Episode 026: Gold Medallists
Siobhan Angus, Athina Peidou, and Stephanie Raposo are the 2020 recipients of the Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic excellence at York University. Angus, an art historian, studies the visual culture of resource extraction in Canada. Peidou, an earth and space scientist, studies gravitational maps produced from satellite-based measurements. Raposo, a psychologist, studies sexual satisfaction and intimate relationships.
Transcript
Cameron: My guests today are Siobhan Angus, Athina Peidou, and Stephanie Raposo. They are doctoral students at York University, and they are this year’s recipients of the Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic excellence. Siobhan, Athina and Stephanie, welcome to the podcast!
All: Thank you.
Cameron: So Siobhan, you did your PhD in art history and visual culture, and your dissertation was on "the visual culture of resource extraction in Canada." Is that correct?
Siobhan: Yes, it is.
Cameron: Okay. Athina, you are coming from a completely different perspective. You are doing earth and space science and engineering, and your research focus was "satellite-based gravity field maps." Very technical.
Athina: Yeah. That sounds fancy. [laughter]
Cameron: And Stephanie -- this is just an example of the diversity of guests that we have on the podcast and the diversity of people at York -- your PhD is in social and personality psychology, and your work is on implicit theories of sexual satisfaction and how couples can sustain intimate connections. So quite a bit different from the satellite research?
Stephanie: Yes.
Cameron: Okay. I'll talk to each of you a little more closely about the work that you're doing, but before we go any further, I just want to make sure that everybody understands what these Governor General's Gold Medals are for. So, the Governor General's Medals for Academic Excellence have been awarded in Canada for over 140 years. I think they started in the 1870s, so shortly after Confederation. And the Gold Medal is the one that's for graduate programs -- programs at the masters and PhD level. Have I got that right?
Stephanie: Yes.
Cameron: So, I read the Governor General's website to learn a little bit more about the award, and they're quite insistent that the award should be given quote, "... regardless of the more intangible qualities of student's life, such as good citizenship, moral behavior or popularity." So, for all I know the three of you are unpopular and morally disreputable. Is there anything that I need to worry about? [laughter] I also noticed that the award is, "... not to be associated with any monetary award." Does it mean something to you that this is a very symbolic award?
Siobhan: There's something very different about it because it's a medal.
Cameron: It's an actual medal. You get to wear it around your neck.
Siobhan: Yeah.
Cameron: Oh, okay.
Siobhan: So, because of COVID, production apparently is delayed on them. So I suppose if you really wanted to convert it to monetary value, you could just like melt it down and sell it. Probably shouldn't say out loud, I'm not going to do that.
Cameron: Stephanie, in your field, has this award got symbolic significance to you?
Stephanie: Definitely. In my field, funding isn't always the easiest to come by especially because the topic is, it can be such a tough one for many people. So for me to receive this medal, it means a lot about the impact that this research can have for many people and couples.
Cameron: Athina you're actually in... Are you in California now?
Athina: Yeah.
Cameron: So, nobody cares about the Governor General in California.
Athina: [laughs] Well, it's a great symbolic medal, as you mentioned. It's actually, I think, the most prestigious Canadian recognition that the research and the researcher during their studies can receive. So it tells a lot about the topic, as Stephanie mentioned, and about how you approach the topic itself. So yeah, I'm actually very, very happy.
Cameron: Yeah. So the awards are based-
Siobhan: Can I-
Cameron: Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Siobhan: Can I just jump in quickly?
Cameron: Yeah. Siobhan.
Siobhan: I also just want to say that I think so many of the things that we do that have value in academia -- like peer-reviewed journal articles, prestigious grants -- don't translate at all outside of these structures. And the thing that's really great about the Governor General's Medals is that they cross disciplines. Architects get them, poets get them. When you see the list of people that have won them, it's an amazing group to be in. And I think that, for thinking about positioning your work to a more public audience, it's something that maybe helps translate that your research has value and importance in that way. I think in that way, it's both symbolic, but also kind of helps you develop your career in a slightly different direction, which is always valuable.
Cameron: That's fascinating. The implicit interdisciplinarity of the award really opens doors. Siobhan, I want to talk to you a little bit about your work. So you're doing art history and art criticism. And your focus is on the visual culture of resource extraction in Canada. What does visual culture mean in the context of an industry?
Siobhan: Yeah, it's always an interesting question because when I tell people that I write about mining, and images of mining, paintings of mining, people always assume that I'm talking about these big industrial projects and sort of modernist photography. And if you look at my dissertation, I actually don't really look at photographs of industry at all, which I didn't really notice until I finished the project. There's a few photographs underground.
Siobhan: But really what I was interested in is, extraction is so central to Canada's economy and its history and the way that it narrates these things. But it's something that's really left out of the visual record. When we think about the Canadian shield, which is the site of my research case study, we think about these landscape paintings of the Group of Seven, right?
Cameron: Oh yeah.
