Science, objectivity, race, gender

Have you heard of Space + Anthropology? This group blog through Medium.com brings together commentaries on the intersections between tech, culture, space, sci-fi, art, and anthropology. We already blogged in a past post of reading lists and syllabi about Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's fantastic Decolonising Science Reading List.

Other eye-catching pieces from Space + Anthropology include "Native Sci-fi Films and Trailers"
by William Lempert and Michael Oman-Reagan's "Anthropology in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”." But we want to highlight another piece by Prescod-Weinstein: "The Self-Construction of Black Women Physicists" based on a talk she gave at Yale’s Critical Histories, Activist Futures: “Decolonizing Science by Reconstructing Observers.”

Where the work of science is to continuously excavate the boundaries of what we do not know, it becomes clear that the relationship between the questions we ask and the axioms of scientist-construction has epistemic meaning for what we may come to know about physics.
To be Black means to have your capacity to have an insightful epistemic standpoint constantly questioned. ... This epistemic alienation serves a status quo where communities at the margins are excluded from discourse about what science is and whom it serves.

How might this piece by Prescod-Weinstein be useful in raising the complexities of and intersections between science, objectivity, race, and gender with our students? How do hegemonic cultural assumptions shape how knowledge is created, validated, and disseminated?

Quick links and further reading:

• Space + Anthropology blog
• Prescod-Weinstein's "The Self-Construction of Black Women Physicists"
• Prescod-Weinstein's Decolonising Science Reading List
• anthro everywhere's
• Reading Lists for Decolonizing Anthropology & Beyond (15 December 2016)
• How gender changes our jobs (24 October 2016)

An Anthropologist, a Climate Scientist, and a Geographer walk into NASA...

The joke introduces a recent news article describing a new project that brings together various scientists to study changing patterns of urbanization and land use in the Himalayan region. This project will combine satellite imaging data with other qualitative data including census information, data concerning flow of remittances and land use, as well as the results of new ethnographic studies. These latter projects will take place in India, Nepal, and Bhutan for the purpose of understanding 'why' and 'how' different economic, political and social forces influence urbanization.

This overview of the research reads like a well-crafted SSHRC proposal, outlining the knowledge mobilization: Turin and Shneiderman (two Canadian UBC Anthropologists) hope to create conduits for effective information transferring between the researchers and local communities, national governments and development organizations. Such channels will help ensure that the results of the study can be broadly disseminated, but also that the needs and concerns of those in the communities being studied can be communicated back to the team to further inform the direction of the research.

The article ends with Turin describing how he will leverage the partnerships he and his wife (Dr. Shneiderman) have built over the last 25 years to connect with local need and take the results back to communities at all levels. 

This quick article in the Ubussey highlights some really interesting research collaborations for anthropologists and highlights some of the unique attributes they bring to such an endeavor.

How gender changes our jobs

One of the things I love about teaching anthropology is thinking about and showing how -- through everyday experiences -- broad processes shape local lives.

I think that these connections come out very clearly in this piece from The Atlantic, "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (2016). The hook of the piece is that computer programming, which is now a male-dominated field, actually began as a career considered particularly suited to women. So, what happened?

The answer comes down in a very real way to how our

Margaret Hamilton, Programmer for NASA (1969)

conceptions of “expertise” are inseparable from gender. As Judy Wajcman, a sociology professor at the London School of Economics, has argued, “The classification of women’s jobs as unskilled and men’s jobs as skilled frequently bears little relation to the actual amount of training or ability required for them. Skill definitions are saturated with gender bias.” Gender stereotypes pervade definitions of competence and status, contrasting work that requires brain or brawn; mathematical or verbal ability; individualism or cooperation. When an occupation undergoes a shift in gender composition, the description of the job often morphs to better align with the gender of the incoming hires—such as when programming went from being understood as clerical work suitable for women to a job that demands advanced mathematical facility. When women replaced men as typists, it went from a job that was seen as requiring physical stamina to one that needed a woman’s dexterity. In providing profiles not only the male-dominated field of programming, but the female-dominated field of teaching, this piece underscores how our perceptions of different careers, their power, prestige, and the paycheck that goes along with them is deeply coloured by our culturally-informed ideas of gender.

Dr. Christine Darden. Courtesy NASA

This piece is also interesting to use to think about how structure and actions based on socially constructed qualities associated (even unconsciously) with gender and race have helped to shape certain fields, and to keep individuals out of working in certain fields, e.g. women and people of colour in STEM.

Quick links & further reading:

• "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (The Atlantic, 2016)
• How does language shape our worldview? (17 October 2016) and other anthro everywhere! posts on language
• "Margaret Hamilton, the Engineer Who Took the Apollo to the Moon" (Medium, 2014)
• "Meet the Black Female Mathematicians Who Helped America Win the Space Race" (Observer, 2016)
• "What's Up with Chicks in Science?" Neil Degrasse Tyson responds to an old white dude about minorities (African-Americans and Women) in Science (YouTube, 3.30 minutes)
• "Alabama scientist, one of nation's few black female physicists, breaks ground in cancer research" (AL.com, 2016)

Africa is not a country!

In spite of many students' regular claims in term papers and on tests, anthropology instructors know that Africa is not a county. (To be fair to our students, claiming that Africa is a country is a crime that journalists and politicians in the West regularly commit.)

Over the past few years in my intro classes I have taken the time to discuss this common misnomer/ slip of the pen with my students. For one, it often means that I don't have to write "Africa is not a country!" a dozen times come marking season, but I find that it is also a useful discussion to have when introducing the issues of representation, ethnocentrism/ Eurocentrism, power, and colonialism. In doing this, Kai Krause's True Size of Africa map has been very useful. (I sometimes also like to show this 4 minute clip from The West Wing on the Mercator projection map that most students know.)

Other links:

• Inspired by both Krause and The West Wing, The True Size of... is an interactive mapping tool that allows users to compare the sizes of any country.
• Al Jezeera's Reality Check: Africa is not a country (3 October 2015) debunks a slew of stereotypes in just 2 minutes
• Africa is not a country (The Guardian, 24 January 2014) highlights media prejudice against Africa
• For those who insist, Africa is a Country is a critical blog whose authors/ artists and editors "deliberately challenge and destabilize received wisdom about the African continent and its people in Western media."

Rethinking built space for the Deaf

At the world's only liberal-arts university for the Deaf, a new design movement -- DeafSpace -- is reconsidering how our built environment shapes social relations and our experiences of space. At Gallaudet University, DeafSpace is re-thinking architecture (including the classroom) with its Deaf and Deaf-Blind students in mind. This movement underscores how considerations of space and proximity, sensory reach, mobility and proximity, light and color, and acoustics have all traditionally privileged the hearing.

This item hits on all kinds of interesting things, including encouraging us to think about taken-for-granted, 'common sense', and cultural experiences of space.

For an in-depth read, check out: How Gallaudet University’s Architects Are Redefining Deaf Space (Amanda Kolson Hurley. 2 March 2016. Curbed)

For a shorter piece: How architecture changes for the deaf (Johnny Harris and Gina Barton. 2 March 2016. Vox)

Both articles have a link to the short YouTube video (4:48) on How architecture changes for the deaf.