 And his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_how_i_harnessed_the_wind?language=en
Meet the real-life Leslie Knope: Erica Ostermann is an Assistant Dean plus a full-time graduate student in Information Science. From Bowdoin, to Stanford, to Cornell, Erica is former boss to Liz and Xine (as well as activist Deray McKesson of #BlackLivesMatter!) She is possibly the most organized, driven person we know. But accidents are still important -- how do we take moments of randomness or even injury and make them into learning experiences? How do we find balance between our Type A tendencies and need for self-care? Get a new perspective on student life, accessibility, and building a healthy team in higher ed -- and juicy details on new aspects of Liz and Xine!
Graduation! PhDiva Xine Yao was chosen as the baton-wielding degree marshal representing all graduating PhDs at Cornell for the 2016 Commencement. As a gesture of solidarity, she raised her fist when entering the stadium and on stage where it would be projected on the Jumbotron and recorded for posterity. Is Xine the "modelliest model minority ever" and can she try to use her visibility for good causes? Drs. Liz and Xine talk about struggle, success, privilege, and vulnerability amidst the pomp and circumstance of graduation. Xine met the amazing Paula Vogel who was kicked out of her PhD in the 70s for writing a feminist dissertation -- and who went onto positions at Brown and Yale. We also pay homage to some of the amazing undergrads we know. Farewell and may we meet again!
How can we teach and care for our students in ways we are still learning to do for ourselves? It's not just about content, lessons, and assignments -- it's also about vulnerability and emotional labor. Join us for the laughter, tips, and anecdotes in the second part of a two-part series where Xine brings together Mariana Alarcon, Elizabeth Alexander, Aurora Masum-Javed, and Renia White from the Cornell English PhD and MFA programs for a lively conversation about teaching while WOC. We talk about the rewards of teaching, negotiating our authorities in the classroom, and developing our teaching personae. How do we teach #BlackLivesMatter and "let the world into our classrooms"? Hope you find this episode as generative as we did!
Grades are in, teaching evaluations are in! Who is being judged and how? Women, people of color, and especially women of color (WOC) have the most to fear about how their teaching and authority are evaluated. In the first of a two-part series, Xine brings together Mariana Alarcon, Elizabeth Alexander, Aurora Masum-Javed, and Renia White from the Cornell English PhD and MFA programs for a lively conversation about teaching while WOC. Join these women as they discuss topics from being seen as "too racially affliated" to whether our students should be "baby revolutionaries" to teaching microaggressions and Serena Williams in Claudia Rankine's Citizen. How do we as teachers learn from our teaching? We reflect on the biases, successes, and failures of our students and ourselves as we continue to develop our pedagogical practices.
Do you ever feel like you don't belong? Imposter syndrome names the feeling of being out of place that even successful people can experience -- and this is widespread in all levels of the academy. But when can we have anxieties as women of color that might not be about being an imposter? There's so much about power and structural inequality, from the brand power of schools to academic credentials to how performances of intelligence are recognized according to norms of race and gender. Liz was the only black person -- not to mention black woman -- doing her undergrad in physics at Penn, while Xine is one of a few scholars of Asian descent in early and 19th century Americanist literature. How can we recognize our own experiences without invalidating those of others? We talk about vulnerability, self-doubt, coping strategies, and infiltrating the system to change it from within.
email: lizandxine@gmail.com twitter: @phdivaspodcast facebook: Phdivas Podcast
End of the semester struggle is so real! This is a teaser for our upcoming discussion about imposter syndrome in academia. Good luck to all of you! Thrive and survive! <3
International grad students are the majority, but why don't we hear from them? We chat with Dr. Michelle Tong about visas, labor precarity, culture shock, and stereotypes about the model minority and alienness. This ep includes discussions of the dynamics of scientific methods. Michelle just earned her PhD in psychology working on smells and memory; in her words, she can't diagnose you but "would have to take out your brain and slice it." Together we reflect on the blurred lines between our research and ourselves.
