Episode 006: Victoria Metcalf

Dr. Vic Metcalf is a marine biologist and the director of New Zealand’s Participatory Science Program. We talk about sex reversing fish, sentinel species, and the importance of public engagement in science.

Transcript

Cameron Graham: My guest today is Victoria Metcalf, National Coordinator of the Participatory Science Platform for the Government of New Zealand. If that job title feels a bit too long for you, try this one: the Queen of Curiosity! Dr. Metcalf is a marine biologist by training, known for her molecular biology research on fish and shellfish in the Antarctic. Her research has looked at how these species are affected by rising ocean temperatures, increased ocean acidity, and of course, pollution. These are not trivial issues, nor are they simple to understand, so I'm glad she's in the studio today to talk with us. Dr. Vic, welcome to the podcast. 

Victoria Metcalf: Thank you so much for having me. 

Cameron: "Dr Vic" is your Twitter handle.

Victoria: It is. That's right.

Cameron: This is how I encountered you, through a recommendation from other people I've talked to on the podcast. They said I needed to get in touch with you. Your Twitter following is pretty impressive and your really good at communicating with the public in an informal kind of a way.

Victoria: Thank you so much.

Cameron: The use of that Twitter handle for you is related to your job with the government in New Zealand: the Participatory Science Platform. What is participatory science?

Victoria: Yes, that's an excellent question because it's a slightly unusual term that lots of people aren't familiar with. Participatory science is really just a form of citizen science. Most people have heard that phrase. So, citizen science is when the members of the public get involved in scientific research. In its classical sense, it's normally in a format where a scientist has a project and might need some assistance with a particular part of the project. So it might be that they are going to a location on a particular day and they want lots of people to help out with finding living things and counting them and helping with that collection of of biological information, for example. Or it may be that they need some assistance with analyzing photographs or satellite imagery and there might be some counting or some analysis of terrain, for example. What terrain there is on Mars is a classic project, in which case these are always being dictated by the scientist, in terms of what the project scope is. The citizens, the members of the public, are only coming on at one particular point in time in the project, and they're not really involved in decision-making around the project is doing and how it benefits them personally. So participatory science is a form of citizen science, but it sits at the other end of the spectrum, whereby the community, members of the public, are involved in the research process from start to finish. Often they might have come up with the idea of the project and they are asking the scientists or the experts to assist them with that research. It's a different way of doing things and it's definitely a co-creation model, and often it's community-led.

Cameron: So there's, like, two shifts from the model of the isolated academic in the laboratory doing their research. In the first step, you are involving people in the production of the data in some way, through the analysis of photos or being out in the field helping to collect samples or something. And they come in for that moment in the research and then they're gone. So that's providing some labour, and I presume it helps people feel engaged in interesting stuff. They could be doing Sudoku puzzles. Instead, they count stars on a map of the universe or something like that, a photo of the universe. What kind of stuff would they do in the kind of research that you do? What would a citizen be involved in looking at samples of fish or anything like that, or is that really not amenable to citizen science?

Victoria: Oh look, anything and everything goes, which is the wonderful thing about participatory science. So essentially it has evolved a bit from social science research, something called participatory action research. So this is all about getting to an end goal where they want some change to occur. Participatory science can be a wee bit similar to that, and in terms of the types of projects that we funded in four years of running the Participatory Science Platform – or  PCP for short, because that's rather a long name – it spans across all areas of science, and tech, and even into health. So it might be a school looking at school fitness programs and evaluating using technology whether their own exercise program that they've come up with is more effective than the prescribed exercise program. Or it might be looking at their local waterway and the health of that, and looking at water quality parameters, but maybe also diving into how healthy the biodiversity is in that particular area. Or it might be one of our projects called Flip the Fleet, which is putting dongles into electric vehicle cars and then looking at all sorts of things to do with the use of that vehicle: how long the average trip is, the battery efficiency, and using that data to help provide a baseline of knowledge about EV use. It's actually relevant internationally. That particular project, Flip the Fleet, has had international repercussions in terms of discovering a software fault to do with the battery life that Nissan then had to address and provide a fix for.

Cameron: So there is a direct repercussion for the research.