Siobhan: And it's beautiful untouched, abundant wilderness. So I was thinking, what do these images that signal both abundance and emptiness kind of teach us about nature? How does that help us relate to nature and shape our impressions of it? So I gathered all of these different types of images -- so postcards, images of workers, images of Indigenous communities, paintings -- and started putting them all together to think about these larger image economies. There's incredibly different stories that surface, once you look at them, because by the turn of the 20th century, photography was a pretty accessible medium, right? You had the Brownie camera, you could take photographs in all of these different kinds of sites. So you have all of these histories that are preserved, but they became flattened out, and it's history of industrial development and economic development. And we're told now when we would look at these places, "It's a pretty regrettable scene of industry, it wasn't really regulated, there was a lot of environmental damage, but things have gotten better." So I was trying to locate the ways that people lived and worked in these communities. And then also in a more nebulous way, looking for traces of these environmental transformations, to think really about how we imagine nature, understand nature and connect to nature. And often that's kind of through these sites of labor or work.
Cameron: Hmm. So it's interesting you mentioned the Brownie camera because that has such a transformative effect on the collection of images. And we see the same thing with the advent of the cell phone, the smartphone today with everybody able to capture, not only still images, but video, and that changes who gets to tell stories. So, how did you see that? Like, when you talk about visual culture in resource extraction, whose culture is it? This is in many ways the culture of the anthropologists taking the photographs as opposed to the culture of the workers themselves, right?
Siobhan: Yeah. So, in the chapter that I shared with you, it's a collection of anthropological photographs, but each chapter sort of takes a different approach and it looks at different archives by different kinds of photographers. So one of the archives that I look at is a family archive by an amateur photographer who moves to the region as a prospector. And so the way that he sees this place is incredibly different than the way this anthropologist sees this place or these sort of business images that circulate and periodicals that function to promote investment.
Siobhan: So it's this approach of putting these photographs that are in very different genres, targeted to very different audiences into dialogue with one another, as a way of thinking about the ways that we experience "place" is incredibly layered. And I think I'm really interested in how our histories are so much richer, so much more complicated and so much less complete than we often acknowledge. And so looking for those moments of tension, moments where alternative possibilities are put forward, moments where those possibilities are foreclosed, as a way of sort of thinking about I guess hope, resistance, healing in the context of man-made environmental catastrophes.
Cameron: There's a really interesting tension between -- or correspondence between -- the kind of the role of the anthropologist in looking at this, and the differences between the resource industries and the indigenous peoples in these territories across the Canadian shield, right? What did you learn about the representation of indigenous people in these collections of photographs?
Siobhan: I think extraction is interesting because it's both a material process and it's also a worldview. So extraction is the process of literally taking materials from the earth, which are then transformed. And some of these materials become the raw foundations for art-making. Extraction in Canada required the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their territories, right? This is a foundational first step to all of this industrial developments. And then sort of symbolically, their claims to territory and their histories with land are really erased. But as a worldview, extraction is also a worldview, right?
Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Siobhan: So it views nature and people that are considered part of nature, which for a lot of history has been an incredible amount of people that have been grouped into this category, as a resource to just be exploited. So, this way of celebrating economic growth over other forms of value and other forms of relationships. And over the course of my research, I had the wonderful opportunity to collaborate with the Ni Dakinan, which is the natural resources environmental stewardship and cultural heritage wing of Temiskaming First Nation, who's one of the communities that this territory is on. And they're doing this incredible project where they're mapping these former industrial zones and locating native species. And so reclaiming these territories and mapping them to find different ways of thinking about value. They call them non-timber forest products. Because historically, the way that the Ministry of the Environment or Natural Resources Canada looks at these sites is through their dominant form of extraction, and how those forms of value are created. But these processes of mapping, building these community networks, and thinking so much more relationally or long-term in the ways that we might act as stewards for our territory -- I think there are these very tangible examples of living if not non-extractively, because I think that's quite impossible, but much less extractively than these examples of, say, the tar sands megaprojects, which just prioritize extraction over everything else.
Cameron: I noticed that a lot of the photographs were of workers as you've mentioned. And I'm wondering what you, as an art historian are able to see and say about the extraction industries that like a labor historian wouldn't. What's the art angle bring to this conversation?
Siobhan: I think that art really allows us to think through the symbolic dimension of life. And I think that that's really important. I think one of the things that we're really seeing right now is to take, say, climate change, for example. So this is an environmental problem. It's a scientific problem. And it's a problem that people across disciplines are trying to connect to, but it's also a problem of narrative making. A question of imagination. Right? It's about how we value things, why we value things, the ways that we frame things and the ways that we know things. And so many of our policy failures in tackling these kinds of problems center on questions of perception. And you know, art is only one aspect of it, right? It's not to say that art has the answer while other things don't. But I think that what art can also bring is that, especially when you're working with artists, is there's this ability to imagine otherwise that comes through in artistic projects. And I think that at this particular moment in time, it's quite obvious that the stories that we've inherited are insufficient in helping us transform the structures that need to be transformed in our current moment. So I think this is where the role at the humanities really comes into play.
Cameron: So talk to me about these other images that you sent me as part of your study, which were the heliogravure images that are .... Now, if I understand correctly, this artist basically irradiated these plants and then used the plant sitting on some kind of a photographic plate to create an image of the plant's own radiation. Is that a rough summary of the method?
