Episode 027: Public Scholars
Bettina Forget, Sylvie Ouellette and Erica Pimentel are members of the Public Scholars Program at Concordia University in Montreal. They talk to us about the link between art and space science, how bacteria scavenge iron from their surroundings, and how accountants can work with blockchain. We also talk about a problematic article in a chemistry journal.
Transcript
Cameron Graham: My guests today are Bettina Forget, Sylvie Ouellette and Erica Pimentel. They're all participants in the Public Scholars Program at Concordia University in Montreal. This program brings together PhD candidates from a wide variety of disciplines to develop their ability to engage with a wider community and share the significance of their work and its impact on society. Bettina, Sylvie and Erica, welcome to the podcast.
Bettina Forget: Hello, Cameron.
Sylvie Ouellette: Thank you.
Erica Pimentel: Happy to be here.
Cameron: Bettina, I want to just briefly get a sense of what it is you do. Now, your PhD is in art education?
Bettina: That's right.
Cameron: What's your focus there?
Bettina: My focus is actually on art and science. That's kind of the intersection where I work and research. Specifically, my research looks at how art could maybe be an access ramp into science, specifically for girls, who tend to disengage from science when they hit their teenage years.
Cameron: Ah, okay. Well, I'm interested in talking to you more about that. But before we do that, Sylvie, you have a... Have you completed your PhD or are you still working on it?
Sylvie: No, I'm about halfway through.
Cameron: About halfway through, so your PhD is in chemistry and biochemistry?
Sylvie: Yes.
Cameron: And what's your focus in that, in your work?
Sylvie: Right. Well, my PhD is research-based, which means I spend anywhere from 35 to 70 hours a week in the lab at the bench. My focus is to determine how bacteria scavenge iron from their surroundings.
Cameron: Okay. Well, you can teach me about that when I get a chance to talk to you in more detail. And Erica, my connection with you is that we both have done, or are working on PhDs in accounting. So what's your focus within accounting?
Erica: I research accountants, not accounting. So I used to be a practitioner, I'm still a licensed CPA, and I think that informs my interest in how accountants do their work, how technological change is impacting the way accounting is practiced, and more foundationally, how folks find meaning at work in the context of these ongoing changes.
Cameron: Right. Well, the production of meaning through our work is a huge, huge topic, so we can deal with that in more detail in a moment.
Cameron: So, let's talk with you, Bettina. I've looked through your CV, and you've done a lot of work around the intersection of art and science, as you say. And you actually are an artist, you've done work that's been exhibited nationally and internationally. So you've made a transition from being an artist to being an academic, or have they always been mixed together for you?
Bettina: I started off in the arts. I'm a trained artist with my undergrad in fine arts, and actually was a-
Cameron: And, sorry. Is it visual arts?
Bettina: Yes. Visual arts.
Cameron: Like painting or sculpture?
Bettina: Yes. Studio arts.
Cameron: Studio art, okay.
Bettina: So, I was painting making installations, video, so kind of multidisciplinary. And when I was doing my undergrad, at the same time I started to get engaged with amateur astronomy, and the two things started to influence each other very much. And by the time I got interested in teaching art, those had converged to a point where that became my research focus.
Cameron: But you've already taken steps towards making this connection between art and science through the Visual Voice Gallery that you've founded.
Bettina: That's right. We're in our 14th year right now.
Cameron: Can you tell us a little bit about the gallery?
Bettina: Yes. It's located in Montreal, near Place des Arts, downtown. And the gallery, uniquely, only exhibits art that makes a connection to science. So it's astronomical art, BioArt, art that is based on mathematics, chemistry. So really that overlap of hard sciences and contemporary art.
Cameron: Yeah. My only image of, when I think about art and science, is these phenomenal detailed photographic renderings of telescope images of distant galaxies that look so complicated and so colourful. It's just really remarkable. So that's where my mind goes. I presume you've got more in store at the gallery than just pictures of galaxies, though.
Bettina: Yes. And I think it's actually a whole movement, that SciArt movement, where art and science start to fuse and inform each other. And sort of in its early days, that was pretty much it, beautiful pictures through microscopes and telescopes, and a little bit of the fetishization of science. But now, artists are getting really engaged with science, and they're actually going into a lab, like they will work for example with Sylvie, and do research creation and create arts-based research. So we're looking at the same research area, but instead of writing a journal article, maybe it becomes an art installation. But it has the same... It also wants to make a connection with the general public, and so transmit that knowledge of what's being created in the lab, just in a different way.
Cameron: Yeah. In my research, as an accounting researcher, I'm often working in fields where I don't really have a lot of expertise about the subject matter, but I bring my accounting angle to it, and I always feel like I'm adding to a conversation that is going on and hopefully adding another layer of understanding or richness to the conversation. Is that something similar to what you see as the role of the artist in science or what is going on there when you bring an artistic perspective to what is a research science focus?
Bettina: That is such a great question. That is exactly what happens. Artists come into a lab or into a scientific institution with a different perspective. They may come in with different questions. And they usually connect in the research practice and the research question. So for example, a bio-artist I work with, she is very interested in who we are as humans, and if we end at our skin, or if we are really what is called a holobiont, that kind of symbiosis between a microbiome that lives in and on us, and homo sapiens as that skin bag that carries all these microbes around. And the scientists who work in the lab, they're sequencing gut bacteria, they're doing all the hard work, and then Hélène comes in and she goes like, "Well, what does that mean for the human condition? Are we really human?" So her work is a commentary and it connects the very abstract scientific work to the human condition, and I think that's really important work.