Victoria: Yes. The key thing with participatory science, and our particular framework in New Zealand, is that anything that is being funded project-wise, the community have to be fully on board with. It must be locally relevant to them. It can't be something that they don't want to do, that's not interesting. So often it's working on a local issue, a problem that they'd like to solve, or maybe they just have a question about something to do with their place, their location, and then they're using science and technology to help answer that question.

Cameron: Right. So the shift from citizen science to participatory science is getting people involved in the whole project from start to finish.

Victoria: Absolutely. We talk about this as being a co-creation model, and it's from the design, the initial idea of the project, right through to the end product. This includes the communication of the results back to the wider community and trying to get knowledge out about what's happening within the project.

Cameron: Do you have any difficulty getting people to agree on what the project should be about?

Victoria: Well, I think the nature of this form of citizen science is that it's really collaborative. In that co-creation space, it's not a quick design of a project. It involves a lot of consultation and discussion before they firm up the project idea. But actually you know, the communities have amazing ideas for what they want to do. Often it's just partnering up with the appropriate expertise to help make your idea into a reality that can be technically done and robustly done, so that it's good science and can get them the outcome that they want.

Cameron: So is your job, then, to connect the parties, the academic side and the citizen side, the participatory community side?

Victoria: Yes, absolutely. That's a huge part of it, and whilst I play some role in that, we have regional managers in the three regions we are running around the country at the moment. And that's a huge percentage of their role, networking and connecting the dots to make the project teams into a shape that going to work for a project.

Cameron: Do you work with existing local organizations or do you just throw out a call for interested people in a particular area?

Victoria: Both of those are what we engage in. In four years of running this platform, our regional managers have become very well known in their region, so they've been out there making themselves known, putting out that call for applications and ideas from anyone that's interested, and making sure that they reach across as much of the region as possible, but there's a lot of work with existing entities and building those networks as well. 

Cameron: As you know from our previous conversations over coffee, I'm so aware of the disconnect between social discourse around important issues like global warming, and academic knowledge. There seems to be a free-for-all, that anybody's opinion goes. This is the expectation that has been thrust upon us, whether we like it or not, that if it's a controversial topic, then everybody should be able to have their own opinion. And you know that I don't think that's a very productive way to work. How does participatory science shape the way that people engage with science, engage with knowledge?

Victoria: It's a beautiful thing to see in action, it really is. People best understand it when they go and visit one of our projects doing one of these things, it might be an event that they're holding on a particular day. Because what it does is it democratizes the science process. And I personally believe that this is fundamentally important for the future of society. Whilst it still recognizes that there are scientific and technological experts, and they have a really important part play, it opens up science and the process of science to anyone and everyone to get involved, in a framework that supports them to do that in a methodical, rigorous and robust way. And so anyone can come in and be a partner, or a part, of the science process. It's doing that – the learning about the nature of science and the process of science and how research is being conducted – which is then teaching them also, alongside that, critical thinking skills, how they synthesize information, which are really important aspects of how we evaluate properly scientific knowledge that's already out there, or new stuff that's coming through. But what it also does, for the experts, for the scientists and the technologists involved in the projects, is it often makes them think about the research in a different way. Because different people coming in, perhaps without prior scientific knowledge, might have a huge body of cultural or societal knowledge. They can come in and challenge and ask questions in a way that may shape (and we found it does often improve) the science being conducted, especially young people because they don't have the same social and cultural filters. They don't have the same social filters that adults do, and they can often ask, "So why are we doing it this way?" When you start opening up those conversations you start to think about the process and the methods. We have found that often leads to improvements in how the project plays out. 

Cameron: So you're talking about a democratization of the science, right? that it opens it up, it reduces or makes permeable the imagined barrier between the academic world and the general public, so that people can come into that research and get engaged. And that shapes the kinds of questions that are being asked and the way that the research is conducted. But there's going to be a flow back the other way, too, in that you're helping people to understand that our knowledge about the way things work and about the way the world works is something that is collective. It's a collaboration.

