Events & Calendars Presidential Scholar Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Transcript: The Black Feminist Cosmos

- Good evening. Thanks for joining us tonight. My name's Darryl Harper, and I'm the Director of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry and one of the partners helping to plan the Presidential Scholar series. This is our final event in this year's presidential colloquium on race and racism. And I'm really honored to introduce our speaker, our guest tonight, visiting presidential scholar, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. In residence here for the week, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein has been meeting with students, faculty, and staff, broadening and enriching our community conversation about physics, science more broadly, and the cultures in which scientific work unfolds. I imagine that many of you attended her astrophysics lecture earlier today, and I hope that many of you will have the chance to participate in one or more of the upcoming events programmed for her week on campus, including class visits, opportunities for informal coffees and lunches. As your questions are an important part of tonight's event, I encourage you to use the cards and pencils placed in the book holders in the pews, and write your questions for Dr. Prescod-Weinstein as the evening progresses. They'll be collected and brought up to the stage as we enter the Q and A portion of the event. And let me also note that this evening's talk is being recorded, and it'll be posted online. And now to welcome our guest, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is a researcher in theoretical physics with a focus on cosmology, neutron stars and dark matter. She's also a researcher in black feminist, science, technology and society studies. Nature Magazine recognized her as one of 10 people worldwide who shaped science in 2020. Essence Magazine has recognized her as one of 15 black women who are paving the way in STEM and breaking barriers. A leading physicist of her generation, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is one of fewer than 100 black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in black feminist traditions. Her widely acclaimed first book, "The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred" published in 2021 articulates scientific questions about dark matter and space time while also interrogating the discriminatory sociocultural systems that currently support and at times still define scientific practice. "The Disordered Cosmos" was knee best book of the year by Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine and Kirkus, and it has been a finalist for many awards, including the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Award. In addition to her work as a researcher and teacher, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is a columnist for New Scientist, and Physics World, and a co-founder of Particles for Justice. She received the 2017 LGBT Plus Physicist Acknowledgement of Excellence Award for her contributions to improving conditions for marginalized people in physics, and was also the recipient of the 2021 American Physical Society Award. She was co-organizer of the 2020 Strike for Black Lives, an online campaign for researchers around the world demanding that academic and STEM institutions confront racism, science, and anti-black racism throughout society. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein's conversation partner tonight will be professor Sheila Jaswal, associate professor of chemistry, member of the Biophysics and Biochemistry Program, and co-founder in collaboration with Amherst students of the Being Human in STEM initiative. H-STEM is a model for inclusive practices in STEM education, that strives to foster a more inclusive, supportive collaborative framework in the science classroom, lab and beyond. Since its founding at Amherst in 2016, H-STEM has been adopted at colleges and universities across the country. Please join me in welcoming Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Sheila Jaswal for a conversation on the black feminist cosmos.

- Hi, Chanda.

- Hello.

- Chanda was telling me that she didn't even tell her how to use the microphone.

- I didn't say that. Wow, we're starting with the lies already.

- There we go. So actually, it's really exciting to have you here visiting Amherst because one of the first resources that my students and I found, in that begin beginning semester of Being Human in STEM was your piece in Medium from January, 2016, "Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building". So that really gave us a lot to start with. And I've been following and learning from your work since then. And I'm really excited to be here because about a month ago, my dad, who's a theoretical physicist and immigrant from India and activist in Lincoln, Nebraska, emailed me a book review from Physics Today and said, "You should read this book." And I said, "Dad, I have this book." So, it was really fun to hear about your research on axiom particles today. And I am definitely persuaded that there should be funding for cosmic probes of dark matter. So let me know where to sign up to sign the petition. So, what I really loved in reading your book was how beautifully the science and your love of the science are woven together. And you also unflinchingly expose how racism is woven into not just the history of science, but how we practice science today. And therefore, it is woven into the fabric of not just your journey as a queer black gender woman in physics, and my journey as a queer biracial woman in chemistry, but in all of our journeys, including those who have never experienced a microaggression or an entire STEM education without once being taught by someone with their skin color. So, identifying an unraveling racism from the fabrics of our discipline is not just the work of you with your awakening catalyzed by the Mauna Kea Telescope conflict, or me with my awakening catalyzed by the students of the student protest Amherst Uprising, but it's really the work of every single last one of us. So, I would like to ask you, since you've been involved in this kind of work since 2014, in what ways have you witnessed our STEM communities coming to that realization that racism and science is the responsibility of all of us, and that addressing it is as urgent as doing the science itself.