Siobhan: Yeah. The other thing that I'm interested in with photography is how photography materially connects to extraction. So all objects have a story and one method of doing eco-critical art history is to trace these stories. So with photography, something that I'm interested in is, what are the chains of production that provide raw materials for art-making, what technology incorporations are involved in refining these materials, and then what is the labor of the artist? So this artist in particular, Susanne Kriemann is a Berlin based artist who is looking at these former sites of uranium extraction in the GDR. And she's using these different forms of photography to think about how we can both understand these histories -- she's proposing, I think very much a counter-archival project saying this was the official history, but this is how it affected people's labour, their livelihoods and their health -- and then it's also this really material exploration of photography itself. For example, uranium emits light without an external source of energy like the sun. So if you put uranium on a photographic plate, it actually basically takes a photograph of itself. And so, one of the things I'm interested in, in my current research is what's different about a photograph exposed by uranium, than a photograph exposed by sunlight. Or what's different about a photograph set in bitumen or a photograph set in silver. So how these artistic processes are deeply connected to both resource extraction as an industry, but also this way of relating to materials and thinking through their properties, how they enable and constrain visual form. And so I think there's something actually quite relational in the process of the photographer and then the materials themselves.
Cameron: Well, there's something haunting about these images. They're almost like death shrouds.
Siobhan: Exactly.
Cameron: Look at these poor plants that had been left to irradiate on this photographic plates, like the shroud of Turin. And here you have the poor little plant leaving its last -- last and lasting! -- impression on this photographic plate. So is there an emotional content then that comes through in your work that can't be perceived necessarily by someone who's doing, like, an economic history of resource extraction? How does emotion connect into your work?
Siobhan: That's a really good question. I don't know if I write about emotion very well, but all of these projects, these photographers that I'm interested in, these objects -- my research process is very emotional in relation to them. And that sort of dimension of feeling, of dreaming, of hope, of resistance really comes into play in how I'm approaching these images. I mean, to think about these plants in particular is a good example, right? They're plants that grew in territory contaminated by uranium mining. So these plants are full of toxic metals, but there's this very beautiful dimension to it because the plants are phytoremediators. So they extract toxic metals from the soil, and it's an incredibly slow, very labor-intensive process of cleaning soil. But these plants are doing that work, right? They're cleaning up an ecosystem damaged by humans. And then the artist is memorializing that in these photographs. And I think there's a loop of meaning there that I find quite moving.
Cameron: What you're getting at here is something that I think profoundly affects all of us as academics, which is what do we do with our own emotional response to what we're looking at, right? I mean, I'm an accounting researcher, right. And you'd be surprised at the fact that accounting for me can be very moving because I'm looking at the stories of people's poverty. I'm looking at the injustice of tax evasion and all these things trigger everything from sadness to outrage. In my case, lots of outrage. So, how do you, I don't know whether "sublimate" is the right word, but how do you process that as an academic and produce something that is of academic value, but also authentic to your own experience of having looked at what you've seen. So I don't know how you make sense of that.
Siobhan: That's a really good question. I grew up in a post-industrial environment. So I think these questions of environmental justice have just always been something that are at the core of my research project. This sort of commitment to political, economic and social justice. And really also insisting that we have to think about these things together. But one of the things I think that makes it easier, maybe not easier, but to study these questions through art, as opposed to other disciplines is because it's the symbolic dimension and because artists are pulling in all of these different things and thinking about them alternatively, you know, you're working with beautiful objects, which I think helps, and it provides sort of some solace in these moments. But I think in a lot of these, especially these contemporary photographers who were dealing with extraction, they're showing us the costs, but there's often an element I think of hope, and this sort of belief that once we sort of put all of these pieces together and understand it, then that's the step -- that's one step -- towards moving forward.
Cameron: Yeah.
Siobhan: And I think that there's so much urgency right now, and I'm so inspired by all the activist work that's happening. So I think it's a continuum, right? And you just have to hope that your work has value within that. Change happens slowly, but I think that there's a lot of momentum right now, and that comes from, I think, feelings of emotion and rage and resilience and hope. So keeping that emotional dimension feels politically and academically urgent.
Cameron: That's lovely. You've provided me with a very nice segue to talk to Athina about her work, because you're talking about pulling all of these images together into something to make sense of things. Athina, you're dealing with satellite imagery. So you're also looking at images of the planet, but they're from a very, very different technological source. Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of work that you're doing. You're taking these images from satellites to produce a gravitational map. Can you explain what that all means?
Athina: Right. My research was on satellite gravity missions. So when I usually start talking about my research, everyone says stuff like, "Why do we care? Why do we have satellites measuring the gravity field?" Right? This type of idea is such a unique idea because all we care about is to try to understand how dynamic their system is. So, when we mean dynamic, it does translates directly to the word change. So anything that changes and has to do with a mass change is a type of a dynamic behavior of the earth system. So all the masses that change within the air, that might be like the ice mass that melts in Greenland, like some drought periods in California, or like anything -- or the earthquake in Japan that happened in 2011. So all of these types of mass changes have a gravity signature, right? So it's a very, very simple idea that we have a mass that moves from position one to position two. And by measuring this change we will actually understand better how the mass redistributes within the earth. So we have all these satellites, they fly and they measure the change in the gravity that is directly proportional to the change in the mass. Is this simple?
Cameron: Yeah, no. I think it's understandable.