Cameron: Your description of us as skin bags reminds me of that old Star Trek episode where the alien life forms were disembodied and they didn't really understand humans and their description of us was "bags of water."
Bettina: Yes. Ugly bags of mostly water. I love that episode.
Cameron: Yeah. Because we are mostly water. So the artist then is working in the lab and getting a lot of stimulating ideas from observing the research. What's the feedback from the artist to the scientist?
Bettina: That is actually also very interesting, because ideally, these kind of collaborations are an enriching experience for both parties. So obviously, the artist gets a lot of information and new ideas and stimulation from the scientist. But the scientists also benefit, because they are confronted with new ideas, maybe there's also a subtle critique that's being offered to the scientific process of what is being done in the lab and being put into a larger context. And it's also, in my experience, that the scientists are really delighted to see their work as an art piece. They go into the gallery afterwards and go like, "Oh my God, that is my research." It's a video, it has become a sculpture, and there's a new connection that you are creating with the primary research question and can reinvigorate your research process as well.
Cameron: That's fabulous. Now, you have a specific role at a major scientific institute to do this kind of thing. You're the artist in residence at SETI.
Bettina: I am.
Cameron: Can you remind people what SETI is?
Bettina: The SETI Institute is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence that came out of NASA in the '70s. At the beginning, SETI was dedicated to really searching the skies and listening for alien signals. Today, the SETI Institute is an independent research organization. It's still five minutes away from NASA Ames. You can practically walk from the campus, and a lot of researchers actually have offices in both institutions. And now the SETI Institute also looks at astrobiology, exoplanet research and space exploration. So, I'm running the Artists in Residence program, so I'm the director of the Artists in Residence program there.
Cameron: Oh, okay. So you're directing that. So what does that work involve, then?
Bettina: We have a current cohort of seven artists who are collaborating with SETI researchers, and I'm facilitating those interactions. So, I'm making sure that when an artist comes in, we have a conversation about what it is they're interested in. Are they interested in information technology and what intelligence means, what communication means? Or are they interested in how life began and the relationship of maybe water and ice and life and geologic time? So I pair them up with a researcher, and then throughout their two-year stay with us, I make sure that the collaboration runs well. And then the other part of my job is also public outreach, making sure that the general public knows about the Artists in Residence program and all the art that comes out of it. Because we see that art as science communication, a great way to connect the general public with science through the arts.
Cameron: It's interesting to me that you've got a role as an academic that's very much focused on the public. I've talked to a few people like that on this program. But many of us are more like myself, where we're doing our own research and then just occasionally what we do leaks out to the public realm. So give me your perspective in what it means to be a public scholar or public intellectual. What do you feel is your responsibility, your role, the potential for what you do?
Bettina: The reason I came into the PhD program was of course to enrich my field, but ultimately, the impetus for my research is to enrich the general public. My quest to get more women into science is supposed to be a benefit to society. So I come already with a little bit of a soap box that I want to climb on and let everybody know about what I think and what I'm trying to do here. So to be given this opportunity through the Public Scholar Program to facilitate reaching the general public, I love it. I do a lot of outreach. I like to give talks to the general public about my art and about the SETI Institute, and if you ask me, "Do you want to do a Zoom meeting for my astronomy club?" I always say yes, because I love letting everybody know about what I do, because I think it's important work.
Cameron: And so the publication of the art also involves some sort of a publication of the science.
Bettina: Yes. That's right. They kind of go hand in hand. And I like this kind of surreptitiousness of it, that people come into my art gallery and they're thinking, "Oh, I'm just looking at the nice art installation," but really they're learning about astronomy and going to Mars or about holobionts, and they are starting to ask themselves questions, the same questions that the scientists are asking, but through the mouth of the artist, and it comes out a little differently, and it makes a different human connection.
Cameron: It's such a fabulous role to be involved with SETI, but also to be involved in this way. It's quite remarkable. I want to turn to talk to Sylvie, because she's a person working in a lab asking questions. You're working with bacteria in your lab. What is it that you're watching the bacteria do?
Sylvie: Right. To begin, the best way to explain this, I'm going to try to condense this. Bacteria need iron to grow, the same way we do. Now, we know that through evolution, bacteria have developed this ability to synthesize compounds that they will secrete into the environment to bind the iron and then reacquire it. These are called siderophores. In E. coli, the siderophore that synthesizes is enterobactin. Now, we know that enterobactin is synthesized through the concerted action of six proteins, six enzymes. What I'm trying to determine is whether those six enzymes assemble together to facilitate synthesis. This is very much like an assembly line, where there is a streamlining of all the processes to make it easier, make it faster. So what I do is I look at these proteins and figure out, through various laboratory techniques, figure out how the cooperate or not, and then from the moment we understand how they get together, then the pharmaceutical industry could come up with ways to disrupt this. This is a new -- well, a fairly new -- approach to antibiotic synthesis in that if you figure out how to disrupt the mechanism, that's called targeted disruption, then you can... I wouldn't say more easily, but more efficient, perhaps, way of stopping the bacteria from growing. If you stop them from acquiring iron, then of course they can no longer grow. So ultimately, this would be a new class of antibiotics.
Cameron: I see, okay. When you said that you were looking at bacteria and how they scavenge iron, I immediately thought of environmental applications or something like that. But you're going in the direction of pharmaceuticals, right?