- Oh, this is a big question. So I would say... So I started thinking about these issues and working on them when I first got involved in the National Society of Black Physicists in 2003, 2004. And so, I will generally say that my feeling about this is a feeling of long and deep frustration. Just to pick one thing, we've known since around 2006, 2007, that the number of black students in the United States who were earning bachelor's degrees in physics was going down. So we've known for a long time at this point. And members of the National Society of Black Physicists started sounding the alarm about this as soon as the numbers became clear. For a long time, people just completely ignored it. The American Physical Society ignored it. And part of what people were ignoring is the numbers were dropping because Historically Black Colleges and Universities were closing their physics departments and predominantly white institutions like Amherst, like the University of New Hampshire were not picking up the slack. There was no interest in picking up the slack. It took really another decade and a lot of fighting and organizing to get the American Physical Society to create the TEAM-UP task force that eventually put together a report saying, okay, the numbers are dropping for African-American students. And that's how they framed it. I would have said black. They said African American. What should we do about it? And so they put together a report about the drop, but that was really like 10 years. It was about that time scale. And really, it was just to get people to pay attention to this one small piece, which is just the number of people who are earning bachelor's degrees. On some level, yes, that involves if you read the TEAM-UP report, which I highly recommend, they're talking about conditions and all of these other questions, but that's calling on people to rethink the conditions. We haven't even actually reached the point where those changes are happening. It's just a report recommending the changes. So, my general feeling about it is this stuff is going way too slow, and I'm trying not to cuss.

- Please do. Well, maybe sort of to that point, that many in STEM who haven't had to live with the daily consequences of racism are fearful about saying the wrong thing, don't feel like they know enough to really weight into these conversations, and they haven't studied and read as you have, black studies, feminist studies, history of science, not to mention with keeping up on all these current ideas on Twitter. So, that's fear that people have. And on the other hand, we simply can't wait. As you say, this urgency is there and should have been there all the way along. So we can't wait until everybody feels ready and like they know the right things to say. And for myself, I'm reading, I'm learning, I'm having conversations. I'm always acknowledging that I'm not an expert, and I'm trying to embrace mistakes and learning from them. But I wonder if you could speak to how you make room for that, the fact that we're constantly learning, that we are never done, but yeah, we still have the responsibility to speak up when we can and take action.

- Yeah, so, I've been reflecting on this a lot, having made the transition to being faculty relatively recently. And that's an interesting sort of psychological experience because you go from being in this position where people kind of universally understand you as being relatively disempowered in academic spaces, to people imagining you as being incredibly empowered in academic spaces, to levels that are just completely unreasonable, particularly for a woman of color who is still an assistant professor. Although my impression is is that once you hit associate, some of those things don't go away, right? And so, there's a level of now grappling with people imagining me having power that I don't have. And at the same time, I actually do have some forms of power that I didn't have before, and feeling the need to pay attention to that persistently. So I think that that's part of it is consistently paying attention to what are the power dynamics in the room, and how is my relationship with that shifting as time goes on? As someone who was a student protestor, see, I was going to say is a student protestor, that's still very much who I am in my heart, right? When we were talking yesterday about the, I don't know how it's described the takeover of, the Amherst Uprising, the Amherst Uprising. I was asking questions about like the tactical decisions that had been made, like why was it in the library? Why was it in at the president's office? Which is what we did when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. One of the reasons that I ask that question is because I have to be aware that as time goes on, younger folks are rethinking tactics and making different tactical decisions than the ones that we made when we were students. And the task before me is to understand why those tactical choices are changing, and to learn from it and to figure out how in the position that I now hold with someone who holds some form of professor title, that that can make me better at what I do. So part of it, a piece of that really has to be being ready to ask why are the students doing this rather than reacting through the lens of I've done this and I know how it's done.

- Thank you. So, along the lines of that constant changing and taking stands and then maybe reevaluating, and it sounds like you're reevaluating your positionality as am I as are we all as we're moving through, but can you give us an example of when you may have taken a stand or made a mistake or a misstep and how you learned from that and how that has shifted, how you go forward?

- I have to think about this for a second. So I think like probably the missteps that I go over the most are the ones where I chose silence because I thought I had to, or I felt like I really needed to. And generally speaking, it's usually my own defense. I don't have as much difficulty defending other people, but there have been times when I have chosen silence and it stayed with me in ways that were deeply unhealthy. And I think one of the challenges that we are always facing, particularly those of us who experience marginalization or outsider status and decentering, is figuring out what will help us wake up with ourselves in the morning, go to bed with ourselves at night, and feel like we are who we really feel we are on the inside, on the outside. And so I think that the times when I chose silence, I was not being myself, and I had to live with the consequences. And so I think what I would say like generally is a rubric there, sometimes for people that is the right option, it's important to know what the right option for you is, and to also be generous and patient with yourself. I think my spouse who's sitting in the front, I think at the top of his list of complaints about me is that I am not patient with myself.