Athina: All right, cool.
Cameron: I was really interested in the images of these kinds of shriveled ... they looked like you let an orange dry out and it's all gone shrivelled. These images of the planet that are taking the different gravitational levels on the surface of the earth and exaggerating them for the purposes of conveying them in an image. And you end up with this kind of distorted sphere to show the high points and the low points of the gravitational pull of the earth at different places on the planet. So, as I understand it, you've got that big, big blue dot on the picture -- I can put a link to the image on the website for people to see -- but this big blue dot around the tip of India and Sri Lanka. So does that mean that if I want to lose weight, I go to Sri Lanka? That the gravity gravitational pull is lower?
Athina: If you want be happy when you go on the scale and see a little bit lower number, then we have to understand that at the equator, we are the further away from the earth, right?
Cameron: Yes of course.
Athina: And of course, in Canada, we are closer to the poles, we are closer to the center of the earth. Right?
Cameron: That's my story then about what's happened to me in the pandemic is that I've just moved closer to the pole. [laughter] So yeah, the closer you are to the center of the earth, the heavier the gravitational pull is, just as if you were far out in space, you would feel the gravitational pull very weakly. Right? So, on the surface of the planet, there are places where the gravitational pull is stronger, like around Iceland, and places where it's weaker, like around Sri Lanka. Right? And so you're measuring this at a global scale, but what you were just talking about a few minutes ago, you were talking about minor changes in this, like when there's an earthquake in Japan.
Athina: Right.
Cameron: And you're able to detect it at that kind of almost micro level as well?
Athina: Right. So, we actually care more about the change itself, right? How the gravity changes and not about what the actual gravity value is in the poles, or Sri Lanka. So we were able with this mission to detect mass transfers within a resolution of, I would say, two to 300 kilometers and it's actually a large impact on the gravity field. So that earthquake there in Japan, or other mega earthquakes had this big fault plane. I don't want to go too technical, but apparently they were detected by gravity missions.
Cameron: I just wanted to draw attention to the title of your paper. In order to detect these changes at such a low level of high rez level, you need really, really, really good images that provide detailed maps of the gravitational field. Right? And you're dealing with a problem in the images that are produced by the satellites. You came up with the most click-baity title for an academic article that I've ever read. It's "Striped mystery in GRACE geo-potential models revealed!" I mean, it's shameless what you'll do to get people, to read your article, really, Athina.
Athina: [laughter] Yeah.
Cameron: So I clicked on it, because I do, and when I look at the images, I think of a Moiré pattern.
Athina: Did you know about Moiré patterns?
Cameron: Yeah, yeah. Anybody who's been to a cottage and looked from the outside through a screen window, and then through another screen window, back to the outside of the cottage, you notice that the meshes of the screen windows don't line up perfectly, and you get this really interesting pattern of where the almost line up and you get, like, it looks like a thicker wire and when they're well separated, you get more light coming through. So you get this really interesting pattern coming through the two screen windows, right?
Athina: Right.
Cameron: And you get the same sort of thing. I'm old enough to have had a cathode ray TV. And you try and take a picture of what you saw with a camera and you get a very, very strange kind of an image it's not at all what your eye sees, because the camera is picking up this interlaced signal of the cathode ray flipping by, and it's not getting the full image that your eye kind of figures out how to make up for. So there's all kinds of problems with the way that images are produced when you're trying to do this. And you've got this satellite, which is basically doing this orbit around the earth. Now people on the podcast, aren't going to see me moving my hand, but I think it's basically kind of going North to South, North to South, North to South that way around. And then as the world rotates underneath the satellite, is that a fair kind of description of what's happening? It's able to capture the whole map of the earth?
Athina: I'm amazed. Actually, you described it so well.
Cameron: [laughs] Yes, but that's partly because I read your paper. So you describe it well, and hopefully it came through clearly enough. But when you've got this little satellite going over the surface of the earth and these kind of vertical stripes, you're going to end up with differences in how it pieces the image back together, right, to produce a full map. And that's the kind of striping that you're seeing. You're getting these kind of almost interference patterns in the image.
Athina: Exactly. It's a type of interference. So if you take a map of the gravity field from the air, you expect to see like some sort of like signals from Himalayas, some other signatures in Amazon, but we have some satellites orbiting the earth from South to North, as you indicated. And the earth rotates. In essence, we have a sampling artifact that I couldn't describe better than you did. We experienced that in many aspects in our everyday life, this Moiré pattern that sometimes, when we take a picture, we see some blue and red lines that are there, but we know that it's not, it's some sort of an artifact. So, the satellite actually experienced the same artifacts as we do with photographs. So we had them and they were on top of the real signals and they were coming from the way that we sampled the gravity field.
Cameron: So when you talk about sampling, you're talking about taking a continuous image. A continuous signal and translating it into a digital representation, right? Is that what you mean by sampling?
Athina: Yeah. And when you say the word image, it's not exactly that we want to take an "image" image. It's like we take a signal, right? And we measure, like, time, place and the gravity value. Let's put it that way. And then we try to sort of like map it on the earth. Right?
Cameron: Right, right.
Athina: While we map it, we actually start seeing this type of red and blue stripes in the marks.