Victoria: Yes. I think that teamwork aspect of participatory science is actually true of all science. No science is done completely in isolation by one person in a room. It's a stereotype that is pervasive, that that's how science research is conducted, and it's actually not true. But this [participatory] approach provides a real great framework for how teamwork can lead to really good outcomes, and how embracing diversity in our approaches can lead to better outcomes, as well. So it's kind of "science communication by stealth" within these projects. Formal approaches to science communication might be this podcast, for example. We are engaging in a dialogue. But when you're involved in these projects, it's a lot of casual conversation, all the time. The members of the community, including the young people, the school students involved, are learning about the process of science, and how science is conducted, in a very casual but embracing way. And what part of that is doing is breaking down those barriers between the public and the science sector. They can see the scientist is just another person, just like them. So then it becomes more relatable and also you build trust through doing that. And so when you fundamentally build up that level of trust, you can perhaps hopefully, it you do enough of this with enough people, reduce that "mistrust in science" factor, because you can see what the process is and you can see the scientist as just another person. So therefore you can see that working together has benefits for all.

Cameron: I want to talk to you about your own research. Your research was not conducted in that participatory model. You've done a lot of work in the lab looking at molecular biology, cell-level analysis of fish samples, and stuff like that. Can you describe just what that process was like for your work? What did you do during the day to do your research? Are you out in the field collecting samples or are you hunkered down in the lab doing your test tube analysis?

Victoria: It was really varied, and I really enjoyed that process of doing science and particularly had a love for combining fieldwork with lab work. For my Antarctic work, that naturally involved going down to Antarctica, which is either a flight on a plane or a long trip by boat in some pretty rough conditions – and some seasickness to boot, to go with that. Once you get down there, it's about drilling holes in the sea ice on location, wherever you're planning on catching fish. And we know that certain species can be found in certain areas, so you might go to a particular bay, drill a hole in the sea ice, two meters or so deep, and then stand there with a fishing rod over the hole, keep clearing the hole of ice, and trying to catch the fish that you're after. And then you have to very skillfully, without damaging the fish at all in the cold air temperature – because the seawater is -1.9°, the air temperature could be -20°, -30° – so the process of getting them out of the water and safely into a chilly bin full of water at their temperature needs to be don carefully and quickly. Then it's a matter of transporting them by vehicle, it might be a Ski-doo, might be a piston bully, which is the type of vehicle used to groom ski fields, transporting them back to the lab at the particular base that you're at.

Cameron: Just to clarify, the fish are alive at this point?

Victoria: The fish are very much alive. So we want to keep them alive, initially, and depending what you doing ...

Cameron: That word "initially" sounds ominous if you're a fish.

Victoria: Yeah, I think I should scrub that. Yes, it's so heartbreaking because they are such "personality plus" fish down there, and you get very attached to them and might even name some of them. Anyhow, they come back to the lab and you usually set them up in an aquarium where there's tanks and flowing water, and then it depends on what you're doing with those particular fish, whether you're conducting some kind of environmental response experiment or simply trying to get representatives of a particular species, to create a tissue bank of a number of individuals that you can then do genetic analysis on.

Cameron: I've got a question about how many fish you need to do a study like this. For the kind of social science research that some my colleagues do – I don't do a lot of surveys and that kind of thing where sample size is particularly a concern, I do more micro-level case studies – but many of my colleagues are doing samples of a population of some sort, in order to get information from them, and n=30 is an absolute minimum to even begin to think about statistical significance. I noticed in one of your papers, you talked about the number of fish that you analysed, and when you subdivide them into the different categories of, you know, you did this to these fish and you did that those other fish, sometimes the sample group that you're basing your results on like n=4. So how many fish do you need to do a sample like this?

Victoria: It totally depends on the type of work that you're doing with the fish afterwards. One of the main aims with any animal research is that you really think about, firstly, do you need actually to work on animals at all in this particular species, and secondly, what is the minimum number that you can use? So it's all about reduction and being respectful to that particular organism, and not plundering it. And because you're down in Antarctica and you're often constrained by a whole lot of things like the weather, permits of how many fish you're actually allowed to catch, then you're trying to work on the smallest number possible. And so, it's a balance between what's going to be statistically meaningful in that particular study versus not taking too many fish.