Sylvie: It would be good for pharmaceutical, but also for agriculture.
Cameron: Oh, of course, yeah. Yeah. First of all, I want to ask you, you're right now at this very moment as we're talking, you're in your lab in Montreal. And most of us, as professors, are not anywhere near the university campus during the pandemic. So there's something very important about you actually having your hands on the tools there. Can you tell me a little bit about how a lab gets arranged? Where does the funding from this come from? It's obviously a lot more expensive that the kind of research that I do because you need this physical location with all this expensive equipment. So do you get involved in finding funding for the lab?
Sylvie: No. That's up to the professor, my supervisor who's in charge of the lab. Our funding comes from NSERC.
Cameron: Okay. NSERC is the natural science federal funding. So all professors have to learn to play, to some degree, the funding game. Your case is fairly easy because you can point to the fact that you've got to buy all of this equipment, and if you don't have the equipment, you won't get the research done. Now, the funding question aside then, you've got the question of what happens after you've done the research? If you could kind of sketch out a schematic diagram for me of what happens from you doing your work to it having some kind of an impact on the world? What's the chain of events? Is there a patent involved, or what happens with the work that you do?
Sylvie: Not at this stage. You see, one of the strengths of Concordia is that we are very focused on fundamental science. And what I aim to do is basically provide a springboard for pharmaceutical industry, or industry at large, to move forward. So I aim to put out data, information, that can be used at a later stage for the applications. As opposed to some universities that are more focused on clinical applications and will work with cohorts of individuals for finding therapies, or things like that. Here at Concordia, we're much more at the basics of science.
Cameron: It's interesting, because to me what you just said, there's a connection between being a public scholar and being at a public institution that exists for the sake of the public. So you're doing basic research that is basically being released into the public domain, then?
Sylvie: Yes.
Cameron: Yeah, as opposed to an institute that's producing patentable technologies that can then be commercialized.
Sylvie: No. We're just basically providing the raw knowledge for people to use as they see fit.
Cameron: So what does it then mean to you to be a public scholar? Is it embedded in this idea of doing basic research or is there a wider role beyond the research itself?
Sylvie: Well, in my case, it's pretty convoluted, because a long, long time ago, I started out as a lab technician at a hospital medical laboratory, and later on I did a degree in journalism, and I put the two together, and for a long, long time, I worked in scientific communications. And at some point I realized the science had evolved much more faster than I had. That's when I decided to come back to school. Initially, it was only, "Let's just take a couple of courses here and there," really for personal interest. But soon enough I got dragged in and I fell in love with lab work all over again, and you never forget your first love. So I'm back at the lab and I'm moving from being a scientific communicator to becoming a scientist who communicates. And this is also a big problem that's seen in the scientific world, is that a lot of scientists, top scientists, sometimes have a very hard time explaining their research in a language that everybody can understand. So as a public scholar, I think this is where it all comes together for me.
Cameron: Right. Well, not everybody has the diverse skillset that's needed to do the basic research and to communicate it. So from what you've described there, I've seen various mechanisms for this. One is the individual who just does the basic research and returns to the lab day after day, and never really talks to anybody other than publishing their work to academic journals, to an academic audience. I know people who are involved very much on the public science side of things where they are, as you said, a science communicator, and their job is to help publicize the work of others. So you're positioning yourself on the edge there, where you're developing your own research but also taking responsibility for publicizing what you do.
Sylvie: I think in the end, it's all a matter of balancing left brain, right brain. Left brain being the lab work, the research, the hard data, and the right brain being, being able to fashion this in a way and massage it in a way that people can understand. Which is very much what Bettina does.
Cameron: I want to turn to Erica now. Erica, your accounting research is around the public interest. Describe for me briefly what kind of things you look at.
Erica: I'm interested in how professionals relate to their work. So I'm not interested in accounting, accounting standards, but the experience of an individual working in a hierarchal organization, the pressures that they feel, how they make sense of their work, how they find meaning with their work, and how that impacts how they relate to others. So, very much situated at the intersection of accounting and the sociology of professions, I would say.
Cameron: Yeah. I have a number of colleagues who focus on the accounting profession as the topic of their work. So what does it mean to you that accounting is a sphere of work that is professionalized?
Erica: Accounting, of course, is a profession with a capital P. We have a legal jurisdiction, and there's a whole body of literature of why accounting is a profession. But I think that makes us special in the sense that there are a lot of institutions around the type of work that we do, and we should not take that for granted, the protections that accountants are afforded by the institutions that protect us. But at the same time, that gives us a tremendous responsibility that what we do should be ethical, that we are there to serve more than our own pockets. And I think that there's a lot of research of the accounting profession becoming commercialized, and I have a paper that I wrote with my supervisor and a Tunisian co-author, looking at how the process of providing a client service doesn't always have to be profit motivated. Like, I might just want to put my client's needs first, not because I want to make money, but because my clients are part of a community that I care about. And so we look at a specific context that's very much a kinship based economy, and the accountants said, "Sometimes I let my clients do grey things or nefarious things, simply because I want to keep the lights on, because I want to protect the jobs of the employees at the organization, of their suppliers, and of the community. I think my clients are important to their community, and I can't let those clients fail." So I think it's interesting if we question the relationship between the clients and who's paying them, and as critical researchers, it doesn't always have to be negative. So I found in this context, yes accountants are being commercialistic, but for a very interesting reason when we think about it. So that's just an example of what I do.
Cameron: Does your research involve interviewing accountants or going to their workplaces?