Cameron: The average person, their contact with sampling that they're most used to would be in like an MP3 audio recording. Right? We've taken the continuous sound of the music and you've translated it into a digital form. Right?
Athina: So not only this, but you bring all the right words here. What actually happens is very close to what happens in the radio stations when they try to transmit the music or whatever. We have FM and AM. Right? So FM stands for the frequency modulation and AM for the amplitude modulation. I think they're super technical terms, so I'm not going to go into them. But what happens with the satellite is that we pretty much, like the signal, experience this amplitude modulation, right? So we have a low frequency signal that modulates a high frequency signal and we get the stripes.
Cameron: Oh okay. But you have to translate this into a digital record. Right? So you basically have to convert the continuous signal that you're seeing, the waveform of that signal, whatever it is, to digital numbers. And if you don't get enough numbers, you're not able to reproduce that signal when you try to.
Athina: Yeah. Whether you have undersampling or oversampling of a signal. Right? And based on their position yeah, you expect to have some sort of artifact.
Cameron: What have you got in satellite imagery? Is it undersampling? You've not got maybe enough dots on the map to do a really good job of it?
Athina: We usually have a problem in gravity signals with the undersampling in time and space. And that problem is called, in sampling theory, an aliasing problem. But apparently there are other types of artifacts that have to do with oversampling of a signal, right?
Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Athina: This particular idea suggests that we have a problem of oversampling a low frequency signal. In essence, with take more points needed, but they have a very specifical pattern, a very specifical geometry that blows everything out. Right?
Cameron: Okay. So you're actually oversampling the low frequency signal of the gravity?
Athina: Exactly. So we have two types of artifacts that are mapped as like having a stripey pattern. One comes from the undersampling of high-frequency signals, and one comes from oversampling of a low frequency signal.
Cameron: And when these interact you get that same effect as if you had two screen windows in front of each other and you get a distortion?
Athina: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Cameron: Okay. Now the word you used a moment ago was aliasing. So aliasing, as I understand it from the diagrams you provided, has to do with the idea that if you try to reconstruct the waveform from the digits, there actually might be more than one waveform that would satisfy those digits. Right? Is that what you mean by aliasing? There's an alternative explanation for the digits?
Athina: Sure. So it's pretty much the fact that-
Cameron: She says "sure" as if, "You know, that's pretty close, but not really."
Athina: [laughter] ... actually. It's just that you have something that changes. Let's say that you have a phenomenon that changes every 10 days and you take a measurement of this phenomenon every month. So within that month, that phenomenon would have changed three times, but you will not capture it. You will have only one.
Cameron: That's undersampling then?
Athina: Exactly. That is what aliasing is. Yeah. So when you try to reconstruct that you will see that in the lower frequency that this high frequency phenomenon will fold over and will have some sort of a disruption in the other side of the spectrum. So that's probably how I would say that. Yeah.
Cameron: Yeah. I love this kind of conversation because it really gets at one of the chief difficulties of any academic researcher, which is how do you explain the technical stuff in a way that makes sense to people. Right?
Athina: Right.
Cameron: You've got an audience for your work that is academic and very engineering focused. You can use all the technical terms that would befuddle with me, and I'm another academic. So I kind of understand the general issues that you're facing in research, but I don't understand the mechanics of what you do or the mathematics of what you do in your particular case. And then, you want to go further to express it in everyday language and it becomes, now you've got a different kind of a sampling problem. Right? How do you explain all these data points that you've got at a lower frequency to the average person? It's like recapitulating your fundamental sampling problem.
Athina: It's actually pretty interesting, like when you talk to people about how you spend 70% of your day, where you spend 70% or 80% of your day, you actually have to find the words that can describe it to your friends and your family.
Cameron: So how do you describe it to your family?
Athina: Like about the stripe artifact, about the GRACE? What do you mean?
Cameron: Well, let's go with what you said. How do you spend 70% of your day? How would you describe that in simple terms to someone in your family?
Athina: Right. I would say I wake up way early in the morning and then head to the lab, and then I lose track of the time, sometimes. All of a sudden goes like 12:00 midnight or 1:00 AM and then I have to go home. Right? Yeah. I'm pretty sure that Stephanie and Siobhan here both have the same experience. When you do grad studies, there is nothing else there. You just are there. And what you really need to do to be happy is that where you spend your time fulfills you, gives you a nice taste. And when you wake up in the morning, you're happy that you go in the lab and do all this nice research there and try to find some answers and understand some things.
Cameron: Siobhan, we're talking about emotions and research again already.
Siobhan: It always resurfaces.
Athina: In my outline of like my objectives, everything is related to a different emotion. Right? It's actually interesting to see the emotions of a grad student. They want the [thesis] defense.
Cameron: [laughs] Yeah. I'm not sure how we'd represent that. But yeah, the trajectory is pretty fierce sometimes. In any grad program you go through at some point a dark night of the soul, where you're not sure you're going to be able to do it. Every one of us has had that. Stephanie, you actually study emotions. So, it shouldn't be hard for us to talk about the role of emotion in your work. Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of work that you do? What you're studying is... And I'm just quoting from your own self-description, implicit theories of sexual satisfaction and how couples can sustain intimate connections. So I've got a couple of questions about just that sentence, first off, what's intimacy?