Cameron: The kind of study that I was just describing, you're actually introducing the variations between the groups. You're taking one group and subjecting them to a different water temperature, or something like that. Is it different when you're just taking a sample of the population out of the natural habitat and testing for variability of, say, toxin levels or something like that?

Victoria: Yes, absolutely. And in that case, you might be going to a particular bay, targeting a particular species, one population of that species, and collecting say 10 or 20 fish. It just depends on what you're looking at, whether it's a biochemical parameter, a physiological parameter that you're investigating or a genetic one. and so depending on those, it kind of dictates the number of fish that you might need to come up with a summation of the variability in that population. In other cases, yes, you are exposing them to some kind of treatment, in which case you have a control and then you have various treatment levels, and then usually time as a factor in these experiments. And so you're taking and euthanizing fish at different time points and from different treatments. Unless you are really careful, those numbers can blow up really quickly. We obviously don't want to do any harm to the population of fish down there through our scientific research, so constraining the numbers to as low as possible, which might be three or four individuals per treatment-time, is really important.

Cameron: One of the variables that you play within your research is water temperature. Can you describe a little bit about the kind of effect that water temperature has on fish, at that margin where you talk about Antarctic fish that are expecting a certain narrow range of temperatures in the water?

Victoria: Yes, so great question. All animals have a range of thermal tolerance through which they can function and out the extremes of that window of tolerance, they start to get some changes, particularly in their physiology and their biochemical responses that are potentially detrimental for the fish, at either a really low or high temperature. Our wonderful Antarctic fish that I've studied so much live in a really narrow temperature range, because where they live has being very stable and very cold for quite a few million years. And so there is very little variation throughout the year, whereas if you caught fish off the coast here, the temperature fluctuation, summer through to winter, is quite a few degrees. It can be at least 10° or more Celsius. Down there, you're talking less than 0.5 of a degree, probably, over the season, and so because they are in such stable environment, but an extreme environment, they've made certain genetic changes or trade-offs to function at low temperature, and that means that there's an idea that they are sort of restricted to that very, very small window of temperature, and a very low temperature. So when you heat them up, some of those unwinding processes of physiology start to happen, where they might not be getting enough oxygen around their body, and then that affects all the follow-on processes from there. So, affecting all their biochemistry.

Cameron: So when you talk about heating them up, you're just talking about marginal changes in the temperature, of a degree or two, maybe?

Victoria: Yes. What we've found and what others have found is that some of the species are more tolerant than others. Why that is remains to be fully investigated. Some of them can handle a few degrees of change, at least over a short term acclimation experiment. It might be weeks to months. But some of them are probably more fragile because of certain changes they've made to cope with their environment. For example, the ice fish had got rid of their red blood cells. That's a whole family of Antarctic fish. Now that was probably just a freak genetic event that saw them lose their fully functioning haemoglobin gene, but what it means is that they've got no oxygen carrier. Their fine at really low temperatures to get oxygen pumped around the body and their blood, by enlarging their heart and enlarging their blood vessels, and doing all sorts of things like that to accommodate. But as you warm them up to +2°, which is less than a 4° Celsius shift from we they are now, then they could be in real trouble.

Cameron: The effects can be quite dramatic on their health. They can also be quite dramatic on other aspects. I'm quite fascinated by one of your papers that deals with sex determination in Chinook salmon. You're talking right down at the DNA level here. You were building on the research of a previous study that discovered sex reversed fish in Chinook salmon in California, and your study found that the incidence of this in New Zealand Chinook salmon was much lower. Could you explain that to me? First of all, what's happening in terms of sex reversal, and then secondly, why not New Zealand? Are they just more sexually conservative fish or what? I presume this is an environmental cause, not a political one!