Erica: Two approaches. I started off doing interviews, and through the interviews that I did and through my project on blockchain, I got involved in ethnography. And so I spent two years with an accounting firm, meeting people, seeing how they interact, the hierarchy in the organization, and then when I interviewed these people, I was really able to understand how things work. And the purpose of that paper was to understand where is the accountant profession vis-à-vis the blockchain ecosystem. And then COVID happened and I went and tried to do a bunch of interviews, and what I miss from doing interviews is that deep understanding of getting to know people and situating them in their context over a two-year period. Because after my one hour interview with a respondent, I felt like asking so many more questions about, well, "How do your colleagues feel about this?" and, "Where do you situate yourself in the organization?" So I feel like I would love to spend the rest of my career doing ethnographies, but those are difficult to fall on. But that's certainly what I prefer, is to go in and embed myself in an organization and dig deep into how people engage with their sense-making.
Cameron: This is one of the challenges of doing PhD research, is choosing the mode of research. If you are deciding to launch out as a PhD student to do an ethnography, you have to have a commitment from the organization that you're going to be embedded in, and if anything happens, it might be a change of ownership, it might be a change at the top, the new CEO who decides that they don't really like this kind of invasive researcher being around for all their meeting. So it's a bit of a high risk gamble. Did that enter into your thinking at all when you were choosing your methodology?
Erica: I didn't intend to do ethnography. I started getting involved with this organization thinking, "Oh, they'll learn something, I'll learn something," and then it sort of expanded from there. The problem was then COVID hit. So my ethnography was just cut off at the knees. And for the third paper of my thesis, I couldn't explore that question, there wasn't enough time to explore that question, and so I had to do the third chapter of my thesis interview-based, something that I could just go off these one-off meetings with folks via Zoom. The one thing I realize is as a researcher, you have to be adaptable, you have to be flexible, both to the organization and to realizing that your research questions, you don't want them to be trivial and just driven by the whims of the day, but sometimes you need to be flexible, certainly in a PhD. I could say, "I'll put my PhD on hold and come back when COVID's over," but that's not exactly the best strategy.
Cameron: Yeah. Can you just shift gears a little bit and just describe to me what this interest in blockchain is about?
Erica: The blockchain project started off as my first summer project. A prof came to me and said, "I have this huge grant from our regulator and I need someone who's a CPA, because we want to look at business applications of blockchain." And it was supposed to be very positivist and very almost normative, and through that connection, I met people in the blockchain ecosystem, and it was just so interesting. It's like an entire different community. And so I didn't come at it with a technological interest, I didn't come at it with a strategy, which was originally our interest, of "How can businesses implement the blockchain?" I ended coming back to accounting, because that's how I got in contact with the accounting firm that I ended up doing the ethnography at. So blockchain to me is an interesting technology, but I'm not really interested in the technology, I'm interested in the people that are behind the technology, and how they interact and how they see accounting and how they see financial information as being important or not important. And frankly, they tell me, "We don't need financial statements. We can raise money in ways that don't need financial statements." And so is there a role at all for accountants in this space? So if the world is a social construction, you see reality through your own lens, well I ended up coming back to where I started with this project.
Cameron: Well this interest in people as opposed to technology is I think what drives you to the kind of communication that you do as a scholar.,You've written articles in The Conversation, you have a real commitment to participating in public discourse. What are the perils and the joys of being a woman who's a researcher participating in public discourse?
Erica: You know what? As a former practitioner, I see coming at a public scholar as two ways. First, in academic discourse, sometimes "practitioner" is a pejorative term. You know, "Oh, that's a practitioner journal. Oh, that's too practical." But at the same time as an academic, I have the privilege of thinking big thoughts that maybe organizations should be thinking about and alerting them to things that should matter. For instance, I'm writing a piece in The Conversation now about how should we rethink how people are evaluated or compensated in the context of working from home? These are questions that organizations should be asking themselves but may not think about or may not be exposed to. And I'm an accountant, this is not my area necessarily, but it's something that became very real through some of the interviews that I've done recently for my thesis. So one, as a public scholar coming to organizations with issues they may not know are coming. The other thing is also coming back to academia and saying, "Hey, there's a bunch of these issues out there, we should be looking at these." I remember I went to a job talk and this woman did this very rigorous statistical analysis, and someone said to her, "What's the economic impact of your finding?" And she almost whispered it, "50$." And someone said, "What did you say?" "50$." Now, 50$ for a multinational corporation as a firm size effect is a rounding error. So sometimes academic studies become a bit of navel gazing and they're done for their own purposes. So I think having one foot in practice keeps me grounded in reality. So that's how they intersection of being a former practitioner and public scholar come together. Now, as a woman, I think this is something we might talk about a little bit later, but I remember telling a PhD colleague about what I'm doing and he said, "Oh, that's cute." And I didn't say anything, because at the moment I was just so taken aback, but I think as a woman who's not involved in the sciences and who does something that may be a bit more emotive, if I can say, or something more about people's emotions about work, I have to be careful of not delving into the cute or not being perceived as cute. My research is rigorous and theoretically informed and all this stuff. So it's not obvious. It's not obvious.