Join us in laughing at the absurdity of a so-called postracial world! We sip some tea with Danielle Morgan and chat about race and humor, #BlackGirlMagic, and navigating graduate school as a women of color with a family. Danielle just earned her PhD in English with a project about comedy and satire in African American culture and literature (congrats!). We talk about race, intent, and audience in Hamilton the musical and the work of Dave Chappelle and Aziz Ansari. There's also the #BlackGirlMagic of women like Ava DuVernay, Michelle Obama, Beyonce, and so many others. What considerations go into finding a supportive partner and having children when you're a woman in academia? (Subsidized child care at conferences!)
Danielle is one of the co-hosts of the Black Girl Magic podcast which highlights amazing black women. Check them out! https://soundcloud.com/blackgirlmagicpod
So you're used to being "the smart one." How does our pursuit of success have its pitfalls? In a guest lecture for a Cornell course on "A Life Worth Living," we talk about how we define success and how that drive feeds into problematic ideas about meritocracy and respectability. Competition can become an all-consuming mentality: it's not just about our worth as individuals but our relationship to communities and our burdens of representation. Liz addresses the pressures surrounding her identity as a proud Black woman from Mississippi with a passion for physics, while Xine reflects on her love of literature and its connections to the perception of Asians as the "model minority." Beyond chasing professional accolades, how can we give ourselves the time and space to be happy?
Spring is a time of renewal -- and also rejection according to the academic calendar. So. Much. Rejection: grad schools, fellowships, postdocs, jobs, publications -- all come rolling in, sometimes with a little bit of success thrown in. Track records of academic success obscure every level of academia is filled with what feels like different forms of failure. It's damn hard not to internalize. Liz and Xine try to balance celebrating individual successes for ourselves and others, allowing space for pity parties, and building community solidarity. How do we accept ourselves in the face of rejection? We help pick each other up, dust off, and try again. (And we're not fans of catchphrases like "grit" and "resilience.")
It happens here: we start our second season by helping the whisper network speak up about sexual harassment and assault in academia. The Hunting Ground documentary has brought attention to sexual assault on US campuses and there are now high profile cases about sexual harassment experienced by grads in astronomy and philosophy. We interview Anna Waymack, grad student and advocate, about issues with the current system of academia writ large. Please support institutional and cultural change! We are using the nightingale as our image for this episode in reference to the horrific ancient myth about Philomela who was silenced by her rapist -- support survivors and speak out!
For more information, to give anonymous testimony, and to help create change, please check out Sexual Assault Network for Grads: www.ixgrads.org/
"But my best friend is ____!" What if this common phrase was treated as more than an excuse for bigotry, but as an ethical imperative for allyship and activism? Liz and Xine were invited to give their first keynote, "Friendship as Activism," for the Agency and Solidarity Conference at Cornell. We talk respectability politics; our studies, ourselves; diversity, activism, and service in the academy; and self-care and survival.
Oh, and the keynote was covered by The Cornell Daily Sun and we were called "race, gender, and sexuality activists." Ha! We wouldn't really describe ourselves that way. Your thoughts?
"Graduate Students Urge Activism, Public Service on Campus": http://cornellsun.com/2016/03/15/graduate-students-urge-activism-public-service-on-campus/?platform=hootsuite
Are graduate students workers? Liz and Xine explore this debate by interviewing Jackqueline Frost from Cornell Graduate Students United. We discuss issues of graduate student labor at Cornell and higher education in general -- power dynamics, fear, funding, and differences between humanities and STEM in approaches to work and work dynamics. Should graduate students of the world unite? Do we have nothing to lose but our chains?
"BANG" -- Xine fired her confetti gun and then sauntered off-stage to applause of a thousand people. The Vagina Monologues are a perennial cultural touchstone on many college campuses for women's advocacy. Xine and Liz talk about the power and problems of the play. How can we affirm bodies and womanhood without excluding issues of race or trans women from the conversation? What kind of responses do we get from cis men and how can we encourage them to be supportive allies?
Xine is proud to be a part of Cornell's student-run cast. All proceeds went to the Advocacy Center of Tompkins County to help with their work against sexual violence.
Meredith Talusan's essay "Performing in The Vagina Monologues as a Transgender Woman." http://www.buzzfeed.com/1demerith/performing-in-the-vagina-monologues-as-a-transgender-woman
What happens when we experience loss in grad school? How do we find ways to heal and to remember when our time is so structured by quantifiable successes and milestones? The leave of absence disrupts this timeline and people will judge you for taking it and others will condemn you for not doing it. Liz and Xine take this episode to discuss mental health and to mourn their loved ones through both intangible memories and tangible mementos. From jade necklaces to laundry to an extra winter coat, what do we keep or let go when we lose someone?