Stephanie: That is a very good question, and I think it's one that would differ for many people. So actually my master's research is on attachment theory and I'll get more into that. But even for different attachment styles, whether you're avoidantly attached and you don't feel comfortable with intimacy and close situations or you're anxiously attached and you need intense intimacy and closeness, intimacy and closeness could mean anything from affectionate behavior, to communicating about deep and vulnerable topics, or even sexual intimacy, which my research is focused on.
Cameron: The other part of this sentence that you gave that I was a little bit puzzled by was the word "implicit." When you talk about implicit theories, what's that getting at?
Stephanie: Yeah. So what I mean by implicit beliefs is sexual growth beliefs. So in the context of conflict in the relationship, you see this conflict as opportunities to grow within your relationship, you are motivated to put work and effort into resolving this conflict and moving forward as a couple. The other type of belief is sexual destiny beliefs, where -- kind of obvious from the term -- is you believe you have a soulmate, and if things aren't going right in your relationship, they're not the one for you. That's what you believe.
Stephanie: And so if conflict arises and you feel like maybe we're incompatible, that's when you're going to back away, maybe distance yourself or leave the relationship completely. However, for destiny believers, it's not always the case where if conflict arises, they leave. If you were in a relationship and you feel like you are compatible and that this person is your soulmate truly, conflict won't make a difference in terms of the long-term commitment and outcomes in a relationship. You're going to stay committed because you believe that person's your soulmate.
Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you're getting at a lot of the people's self-understanding in these kinds of situations?
Stephanie: That's right.
Cameron: So question then is how do you actually do research like this?
Stephanie: We use a few different types of methods. Mostly we use self-report surveys rather than observational methods or case studies. And so a typical study design, which was used in both papers of my master's thesis is we would have couples do an intense screening process, where we'll talk to them over email and over the phone to confirm that they are truly couples and they do meet our eligibility criteria. From there, we'll send them a background or baseline survey. That's usually about an hour long, and they'll respond to lots of questions about themselves, their relationship and their partner.
Stephanie: Now I talk about couples and that's a key part of our research, is that we have what's called actor and partner effects. So an actor effect is how I feel about my relationship and how this influences my own feelings. But then there are also partner effects. So how I feel about my relationship or the ways that I behave in my relationship influence how my partner feels and vice versa. How my partner feels influences me. So we get a really comprehensive glimpse at the dynamics within intimate relationships that way. Other methods that we use are daily diary studies, so after the baseline, we'll start right away with a 21-day or 14-day survey, but we'll ask people every day about their daily experiences in the relationship. And then we'll do longitudinal methods as well. So we'll follow-up three months later and do a similar type of self-report survey. Right now, we're also doing a one-and-a-half-year survey when we're checking in every three months with a similar kind of self-report survey. So lots of different kinds of methods to get at our questions.
Cameron: Yeah. And so it gives you like different lenses on the relationship?
Stephanie: Absolutely, yeah. Different perspectives, and often we do find fluctuations. We can look at whether doing something in the moment is good. Whether chronically doing something over the 21-day period is good for the relationship and how this influences subsequent periods. So, that three-month follow-up or different time points later on.
Cameron: I was going to ask you about this 21-day period. Is that like a magic number of some sort: less, you lose something; more, you lose something as well?
Stephanie: Yeah, so it is kind of the magic number in sexuality research, only because people aren't having sex every single day on average. So to account for enough instances of sexual experiences, usually it's one time per week and we need at least like three time points to have enough power to detect an effect. So we try to aim for 21-days to get enough information about their sexual experiences.
Cameron: I would have thought that the optimal period for this would be 28 days for obvious reasons.
Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. Maybe.
Cameron: So you've got a bunch of different distinctions that you make in your research, can you talk to me a little bit about the distinction between exchange and communal participation in the relationship?
Stephanie: Yeah, for sure. So maybe I'll just start by explaining why we even do this research to kind of set the stage for why these two distinctions are important. So in my work, I really try to understand how the ways that people approach their sexuality influence their relationship outcomes as I've been mentioning. And the reason I focus on the sexual domain specifically is because sexuality is often the distinguishing factor between the sexual or intimate relationships and other types of relationships we have with our friends or acquaintances or parents. And because most partners in sexual relationships tend to be sexually monogamous, they often have a really important role in meeting each other's sexual needs. You're relying on the same partner for meeting your needs for intimacy like we talked about. Just having fun on a night or communicating about what's going on that day. So you rely on this person for a lot. Now being responsive to a partner's sexual needs, or what we call sexual communal norms or sexual communal strength, is associated with a lot of positive outcomes, like greater satisfaction for both partners and across time points. So what I mean by sexual communal norms is being responsive or meeting your partner's needs without the expectation that they'll reciprocate that right away. So you do understand that, "Okay, eventually when I need them to meet my needs, I can trust that they'll do that. But right now I'm just going to be focused on meeting their needs because they need me." So that's sexual communal strength. The other perspective we tend to focus on in our research is sexual exchange. So exchange perspectives or keeping things equitable or equal in a relationship can have mixed outcomes. On one hand, keeping things equal can be a good thing. Partners are not under over benefiting, which is good, but on the other hand, being focused consistently on tracking and trading these sexual favors in a relationship can be onerous, and it can really detract from the intimacy that people feel in the relationships. Sexual exchanges, similar to a term called sexual economics, which is also something that I've been researching. And it's this idea that instead of trading sex for sex, or sexual favors for another type of sexual favor, you're trading sexual favors for other types of resources in the relationship. So when we talk about power imbalances in the relationship, or if someone has greater finances than the other partner, we might see that type of an exchange happening as well and supply and demand feeds into this. So there's a lot of overlap between these different disciplines and sexuality.