Cameron: Let's talk a little bit more about this idea of being a woman in science, because the event that brought us all together in the first place, that led to us wanting to record this podcast episode was an article that was published in Angewandte Chemie, which is a German journal. Angewandte means applied, this is applied chemistry. And it was written by a professor at Brock University in Canada. And it was an attempt to review the state of chemistry and a synthesis around, is it organic chemistry, I think? So the title of the article is Organic Synthesis - Where Now? It's a 30-year reflection on the state of affairs in this field. And just to be clear, this article has since been taken down by the journal as being not representative of the kind of work that they wish to publish, which in itself raises questions of how it got published in the first place. But I wanted to read one particular paragraph. In this article, the author is trying to lay out a number of different factors that are affecting research today. And one of the subheadings is Diversity of Workforce. And the article says, "In the last two decades, many groups and/or individuals have been designated with quote/unquote 'preferential status.' This is in spite of the fact that the percentage of women and minorities in academia and pharmaceutical industry has greatly increased. It follows that in a social equilibrium, preferential treatment of one group leads disadvantages for another. New ideologies have appeared and influenced hiring practices, promotion, funding, and recognition for certain groups. Each candidate should have an equal opportunity to secure a position regardless of personal identification/categorization. The rise in emphasis in hiring practices that suggest or even mandate equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counterproductive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates. Such practice affects the format of interviews and has led to the emergence of mandatory training workshops on gender equity, inclusion, diversity, and discrimination." That's the end of the quote from the article. When I read this, I was first of all, really surprised that this would appear in a chemistry journal. It seems to be quite outside the field of expertise of the author, and really surprised that it would get past the review process. So my questions about the journal aside, I understand, this not being my field, but I understand from talking to you, Sylvie, that this is a very prestigious journal. Is that correct?
Sylvie: Yes. It's generally well regarded.
Cameron: Generally well regarded. So this article is complaining about the fact that if we are going to promote certain groups, by that I think specifically the author means women, but also racialized minorities, then that must come at a cost to those who are in a position of, who are being excluded somehow. Let me just back off and let me ask you for your takes, the three of you, when you read this article. I was really surprised by it, but your perspective is probably a little bit different being all women. So tell me what you thought. Sylvie, I'm going to start with you.
Sylvie: My first reaction to this was, "Oh, can we please just stick to chemistry?" I don't know why the author went off on this tangent. The heading was Diversity of the Workforce. I would have expected an analysis of people coming from different backgrounds, different jurisdictions, what everybody brings to the table. Not a matter of ethnicity or gender. I mean, you're doing chemistry, you're doing chemistry, end of story. Is it good or bad chemistry? Well, this is up to reviewers to judge. Whether you're a man or woman, Chinese, African, or whatever else is described as a minority, sorry but if your science is good, it should be judged just for that.
Cameron: Well, one of the things about this paragraph is that it assumes a very individualistic approach to research, because everything we know about organizational decision making and in management research suggests that increasing the diversity of the group produces better decisions. That's indisputable. So the idea that diversity in the workforce would lead to poorer research, that can only make sense if you're talking about individuals who never talk to each other, who never communicate.
Sylvie: Well, in most papers, you will almost always see more than one author. We do not work in isolation of one another, we work in teams, and sometimes teams from various institutions get together on a specific project. So of course there's a blend, there's a blend of all sorts of people. So yes, of course the first author being primary author, and the last author being usually the PI, the supervisor of the research, can be singled out for being part of a minority or being a woman, but the rest of the team contributed. Maybe not in equal measure, because that varies, but it should be considered for the whole of the work, not just the name and gender of one of the authors.
Cameron: So research in your field, and certainly in mine, is very collaborative. You're always, at the very least, bouncing ideas off of each other, and oftentimes crafting individual paragraphs of your paper together, conducting experiments, or what have you, together. So Erica, there's another assumption underneath this article that we just read the paragraph from, which is that somehow, academic work has to be a zero-sum game. That if someone else grows in stature, that therefore someone else must lose. And I wonder what your thoughts are on that assumption.
Erica: Well, I think this type of attitude is why some supervisors will put their name on everybody's papers whether or not they had a hand in the crafting of those papers. Listen, we have a privilege as academics to be able to ask big questions and attempt to find answers to them. And to see that as a zero-sum game, we forget our commitment to the broader public. But I think it also comes down to the cult of productivity that's become stuck in the way academic work is done. This idea that I'm in competition with my office neighbour for tenure, I'm in competition with my office neighbour for a [research] chair, or whatever. And there's a lot of research into universities becoming profit driven, and that affects how we teach, that affects how we promote, retain, select people. And if we lose sight of the objective of a university as being a place to promote knowledge, to promote learning, then we have to sort of set aside some of this profit motivation. And I don't want to go into a diatribe on neoliberalism in universities and all of that, but it is to say-
Cameron: You're welcome to if you want. This is my podcast and I'm giving you permission!
Erica: [laughs] But it is to say that we need to think about why are we here? And we're here to teach people something. The difference between schooling and education. We're here to open people's minds. We're not here just to compete for chairs, to compete for prestige and compete for accolades. Not at all.
Cameron: Bettina, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the field that you're in, which is at this intersection between art and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which I'm sorry if I'm giggling here, but I just love the combination. The mixture of ideas that's there is really remarkable. But I wonder if you can talk to me a little bit about what the diversity of the workforce means in the area that you're working in. Because that was the title of that paragraph that I read. For you, what does diversity in the workforce imply?