What if? With every BA/PhD/postdoc/job application we open so many possibilities for our academic journeys and lives in different places and even fields of interest. Xine and Liz speculate about some of these alternate realities, from family histories to career paths. How do we imagine our pasts and futures in this uncertain world? Who are these other Lizes and Xines?
Let's build the academia and the world we want to live in! January is National Mentoring Month (US) so Xine and Liz talk about how much success in academia is owed to mentors and the importance of paying it forward by mentoring. We discuss this emotional and gendered labor and, of course, the disproportionate (but important) burden placed on marginalized peoples in the academy. What should you know about being a mentor and about being a mentee? Thank you to all our wonderful mentors and support to all our mentees!
Treat yourself! Xine and Liz talk about class and race in the consumerist makeup heaven that is Sephora. Lupita Nyong'o is now the face of Lancome, but our PhDivas have grown up struggling with representation in cosmetics. It's bittersweet finally being able to enter the rarefied realm of beauty... And as academics we're not supposed to care or talk about it.
(FYI Liz loves the Jardin perfume series from Hermes, while Xine's signature fragrance is Tom Ford Black Orchid and is now obsessed with Helmut Lang's Cuiron)
Black Power, Yellow Peril! What happens when Bruce Lee's inheritor is a young African American man from Harlem? Liz and Xine discuss the classic Motown martial arts film The Last Dragon in relation to Bruce Lee's iconic Enter the Dragon. We discuss cultural appropriation, alliance, and adaptation between Blacks and Asians with a focus on Black and Asian American masculinity. Mentions include the work of scholar Vijay Prashad, Jet Li in Romeo Must Die, John Cho in Selfie, Aziz Ansari and Kelvin Yu in Master of None.
ByeScalia -- black scientists clap back. Liz and Xine discuss Supreme Court Justice Scalia's comments about Blacks benefiting from going to "lesser schools," affirmative action, Abigail Fisher, diversity in university branding, and the history of science. We speak from the heart: Liz on the hurt from these comments and Xine trying to support Liz as a friend.
160+ Asian American & Pacific Islander Groups File Legal Briefs with U.S. Supreme Court in Support of Affirmative Action #edu4all #NotYourWedge: http://asianamericancivilrights.org/160-aapi-groups-file-legal-briefs-with-u-s-supreme-court-in-support-of-affirmative-action
We encourage you to support awesome black women scientists like the ones we have listed below: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) Danielle Lee, The Urban Scientist (@DNLee5 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/urban-scientist/about/) Jedidah Isler, TED Fellow (@JedidahIslerPhD https://www.ted.com/talks/jedidah_isler_how_i_fell_in_love_with_quasars_blazars_and_our_incredible_universe?language=en)
"It looks like I'm missing my girlfriend!" Liz and Xine have a 2 body problem since Liz is at UNC Chapel Hill and Xine is still at Cornell. We talk about the 2-or-more body problem (family and friends are bodies too!). Xine also explains Star Wars to Liz: are we Jedi or Sith? Other topics: books we want to read, The Wiz, #ThanksgivingwithBlackFamilies.
We are still working out the kinks of recording apart from each other -- apologies for the delay and sound quality!
Xine and Liz respond to a listener's question: can someone appropriate their own cultural identity? Xine confesses that she's an Asian person who has never been to Asia. Liz muses about her relationship to her own blackness. Food, fashion, hip hop. Power and history. What's authenticity? Who gets to own culture?
Discussing "truth" across the STEM/humanities divide! Liz explains p-values to Xine. Xine teaches Liz what close reading means. Together, Xine and Liz examine the shifting standards of evidence in popular culture and recent events around police brutality.
‘‘I don’t care to speak to you anymore.’’ Nicki Minaj to her interviewer from New York Times magazine. (!)