- Yes. So, yes, I know that about you now, no. So, this quote that I pulled out, "With this book, I hope to map out for myself and for others and understand that creating room for black children to freely love particle physics and cosmology," means radically changing both society and the role of physicists in it. So this really struck me because I feel like so many of the efforts to diversify science, that a lot of us well-meaning scientists think are going to solve the diversity problem is just get more kids excited about science and make opportunities for students to experience hands on science. And your book really shows that you were someone who already had the excitement and the commitment to science. And so if we think that, oh, we just need to get kids to see science like I do, and then they're going to love it like I do and they're going to excel like I do, that's not enough. And so, I feel like your book really helps blow up that myth that diversifying science is just about getting more children in marginalized communities excited, and we need to radically change ourselves and our disciplines and society. So my question is, what change can you envision that would make it possible for black students in science to thrive instead of survive?

- Yeah. So let's start with this idea of outreach, right? And so, since you mentioned, I keep up with things on Twitter, right? So a lot of people probably saw the recent Saturday Night Live sketch about the Amazon shopping experience with new technology and black people reacting to the technology. So, I guess it's Saturday Night Live, so you're supposed to find it funny. And I didn't like laugh once during that sketch for a variety of reasons. One, I think like the feeling of being threatened with violence, just like I'm not there yet with the ha ha about that. But there was also something that really bugged me about it, which is that they have a moment where all of these, like techno things are being said to a black woman, and she's just kind of reacting to it, like sure, whatever you're saying. And there are a couple of different ways of reading this, but the way that I read it first was the way that I imagined that certain white audiences were going to see it, which is like, she doesn't understand that techno bubble, she doesn't care about the techno bubble. She's concerned about how maybe it's going to harm her, but she doesn't understand what's being said, and she don't care. So, I posted about this on Twitter, and people were very upset with me about it because people were like, how dare you read that interpretation into it? And I was like, I was literally at a meeting last week where a black woman got up in front of a room of mostly white people and said that black people and black children in particular are not interested in space. And it made me realize that people outside of STEM are not aware of how pervasive it is in STEM, these narratives, that the real problem, big air quotes, is that we are just not interested. When there's a plethora of data to support our strong interest in space, going back to the January, 1967 issue of Essence Magazine with Nichelle Nichols on the cover, and inside the magazine, they hailed her as the first Negro astronaut. So, Nichelle Nichols for the young folks, she was Uhura in "Star Trek: The Original Series", and they called it a triumph of modern television over modern day NASA. They were real clear about our interest, right? Going back to 1967. So, I think the beginning of this question about thriving is reconfiguring the public narrative to match reality, which is to stop framing black people being interested in science as unusual, or like literally out of this world, right? And to start talking about how we are part of a long tradition of science. I think that this is a really key piece. As long as we are constructed as outsiders in science, we will feel like outsiders in science. And so part of it is constructing us through the lens of what the actual truth is, which is that we, I come from a long black tradition of science, and nobody ever said that to me, I had to come to that myself, and no black student should have to come to that themselves. So if you're a black student in science in the room, you're part of a long black tradition. And if anybody tells you otherwise, they're full of shit. Yes. So, that narrative... And the way that you said people don't want to hear your view of things like that Saturday Night Live sketch. And I think that's part of the whole challenge of reimagining STEM space and a societal space is that it's really hard to have voices like yours be welcomed when they're saying really hard things. And so, that's something that I really appreciate about you that you're always speaking up and speaking your mind.

- And getting myself into trouble.

- And getting yourself into trouble. I think, I wonder if part of this, you know, I come from a lineage of folks who went to college, both my parents were college professors. So I very much was steeped in what is it like to navigate this kind of environment. And as I mentioned, my dad was a theoretical physicist. So you could say that I came in with a lot of cultural capital to navigate the spaces and navigate these transitions that I continue to go through. It seems like you come from a long line of activists, organizers. Your mom co-founded the Black Women for Wages for Housework in the early 1970s, working for things just now are becoming kind of modern day asks or demands reparations. And so, how do you think having that as part of your lineage has helped you to become the person that you are today in science?