Bettina: For me, it implies a multitude of viewpoints and lived experiences. As you have said, diversity in the team leads to much better results. And unfortunately, science, and especially a hard science like astronomy, have been very exclusive of women. So there has been strong positive discrimination in the field of science for white men, who actively excluded women from being allowed to study astronomy, who were not allowed to even present papers or put their names of papers, who were forced to resign their posts as soon as they married. And I remember Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars, tell a story that when she studied astrophysics, she was the only woman in her program, and she entered her auditorium, and every male student, the sea of men, they all stood up and whistled until she took her seat and then they sat back down. And she said she didn't even fault her young fellow male students, but she did fault the faculty, because these whistles were echoing down the corridor, and they knew, and they never stopped it. And that speaks to this kind of idea that women didn't belong in astronomy. And that was true for a long time. And I think the reason why at the SETI Institute there are so many women in leading positions, for example Jill Tarter. If you've watched the movie Contact with Jodie Foster, that's Jill Tarter's life, basically. She is one of the founders of the SETI Institute. Now the SETI arm is run by Nathalie Cabrol, she's an extraordinary woman. And part of my research was to interview the women at the SETI Institute about their experience of being a woman in astronomy. Jill said looking for aliens seemed like a really weird thing to do. Everybody giggled like you, like, "Oh, you're looking for aliens, really? Okay." As a woman, that's a dead end. It's okay. You go do that. But now, there are so much critical mass of women in that field of astrobiology and exoplanet research that there's nearly parity of men and women in that field. And the corporate culture at the SETI Institute, it's so vibrant, it's so fun. When you go into their offices, they have art everywhere, and they are quirky. I've been to NASA Ames, and it's all gray cubicles. And you go to the SETI Institute, and it's just an explosion of fun and imagination. That's why the arts and residents program sits so well there, because everybody is interested in imagination and big ideas. And women are a large and contributing voice in that conversation.
Cameron: Right. Well, if you read a little further in this article that were talking about, you'll find that apparently that's not how science should be done, you should not be having fun! [laughter] I'm going to read another paragraph from it about the transference of skills, in other words, how does one person teach another. And it says, "The trending in mentoring of new generations of professionals must be attended to by proper relationships of masters and apprentices without dilution of standards. Submission to one's mentor is rarely attainable to day, especially in the university setting. Many students are unwilling to submit to any level of hard work demanded by professors. The university does not support professors in this endeavor, as it views students as financial assets, and hence protects them from undue hardships that may be demanded by the masters." Now, there's one part of that paragraph I think is quite accurate, that is that universities do often view students as financial assets. But I don't think that's necessarily the way that professors view their students. The description you've given of life at SETI seems to be quite different than the kind of workplace setting that is described by this article. Can you tell me about this notion of... let me say, to use a very general word, authority. What does authority mean in the workplace that you're describing? Is authority something that is hierarchical or what is the basis of authority, or is there even a place for authority in the SETI environment?
Bettina: There is, of course, a management structure. We have executive staff meetings. The CEO's in charge. But in the term of science, it's much more collaborative. Scientists go into the field, they go in as teams, as we discussed, those teams are diverse. And I see that the graduate students are doing a lot of work. They have actually, even together with NASA, have summer programs where they are allowing graduate students to pursue their own research and the SETI Institute acts like a scaffold. They help them along, they create the conditions that allow these students to do well. So it's an exchange of ideas. It's not this hierarchy of knowledge. If you're a good scientist, you don't need to puff your chest and say, "I'm your master and you need to submit to me." Just that word, "submit." Really? I mean, submission to one's mentor. When I talk to researchers and they say, "We learn so much from our graduate students," because they come in also with fresh ideas and new knowledge. So if you want to carry the conversation forward, there needs to be also a diversity of age groups, not just of race and gender. We need all kinds of diversity. And that works really well at the SETI Institute, and I imagine at any cutting edge institute, that kind of structure, that more of a group structure is in place, and not that old linear hierarchy that I guess this chemist is used to.
Cameron: Sylvie, you work in that field. Is a hierarchical mentality more frequently found in the field of chemistry than in the SETI Institute that Bettina describes?
Sylvie: Well, I cannot talk about chemistry as a whole because my experience is here at Concordia, and we don't see that. We're a rather small department, and in general, we have very good rapport, students versus professors. And to go back to what you were saying earlier about the idea of enjoyment of one's research, I often tell my other colleagues when I come into the lab, I tell them we're going to have fun no matter what it takes. Because to me, if you do not find pleasure in what you do, then it becomes a chore. And the sheer challenge of research and overcoming the frustrations and seeing things progress very slowly, but eventually getting to where you want to get, that in itself is an immense satisfaction. And yes, it's frustrating, and yes it's challenging. But here at Concordia, we have very, very good professors. A lot of them, they're easily approachable, we have an open door policy. Even with undergrads, for that matter. So I do not see that top-down attitude that you might see elsewhere. Having said this, yes, in some institutions, it might be a completely different ball game.
Cameron: I'm interested in the relationship between misogyny and racism that seems to be implicit in the kind of language which is being used here, because the article is quite clear that they're talking, at least in part, about women, and that women are somehow taking places from men because of this affirmative action policy that seems to be something the author is quite upset about. But at the same time, it's using language about "masters" and "submission" that is very, very much imbued with the language of slavery. Not just implicit racism, but explicit racism is the language that this author has chosen to adopt. I wonder Erica, if you in your work, and you're looking at the accountant profession, do you have any suggestions in how to help me disentangle the relationship between misogyny and racism? They're almost inextricable, and yet they're not quite the same thing. Have you got any observations about what you see in the accounting profession?