Liz and Xine bow before the throne of Nicki Minaj and discuss her role in the current climate of pop culture, racial discourse, and feminism.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is how to mentor and be mentored in return. Liz and Xine reflect on their PhD experiences and give advice to early career graduate students...eating Sour Patch Kids along the way. What do we wish we knew? Thanks for all of our mentors! #academickindness
"Go back to Hong Kong! Speak English!" Liz interviews Xine about Toronto and multiculturalism, racial consciousness, video games, and her general attitude of defiance in her life and her study of literature. Stay tuned for end of the episode where you will also learn something about Xine that causes her friends a lot of anguish.
Happy belated birthday, Xine!
Liz talks about her dissertation defense aka why Xine went to the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology at 9am on a Wednesday
We are starting a new short format called "Footnotes" to come out between our regular long Thursday episodes! Tidbits, bloopers, and answers to your questions.
Liz and Xine sit down with fellow PhDiva Dr. Nadia Chernyak and discuss difficulties and similarities about applying to tenure track jobs in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM. (Yes, we are all on the job market right now.) How is the university changing? What is your #academicanxiety?
For more information about Dr. Chernyak you can find her at www.nadiachernyak.com
Can you study what you love? Newly minted PhD Dr. Shyla Foster talks to Xine and Liz about why she studies Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how to be a critic as well as a fan.
In this two part series, Xine and Liz show each other how they conduct research. In Part 2, modern-day scientist Liz joins Xine on her trip to Philadelphia to conduct research in the archives of the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians. Skull collections! Civil War medicine!
In this two part series, Xine and Liz show each other how they conduct research. In Part I, Xine shadows Liz on a typical day of experimentation with in-vivo imaging in a biomedical engineering lab. What happens when Xine, who studies the history of science and medicine, gets to see Liz's day-to-day work as a scientist? Lasers! Floating tables!
Xine interviews Liz and highlights some of her favorite "Liz-isms." Liz reveals insight into her childhood, why she loves physics, being from the south, and why she's truly a PhDiva.
Liz and Xine break down the outrageous NY Times comments by Duke professor Jerry Hough about Black and Asian names in relation to assimilation in America.
Xine and Liz are back from summer break and bringing you the business. New music, photography, a Facebook page -- and new episodes!
"You're a girl so you can't do math." "Speak English and go back to Hong Kong!" Liz and Xine tackle racial and gender stereotypes that tried to hold them back -- but they ended up doing PhDs in the very subjects they weren't supposed to be any good at.
BlackLivesMatter. DREAM Cornell. May Day. #FighttheFee. Just a few of the acts of protest on Cornell's campus at the beginning of this month. Xine and Liz discuss activism, the academy, and what it takes to be an ally.
Cornell's Response to Student Activists http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/29/cornell-student-activists_n_7167092.html
CAAAV's #JusticeforAkaiGurley #Asians4BlackLives letter http://caaav.org/justiceforakaigurley-national-sign-on-letter
It's hard not to have an opinion about Fresh Off the Boat, the first Asian American sitcom in about 20 years. Check out our take on the representation of Asian Americans and the use of Black culture both in the show and by its creator, Eddie Huang.
Eddie Huang's initial Vulture article on FOTB: http://www.vulture.com/2015/01/eddie-huang-fresh-off-the-boat-abc.html Bill Maher interview with Eddie Huang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPbdydra_Ak OKCupid on race: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/race-attraction-2009-2014/ Color Creative founded by Issa Rae: http://www.colorcreative.tv/
A Cornell study just came out with this headline: 'Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions'
There's A LOT of things wrong with this. So, we had a discussion.
Coverage of the Study Cornell's press release: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-over-men-stem-faculty-positions CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/opinions/williams-ceci-women-in-science/ NYTimes: http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/opinions/williams-ceci-women-in-science/
Criticism Article in Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/04/no_sexist_hiring_in_stem_fields_a_vaunted_new_study_makes_that_claim_unconvincingly.html The Other Sociologist: http://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-science/ Claire G. Griffin: http://claireggriffin.com/blog-1/2015/4/15/women-preferentially-hired-in-stem-but-does-that-solve-the-problem?hc_location=ufi Storify #stillaproblem: https://storify.com/kejames/still-a
PNAS Submission Process http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/reviewprocess.pdf
Who did the PhDivas look up to? Role models and possibility models.
Real Colored Girls' "The Problem with Beyhive Bottom Bitch Feminism": https://realcoloredgirls.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/the-problem-with-beyhive-bottom-bitch-feminism/