Victoria: Yeah, definitely not political. So, fish are like us, in that their sex is determined by largely by six chromosomes. So a bit like us having X and Y, they have a similar system. And so sex reversal is when what they are genetically doesn't match what's under the drapes. For fish, if they are genetically coming up as a female, a sex reversed fish has testes instead of ovaries, and vice versa. If it's genetically a male and it's sex reversed, then it has ovaries. This happens across lots of fish species, and sometimes it's a spontaneous thing. In some species, they actually have that sex reversal happening in response to their population. So some spaces of wrasse, for example, when the alpha male dies, the female at the top of the pecking order will go through this change so that she then becomes a male phenotypically, is what we call it, so what you see is male in characteristic. In the US population of salmon, they've found really high rights of sex reversal in some rivers, and it's long been postulated that this is probably environmental in cause. There's all sorts of pollutants that could be in the water. It could be impacted by temperature, as well. That could say these fish changing from what they are genetically into visually looking like a different sex. We were looking at the New Zealand salmon because the came from one North American river. They were introduced here in the ...

Cameron: Okay, introduced by people?

Victoria: Yes, over 100 years ago, they were brought here and seeded into rivers on the east coast of the South Island, and from there, that population has grown. And so looking at the rate of sex reversal here, where the rivers are relatively pristine – I say that with a bit of the caveat "or historically have been" – might provide us some insight as to whether what is happening, those high rates in the US are environmental in origin. And that would certainly be picked up by what we found. We found really low rates of sex reversal here.

Cameron: But it's still difficult to conclude what causes that. You know that there's a difference in the water quality between the California river and the New Zealand river, but it's tough to actually conclude a causality there, isn't it?

Victoria: Absolutely. This is one of the challenges of science, right? You have ideas around what might be causing it. How then do you go and test it? I guess in the North American example, you'd do extensive waterway health testing and look at all the parameters involved, and then you'd look at rivers where there are high rates of sex reversal versus low rates of sex reversal, and look at the changes in those parameters to see if there's a clue popping out of the data. And then, of course, the other way to do it is the type of a study we talked about before that I did down in the Antarctic, where you have an idea of what the environmental cause might be and you conduct particular dosage experiments, and then track the fish over time to see if that particular entity, whether it's a chemical or a temperature, then causes the fish to change sex. Once you've got that piece of information known – you may find a particular chemical does it – you have a stronger idea that correlation might equal causation.

Cameron: I'm fascinated by the difference between the way that scientists draw conclusions and the way that most people do. I mean, you've got a lot of experience on Twitter. You know how quickly the human species jumps to conclusions based on limited data. Scientists, in many parts of our society, are thought to be being alarmist about global warming. But my experience talking to scientists it that they're extremely careful about the conclusions that they draw. And there's one line in one of your papers that I thought was really so cautious. This is the 2012 paper with the Crystal Lenky. You and your co-authors were talking about some particular fish, and the sentence is, "This fish is thought to be predominant in the diet of Weddell seals." Why is it necessary to say "is thought to be"? Don't we know what the seals eat?

Victoria: [laughs] So many ways to answer this question! To unwrap various parts of that question, firstly, we don't have a massive amount of knowledge about Weddell seals and their diet. It has improved significantly over the last few years, but there are still large holes in our knowledge because we can't go and capture Weddell seals – it's simply not allowed – and eject their stomach contents to see what they are feeding on. Nor can we catch them and keep them in the lab and feed them various things to look at how that might change particular biomarkers in their bodies, so that we oculd then get samples from wild Weddell seals and test for those same biomarkers and then work out the diet. So it's a challenging process to conduct this kind of diet research on wild animals, especially in the Antarctic, with the parameters and constraints around research down there. So there are lots and lots of gaps in our knowledge. A scientists we are so aware of the limitations of where our knowledge is currently at, and I think we're taught – the next point is that we're taught to be incredibly cautious with our language. In particular, when we are writing up the results of our research. A reviewer will always come down on you in a draft submission of an academic paper if you are being too confident with you language and being to assertive. They might say that this is based on assumption and there's not conclusive evidence yet. So this is really interesting to me because I think the cautiousness of scientists actually may feed in a little bit – this is just a personal viewpoint – into the mistrust of science, because maybe we're a wee bit like politicians and it's hard to completely pin us down on a particular topic. We don't want to overstate the conclusions about what we found because we know that scientific knowledge is always evolving. You can never really prove something, you can only disprove it. And so maybe the public see that kind of rhetoric and go, like, "Don't they know? Just give me the answer, already. Come on! I just want to know."

Cameron: We have a certain appetite for certainty, and when you talk to a scientist and ask them a question, typically the answer is, "It depends."