Erica: You know what? If I can just answer this question a little bit differently, because we're talking about experiences of PhD students, and I want to reflect on one of my own experiences. I started my PhD at a different university than Concordia. An institution. Which one it is, is not important. But I was told, "Your experience doesn't matter." Because I was like, "I want to do research on the profession." "Your experience doesn't matter." And I came to someone with a detailed plan of, "Okay, these are the courses I want to take, because I don't want to do some econometric statistical based studies, I want to do qualitative research." "No," was the answer. "No." And so then, I met my current supervisor, and I said, "I want to come to Concordia, I want to do qualitative research," and he said, "Sure." And I had a SSHRC [grant], which as a financial asset made me easily transferable, and then that's what I did. So I just changed institution, because it was obvious to me that there was no choice. And at the beginning of my PhD I felt like, "Maybe this just isn't for me. I've been a CPA for almost a decade, and you're telling me that being informed by that experience is not relevant, you're questioning how I see the world, you're questioning the perspective I bring to research." Just felt like I was being cut off at the knees. So if we're talking about diversity in the academy, it's also just saying people come to research with different perspectives and different interests and different things that keep them up at night. And certainly as a professional former practitioner, I'm very concerned about unpacking, to your point about misogyny and racism, a lot of the things I saw in practice that made me very uncomfortable, that at the time I didn't have the language to make sense of. So yes. I think misogyny is not something that only concerns women, because if women feel uncomfortable in the workplace, that means they can't do their best work, if they can't... I don't think emancipate is the right word, but they can't self-actualize in that way, then that's bad for men too. And it's like, "Why should men be feminist?" Well, men should be feminist because they have mothers and sisters and they're human beings. So I think misogyny is very important, not just for women, it's important for everyone. And racism is important for everyone in the same way. If we have this intersectional mindset that people are a sum of the different profiles they bring to the world, my experience as a white woman is different than the experience of a Black woman, and the experience of a Black man will be different from my experience, and we don't need to choose. We need to explore what these different profiles bring to the workplace, bring to organizations, bring to academia, and unpack each of those individually.
Cameron: I'm conscious of the fact that all four of us are white, so I think it's fair for us to have a conversation about misogyny and inequity around that male/female divide in the academy. I don't know that I'm the world's best person to be talking to about racism, because although I'm deeply concerned about it, I have no lived experience of racism, apart from being the beneficiary of racist institutional structures. So how do we make this transition? If I can draw a parallel, my role as a male academic in trying to undo and unwind institutional factors that are unfair to women, kind of parallels your role as white women academics in trying to unwind racism, institutional racism in the academy. What are those mechanisms? Does it involve this so-called affirmative action approach that the author of this article in applied chemistry was so upset about? Is that all we need to do, is just some affirmative action policies? What is needed? Erica?
Erica: I read an article in the New York Times recently that categorized people. And my last name is Portuguese, which means it comes from the Iberian Peninsula. So technically, according to the New York Times, I'm not white. And I thought that was absurd. It could raise a question about why that even mattered to me, why this stood out to me, why I care about being white or not, what category I fall into. But I think we really need to find a way to say, "How can we do blind admissions? How can we do blind hiring? How can we disentangle the promotion structures in organizations, the evaluation structures, from who are we evaluating?" Because otherwise, it's never going to happen. If in accounting, for instance, to get tenure you need to publish in these top journals, well, those top journals only accept certain methodologies. Well I'm never going to get there. I know there are certain journals I will never publish in and certain universities I could never get tenure in simply because of that. So I think we have to be advocates for the folks who maybe just can't get in the door. Maybe as universities take folks into the program, recognizing that they might need more mentoring, because it's not because they're not smart, it's just because they don't have the background, and be ready to level those people up, just for the purpose of bringing different diversity of ideas through the door. And I think in my case in Concordia, they took someone, I have no background in research before starting my PhD and they took a chance on me, and thank God they did. So I think it's incumbent on us to be activists, to be allies for people who cannot do it themselves and may not even be represented in the conversation. But I recognize, as a white person according to some people, that maybe I'm not in the right position to be talking about this.
Cameron: Sylvie, what about the field of chemistry? Are there mechanisms that you have seen in place that are effective at creating space for women, creating space for racialized minorities?
Sylvie: Well, again, I can only speak for my own environment. Here at Concordia in the chemistry department, we have a high ratio of women professors, researchers. Not so much in chemistry, but in the biology department, very good representation, people from ethnic minorities. So I think Concordia is very much avant garde in this respect with regards to diversity and inclusion. Personally, I don't see a problem, but I can understand that in other institutions -- well, maybe I should say it, maybe Ivy League? -- it might be more of a problem to allow more women and more people from ethnic backgrounds in. But I feel blessed. I mean, listening to all this, I feel blessed that here I do not see this problem. But I've seen it in other positions that I've occupied in the past. I used to work for an international research organization in an administrative role. And I recall anecdotes where some people were not welcome by virtue of where they were coming from. And at the same time, I also saw, within groups of the same team, the women were treated differently. Like, they had a team meeting and the women were relied on to bring the coffee. Is it cultural? Is it generational? Is it both? There's still a long ways to go in a lot of fields, not just chemistry, unfortunately. A question came up recently, "Can you name any female classical composers?" No. Again, it's a male dominated world. So the same can apply in a lot of different fields, but I think yes, we still need to open our minds. And I think we should lead by example. Not just be activists and all, but slowly usher people into thinking differently and opening our minds, and papers such as this one, really don't cut it. Sorry, but this guy should be drawn and quartered. [laughs] Sounds extreme, but I mean, I blew my top more than once reading through this paper that had so very little to do with chemistry in the end.