Cameron: Yeah, yeah. I like the way that you bring up the agency of the person trading the sexual favors, because often our assumptions about something like say a sugar daddy relationship per that, it's entirely exploitative. And while undoubtedly it can be exploitative, you don't want to completely take away agency from the person who is giving the sexual favors in that relationship. Classic example right now would be Melania Trump, right? She was very clearly getting something out of this relationship. She was able to, I understand, hold out, moving to the White House until certain things got sorted out in the economic exchange that went with that relationship. So there's some very clear examples of agency in these things. So when you're talking about in a typical couple, someone factoring in the sexual aspect of the relationship to the broader relationship, it can be a very integrative kind of a thing where there's just so much richness going on. I'm just wondering about the kinds of tools that you've got to get at that richness. How do you avoid kind of reducing what you're observing in this rich human relationship to a set of data points on a survey? We're almost getting back to Athina's problem of sampling these gravitational fields, right? With data points. You've got this very rich human relationship that you're trying to understand with an almost crude sample of that relationship. How do you begin to make sense of what you're losing and what you're gaining from those kinds of research methods?
Stephanie: Yeah, it's a good question, and an important one to consider when we're doing this type of research. Like I said, so we incorporate both partners' perspectives on what's happening in the relationship. So that informant response gives us that added level of, I guess, confidence in the effects that we're finding. So there are models that get at this, which I haven't incorporated into my research yet, but there's something called the truth and bias model, that has been applied to sexuality research, where one person can report on how responsive they were, for example, and their partner can also respond about how responsive they thought their partner was, and we can map it on to see how biased partners are about each other and how accurate they are. So having both partners within the couple of report on what's going on gives us that really complex glimpse of what's happening. But it's a great question. And it's a concern when we have quantitative data where participants can't really elaborate on what they mean by specific items. And that's a limitation of the research that we don't know if couples were having explicit conversations about these trades, like, "Okay, I'll do this sexual favor if you do this." We don't know if they were having that conversation. We don't even know if they've really thought about the relationship in that way before. It could just be something like a dynamic that is normal for their relationship. So it also brings up questions of if you're reading these items every single day for 21 days, and you're learning new perspectives or getting exposed to new ways of thinking about your relationship, is this influencing how couples then behave going forward in the study? Is this different than how they thought about their relationship before? So it's all great questions and certainly ones that we want to look further into, to gain a better understanding of what really is going on.
Cameron: Well, I mean, this parallel to Siobhan's research, in that the gaze of the camera produces certain behaviors in people, right? And in your case, the survey instrument has an effect. It's kind of like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about how language determines our ability to perceive or shapes our ability to perceive the world. So you've got a particular set of instruments. Athina's got a particular set of instruments. Siobhan's got a particular set of instruments that she's looking at the world through, and you get a particular kind of a picture. So one question that arose for me when I was looking at your master's thesis was around things like heteronormativity. What kinds of assumptions are built into your survey instruments that wouldn't work for couples or polyamorous relationships that don't fit maybe the implicit model behind the survey instrument?
Stephanie: Right. So you're tapping into another limitation of a lot of this research that a lot of the samples tend to be straights, white, educated samples. And so our finding's really generalizable to other types of samples? And it's a good question. We do have some diversity in our samples. So we do have samples in which we have same-sex couples, or people who are in polyamorous relationships, but they're just responding about one specific relationship that they have. At this point, I honestly don't have the data to speak to how generalizable the findings would be. But I think in the context of trades, I expect that we would see similar types of dynamics. So if someone is not really comfortable with intimacy, they might be more likely to keep track of these trades in the relationship, regardless of if they're dating the same person, same gender sex, or a different sex. And so even with people in consensually non-monogamous relationships, you do have different partners who meet their different needs. It's possible that they might be communally responsive with one partner based on their relationship dynamic, and maybe more exchange oriented in another relationship. So a cool study that could get at that is collecting samples in which we are able to get responses from every single partner within a consensually non-monogamous relationship to see whether those norms differ across partners or stay the same.
Cameron: I was going to ask how does your work get out into practice? Is it through counseling or... Who is the audience for your research and what do they do with it?
Stephanie: So the audience for this research is a bit different than some of the other research that I do. So for this research, I'll try to disseminate my findings through things like blogs or publicly accessible or easily accessible platforms for people. So I'll share things on my Facebook. I also have a website and there are different types of blogs for relationship research, one's called Luvze, which used to be called The Science of Relationships. And it's just about mobilizing your knowledge in easily understandable lay language. Some of the other research that I do tends to focus on more clinically vulnerable populations, so women who have a clinical diagnosis of low sexual desire. And for that research, one of my collaborators, or a couple of my collaborators are clinical psychologists who help with the research, but also apply these findings to their own practice, and have their own clients who they might be able to incorporate these ideas with in practice. So that's one of the reasons that I love the research that I do, is that I have seen direct influences of our findings to be able to help people who are coping with distressing situations. And it's pretty awesome to see.