Victoria: Absolutely, and I think that feeds into the human worldview that surely someone must have an answer on this. So does that see them turning to someone else for an anecdotal story that then seems more conclusive, because that person is willing to state, "This absolutely happened to my child," before it's true.

Cameron: Partly, the consumption of knowledge that we get out in the world is emotional, right? We're looking for a certain emotional content in what we're reading. It's not purely cognitive. And this is why I'm so fascinated by the Participatory Science Program, because it's getting people involved in the lived experience of science. It's the whole person being involved, not simply the mind.

Victoria: Absolutely, and it's also that they have knowledge that they can bring to the table, and that we can make space within the scientific process for not only science knowledge that evolves out of that process, but that there can be other sources of knowledge that can feed in and insert alongside that science knowledge, and not be invalidated throughout this collaborative process.

Cameron: Some of the stuff that you're looking at in your research is quite significant, it's not simply stuff that's on the margins. I'm thinking in particular of the 2013 paper that you did on pollutants where you refer to the Emerald rock cod as what's called a "sentinel species." Can you tell me what that phrase means?

Victoria: Often we refer to sentinel species as kind of like the "canary in the coal mine." That might be the best known example of a sentinel species. It's something that you would take down into a coal mine, and then if it started to show signs of not being particularly well, you would know as a human being that you were potentially soon to be in trouble yourself, and you want then to exit the mine because the oxygen levels weren't high enough for you. So that's a classic sentinel species. But we can also refer to certain species as sentinels in other ways. The Emerald rock cod is one of the most predominant fish species in Antarctica. It's ubiquitous around Antarctica and found in high numbers. It can also be seen as a representative of most Antarctic fish within a particular super order, and because it's the most common species, it can be seen as the flagship species within that. So when you're looking to better understand the impacts of environmental change, might be climate change down there, then that is a particularly good species to look at, because if it shows impacts, then it's more than likely that some of the other many species down there related it will also show impacts. And then if they start to show impacts, then that's a sign that other ecosystems around the world are likely going to be in trouble as well. Because everything that happens in Antarctica then has an impact on the rest of the biosphere.

Cameron: Right, so the Antarctic is almost like a sentinel ecosystem for us, to tell us what might happen to the rest of the planet.

Victoria: Absolutely. It's the powerhouse of the planet in terms of ocean movements and currents, and also weather. All the ecosystems are in some way linked back to Antarctica because it is the biggest zone of primary productivity on the planet.

Cameron: Now, you have moved from your research at the university level into this public policy role. Do you want to describe that transition for me, because a lot of academics that I know are quite content in their role. They feel very secure, they've got tenure, and they're happy to keep doing it for as long as they can.

Victoria: I guess I'm a bit of a disruptor and I'm always pushing myself to learn and to be challenged. That growth of myself as an individual is really important. When I was at school, I loved the sciences, but also English, and I did a lot of drama at school. And so that creative or more theatrical side was always present. So when I started to get opportunities during my PhD to do some public speaking, I really relished that role. That lead to more and more opportunities. Once you start working on anything to do with the Antarctic, you know, people want to know about it. The Antarctic and anything that resides down there, even the rocks, have a certain charisma that people just are captivated by, at least in New Zealand. So I was finding that people were really engaging with my content, but moreover, I felt like I was making a difference with what I was saying, as well. I started to feel that potentially I was making more of a difference through engagement in that space than I was through the traditional academic route of publishing a paper. Well then, you've come up with a result, but what happens next? Has it actually influenced policy? Does it change people's behaviour? Is it leading to greater awareness across a large number of people? Often the answer to that might be no.

Cameron: So now you're working right on that interface between academic research and the public. The connection. You get that sense of making a difference yourself?

Victoria: I do, but also I'm living through others vicariously. So for me, it's more that I'm facilitating and enabling. I'm a very small part in this platform of allowing people to be their own change makers, and to answer their own questions. And so really, I primarily see that its the individuals involved in these projects that we fund, the project leads who come up with these ideas and then coordinate and make them happen, they are making the real difference. And supporting them are our three regional managers, who I think do a tremendous job at coaching and mentoring these projects through to completion, and through to success. So I'm just a small cog in that wheel, but I find that role incredibly rewarding.