Cameron: Yeah, yeah. Well, as you say, it's interesting that not only the opinions that this person has, but the fact that it managed to get past the reviewers at this prestigious journal. It has since been withdrawn. And now, Bettina, you're working at an intersectional place between the academy and the art world and public education. Your perspective on what it takes for us to unwind these structures that are reinforcing misogyny and racism might be a little bit different than mine. What have you seen that's effective that can be done?
Bettina: Well, I'm seeing it from a sort of larger perspective. I'm a bit more removed, I'm taking a bird's eye view. Part of my research, of course I'm up close at the SETI Institute, I'm looking at scientists and artists, but I'm also looking at the field of science and reading philosophy on science, I'm reading feminism, a feminist standpoint theory, which specifically critiques the field of science. And what is being passed off as neutral is actually masculinist. Science isn't a neutral field. Science is a male-dominated patriarchal field that is ossified and that needs to be restructured. And what art does is it includes qualitative perspectives. So the fact that Erica wasn't allowed to -- allowed?! -- discouraged from including qualitative research is that there's a hierarchy of knowledge fields, and that the quantitative hard science, male-dominated fields are prioritized, they're more prestigious. They're mathematics, they're cosmology, astrophysics. And then there are the soft sciences, anything that has to do with humans. People make fun of geologists. Then there's social sciences. And then there's what's called arts and humanities. And at the very bottom it's visual arts, and things like theater and dance, which apparently have no benefit to humankind and shouldn't even be funded. So there is also an attached hierarchy that women typically do the arts and they do the crocheting and they do what Erica's been told, the "that's cute." We do the cute research, and the men do the important and hard research. And that is at the heart of this article. Because here is a man who sees that somebody is rattling at these structures, that somebody is lifting the curtain saying, "You've never been neutral. You are privileged. And not women are taking the jobs of men, but men have been taking the jobs of women who are qualified, who are actively excluded from the field of science." It's not that we want preferential treatment, it's that we want the same treatment. It's not preferential. And of course, the dominating group is going to cry bloody murder if somebody's taking away that privilege.
Cameron: They're threatened.
Bettina: They are threatened. And indeed, we are coming for your jobs, because there are people who are not qualified who are being promoted because they're white males. And somebody saying, "Well, I'm sorry, this Black woman is more capable than you. She should have that job." And that Black woman doesn't need mentorship, the person who needs mentorship is the guy who is holding the field of science in a piece of amber and doesn't want it to change. So I feel that what we are all doing from our different perspectives, is to question what science is, what is the edifice of science, the field of science and how it must change so that we can all together rise to the challenge of what the world bring us. Like, climate change, AI, and the pandemic that we're living right now, these are all big problems and you can't just have a small group of a tiny demographic holding on to what their definition of knowledge is. So everybody needs to be let in. And that I see as my job. I'm doing it through the arts, I'm being surreptitious, I'm funneling women into the science by telling them, "You're not doing science, you're just making an artwork. But oops, you also just learned about astrobiology." So this is just basically my job. But I know that Erica and Sylvie are also doing the same work, just we're coming at it from different directions. But I think it's not getting the one individual mentored, or adding more neutrality to the selection process, we need to foreground our culture. What is being called strong objectivity, objectivity that includes qualitative research and qualitative perspectives. That is the only way that we're going to shake this up. And I'm definitely kicking at the tires there.
Cameron: Erica, have you got anything to add to that?
Erica: I was reflecting on this as we were thinking about why we feel welcome at Concordia, because the three of us, if I can say, we're non-traditional PhD students. None of us did bachelor's- master's-PhD. And what I think about Concordia, why I felt welcome, is we're not chasing status. It's not a university that's chasing to be number one in Canada, and it's disappointing, but it allows it to have a bigger tent because it's not so obsessed with this cult of productivity we were talking about earlier, about knowledge being a zero-sum game. And it's disappointing that you have to take that type of an attitude to find a place where I think three very competent, ambitious scholars like ourselves would find a home. So my perspective is sort of informed by my PhD journey in that way.
Cameron: Sylvie, anything to add?
Sylvie: I think a lot has been said already. In a way, I think we are privileged to be living in Montreal and having access to the institution here where we do not feel that we have to prove ourselves, being women, being white. But at the same time, I understand that, as I was saying earlier, we still have a long way to go in other parts of the world.
Cameron: Well, I'm very excited about this Public Scholars Program at the university. I think it's an interesting model for helping emerging scholars, if you will, develop their voice for engaging in public discourse. I am really interested in seeing whether this model can be replicated at other schools to give people some exposure, some training to this kind of an approach. I want to thank you all for taking the time to talk with me today. It's been absolutely fascinating to me. I'm, in a perverse way, kind of glad that this guy at Brock wrote this article so that I could get to meet you. But that's, I don't know, an unfortunate occurrence that has developed into this amazing conversation for me. I wish you all the best in your work and I look forward to talking to you again in the future to see where your work takes you.
Sylvie: Thank you.
Erica: Thank you.
Bettina: Thank you so much. This was great.
Links
The Public Scholars Program at Concordia University
Bettina Forget’s amazing art website
Our guests on Twitter:
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producers: Cameron Graham, Bert Imai
Photos: York University, Twitter
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Audacity
Recorded: September 22, 2020
Locations: Toronto and Montreal