Cameron: That's wonderful. So I'm wondering how this gold medal that you've received affects your prospects for doing research. So I'm going to start with Stephanie, because I've been talking with you. Does this give you access to research funding? Does it open up doors for you in terms of collaboration? How do you see it really making a difference for you other than just the pure satisfaction of being recognized?
Stephanie: So, like I mentioned earlier, funding can be challenging for sexuality research, just because, I don't know, some of the grants might prioritize other types of research over this, especially if it's seen as more of a taboo topic or less valuable. But the reality is that sexual relationships really do have a role in maintaining the rest of your satisfaction in your relationships overall. So there is a lot of overlap between the sexual and general relationship dynamics. And so it is really important to consider. What this medal means for me going forward and with my prospects for research is that eventually I would love to pursue a post-doc position somewhere where I can merge these two ideas together. I love the merging of the research and the clinical context. And so hopefully, I can work with someone maybe in a more clinical context or maybe someone in industry or a non-academic position through online dating sites or other types of platforms where I can bring my research with their practice, and then get it out into the real world and help people immediately. That's kind of my goal. And so to have this recognition with the medal, it kind of solidifies and reassures me of the impact and how important and valuable this research really is for people, especially those who don't feel comfortable talking about their sexuality, or might not realize that what they're experiencing is also experienced by a lot of other women or couples. It's comforting and reassuring for them, and that's kind of my goal.
Cameron: Siobhan, I can see you nodding your head as well, as Stephanie talks. What about this gold medal works for you? How does that open up space for you as a researcher?
Siobhan: I mean, it's an incredibly precarious time to be a worker in any field. Especially with coronavirus, but the structural problems have been building for decades. And I think you really see this in the precarious labor in the academy. So in this context, like any recognition or advantage is an asset, right? But I think this one in particular, because it points to the sort of broader connections that your research can make. I know everyone's interested in interdisciplinary research now and you see these sort of connections between fields, but there still isn't a lot of sort of material or tangible support. And there aren't necessarily a lot of places that recognize that kind of research as well. So something like this I think is quite unusual. And I think most tangibly, art history is a book field, so to be competitive for a tenure-track job, you really need a monograph, and an award like this definitely helps with something like finding a publisher. So in that way, it's an incredible asset.
Cameron: That's good. That's good. Athina, I'm going to finish off with you. You've already got a job. So maybe the Gold Medal played a part in that, or maybe it didn't. But you're in a very different field because the funding structures for your work are completely different from art and psychology research. How does your past success translate into future success in your field?
Athina: I mean, always having this type of words in your resume, it's actually a huge asset as Siobhan said, right? It's the most prestigious award you can get in a Canadian context. Right?
Cameron: I just don't think you should leave it in your resume. I think you should wear the medal to work. Wear it to the lab. I want to hear what the comments are.
Athina: [laughs] Sure. Yeah.
Cameron: Come on. That's academic bling. All right. Well, I want to wrap up there by thanking the three of you for being such wonderful participants in this. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you and you all have such interesting and diverse stories, and yet there's such common threads in the way that you're approaching the world. It's really lovely to learn from you.
Stephanie: Thank you very much for having us. This has been awesome.
Cameron: Yeah.
Athina: I feel way better now that I see the rest of the recipients and what amazing work they've done. I'm really happy that we are here together.
Cameron: I'm glad. Siobhan any last words?
Siobhan: Yeah. Thank you so much for the interview and to you both for sharing your incredible research. It's always fascinating to talk to people in different disciplines. And you see again, there's differences in how we're approaching questions, but also all of these common threads. It always just inspires your research to move in new directions, to have discussions like this. So thank you for bringing us together.
Stephanie: If I may, I'm just going to pipe in and emphasize: one of the questions I was asked when we received this medal is, why we chose York and what this medal means in the context of York. And listening to these interdisciplinary research contributions that are just amazing, really emphasizes and highlights the interdisciplinary strengths of York University and how the research community really is super supportive and encouraging and collaborative. And that's one of the things that I particularly love about being at York. So again, thank you so much for having us. This has been a really great opportunity for me to listen and learn -- definitely learn! -- about everyone else's research contribution.
Cameron: Oh, for me too. It's just been an education listening to the three of you, and I'm looking forward to following your work. And I hope that we get a chance to have a cup of coffee or something together at some point in the future, at least for those of you who are still in Toronto. Athina, let us know if you ever get a chance to come back to Toronto post-pandemic, and we'll make sure that we have a coffee.
Athina: I plan to come for my convocation once it's...
Cameron: Whenever that happens.
Stephanie: If it ever happens.
Cameron: Good. Lovely.
Links
York University’s announcement of the Gold Medal winners
Siobhan Angus on Twitter
Staff web page for Athina Peidou at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Stephanie Raposo on Twitter
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producers: Cameron Graham, Bert Imai
Photos: York University, Twitter
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Audacity
Recorded: August 6, 2020
Locations: Toronto and Pasadena