Cameron: You may be what you consider to be a small cog in that overall program, but you do have a significant public presence. Your Twitter handle has 4000 followers, last time I looked. You have tweeted over 50,000 times, according to the last time I looked. Those are ridiculous numbers for an academic. Tell me about your experience on Twitter, as a scientist and as a public-policy person and then as a woman. It can be a pretty difficult place for everybody, particularly for women, given the toxicity of Twitter.

Victoria: Do you know, it was actually the Prime Minister of New Zealand's first man and now fiancé, Clark Gayford, who suggested that I needed to get on Twitter, because he did a documentary down in Antarctica years ago, and I'd been mulling over whether I should have Twitter a go, and he's just like, "Yeah, you need to be on it!" And so that's what started me, and that's whilst I was still an academic. And I started to get a lot of value out of it and find a lot of academic colleagues, and make friends and collaborations happen internationally that I don't think would have happened without this social media space. It's just grown and grown from there, and now it's a really important part of my role to be sharing what we doing on Twitter and to be engaging with people in that space. So I have found it really valuable, and in general a very happy and safe place to b. So I've had a real network of allies, one of whom is at your institution, Dawn Bazely. She's been a phenomenal supporter of woman in STEM internationally, and it's been wonderful to interact with her on Twitter and then have her come and stay with me in person.

Cameron: Yes, it was Dawn who suggested that I get in touch with you while I was here.

Victoria: Yeah, and so for me it's been on the whole a really caring network. And also, then I've been exposed to all sorts of other people across many, many different fields who have helped me learn and grow as a person, really, and challenge my beliefs and my values and improve who I am. And that's partly down to Twitter. But I will say that I've actually been off Twitter for nearly 6 weeks now and not using it. I made a choice to do that after the March 15 attacks here in Christchurch, because I was finding that it wasn't at this particular point in time, the best thing for me to be on Twitter. There was a lot of rhetoric out there about the terror attacks which wasn't matching with my lived experience, and it was creating a lot of internal conflict. So for me the solution to that has been to have a break for my own well-being, and it's been a great thing to do.

Cameron: Mm-hmm. It's a challenge when were dealing with situations like that and a context like that, where there is so much volatility in public discourse. I experienced the same thing after the US presidential election. I'm working and living in Canada, but the impact emotionally on me of seeing what happens when information is denigrated and everything is just reduced to a matter of opinion – everybody's opinion this is same. The idea that I should be devoting my energies to the production of knowledge and working so hard and working so carefully with reviewers to make sure that everything in my papers is documented assiduously and that my claims are as accurate and well-founded as possible, seemed to be an enormous amount of effort that I was put into that at a time when everybody seemed to be able to shoot from the hip and, you know, become President of the United States that way. So I understand your discouragement, but what's the role of the academic moving forward? Are you going to stay out of public discourse entirely or are you going to jump back in?

Victoria: I'll definitely come back in sometime in the next few weeks, I think, but I think it's caused me to evaluate the space of Twitter. Having some space has allowed me to critique Twitter academically a little bit, and to think about how we can often be very quick to jump on a particular bandwagon. And yet Twitter doesn't – or any social media, to be honest – doesn't do nuance very well. And also you are really limited with what sort of information you can portray on Twitter. So I'm very careful about what I write, and I would encourage academics to be careful about what they write and share on Twitter. But particularly, when they jump on a particular topic, that they're doing so sensitively and with compassion. Because of the end of the day, it's another human being that's getting your message. How can we all be kinder to each other?

Cameron: Mmm. Good place to end! Thank you very much, Victoria, for joining us on the podcast. It's been a pleasure to learn more about what you do and I wish you all the best in the work that you're doing.

Victoria: Thank you very much. It's been great to be here.

Cameron: Bye now!

Links

Dr. Vic on Twitter.

New Zealand’s Participatory Science Platform

All about wrasse fish

Credits

Host: Cameron Graham
Recording engineer: Alan Larsen
Post-production: Bertland Imai
Photos: Curious Minds.
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: May 14, 2019
Location: University of Canterbury