- Yeah, so the interesting thing about that is that I think I came in with cultural capital, and I wasn't aware of it as cultural capital. And I have many times wished that I had the kind that you had because in the academy, that works for you in ways that I had to learn to manipulate mine into a kind of capital. So I come from a family of K through 12 teachers on my mother's side, and on both sides of my family, I come from a family of organizers. So my grandmother was actually the founder of the Wages for Housework campaign. And that's how my parents met actually, is through doing that organizing work. It's also the case that my grandfather wrote several books, and is now actually the object of study in the academy. And he was certainly not popular in that way when I was a kid. And so I didn't have... I mean, he was like... The funny thing is at some point, someone said, well, like you grew up with like a famous grandfather. So like, didn't you grow up with money? And I was like, what part of Marxism do you not understand? Like, this is not how that works. I think it ended up working for me because when I started looking for vocabulary to describe the things that I was experiencing, that it was easier for me to find a place to start. And I think that just coming back to this question of thriving as well, one of the hardest things that we go through is not knowing how to describe what is happening to us, and therefore mis-describing it to ourselves. So I had a lot experiences as an undergraduate that I was internalizing a lot of like very ugly messages that I was getting, because I didn't know how to think about the structural differences, like the incredible wealth I was surrounded by at Harvard. I didn't have a vocabulary for what those differences meant, but I think that when I went looking for one as I matured and started to realize that I needed to situate this in structural context, it was easier for me to find that because of the narratives that I had learned through my family. And I think the other thing is that the hint, the idea that there was a structural context was very embedded. I was trained from basically age zero to look for what is structurally at work in the room. And it took me a minute to figure out that I had to apply that skill in physics. And I think it took me a minute to accept that I had to, 'cause I didn't want to. I think one of the things that I was attracted to physics for was because I thought this is going to be me getting to not think about the things that are broken in the world, and I didn't want it, right? And realizing that there was the only way out was through, that was a tough recognition and it was hard emotionally.

- Yeah, I think I really appreciate how you talk about the ability to indulge the curiosity and the imagination that we think we're going into when we choose the scientific problem that fascinates us, which I'm sure you just didn't run into protein folding early enough to realize how fascinating that is as a research question.

- I actually never ran into protein folding. So, someone messed up

- Oh my God. Okay. Let's, beers after!

- Someone blew in.

- So, I guess that tension between first, maybe it's part of our self care when we can just focus on the protein folding and read the articles. I got to go to a student journal club today that was like a super treat for me. But that tension is always there between wanting to just indulge and focus on the science, which is what the messages that we're getting. That's what you need to do, until 10. And then you can start thinking about these other things. So, yeah, and it sounds like from your book, that staying connected to that curiosity, that passion, that love is kind of what's driven you, but then also you were driven to write this book to give yourself the lessons and the map, and hopefully that other students will take from this to make sense of it. So I don't know really what the question is there, but the connection to curiosity and the fact that you can't just indulge that, like if you held other identities.

- I think a lot of the way that I think about the work that I'm doing with myself and positioning myself is shaped by Kiese Laymon, the brilliant novelist and memoirist and essayist and thinker, who talks a lot about... You see his social media posts. And one of the things he loves to talk about is writing and revising. And so I think a lot of times I'm writing and revising myself. And that was part of what I was doing with the book. And that's one of the reasons that I continue to write in the ways that I do. And it's also why whenever someone comes to me with a problem, somewhere in there, I'm probably going to tell them to write it down and write about it. I really think that writing yourself and writing to figure out what you think is a really important piece of it. As a theoretical physicist, I'm curious about how things work and I'm curious, I mean, I'm curious structurally. I'm a cosmologist. So I'm curious about the way that structure forms in the universe. I'm not sure the questions I'm asking are actually different. It's just applying the same question of what are these structures in different environments? In each setting I'm going in and asking, how does power work in the setting? And sometimes that question is a mechanical question. And sometimes that question is a people question. It's also the case that I see problems and my brain just tries to solve them, which can be totally like maddening if it's like, I don't know something on my computer isn't doing what it's supposed to do, that like I will screw up my schedule that afternoon, like trying to work it out, right? It may be a personality defect that has turned me into a physicist, right? So I think that that's the other thing is seeing problems and making a decision about what problems to apply myself to. And that can be a difficult question. At the end of the day, I realized that I could not stay in physics. And this was a realization I had in graduate school. I could not stay in physics if I did not create room for myself, and I could not stay with myself if I was the only person I created room for. So, it couldn't just be being out for me. I had to be out there for my community in some way, because that is what my values told me to do. There's a difficult balance there because I think that those of us... From my point of view, this is a community value that I grew up with a black community value that I grew up with. Black women in particular, I think, feel undue pressure to carry the whole community forward, and to be like the moral sign post at every stage, which is like deeply unfair. Like sometimes you just like want to eat your dinner and like watch "Abbott Elementary" and like go to bed. But it is a community value. And so we have to find ways to strike a balance between getting the work done for ourselves and getting the work done for others, and be aware that that's a constant negotiation. And that our community should be called to participate proactively and positively and supportively in that negotiation, which is sometimes telling you to rest, and then sometimes telling you, this is the time when you have to lift up your voice.

- So, in terms of community, a lot of the programs that are happening to try to encourage more students to persist in STEM are these bridge programs and cohort programs and mentoring programs. And I wonder how those fit in with the idea that we're not just trying to push more through a pipeline that's broken. We need to fix the pipeline. We need to think about the whole ecosystem. And is there a way that this cohort community thinking can help us do that?

- The thing that first comes to mind is my friend Corey Walch who's a Northern Cheyenne thinker and biologist, and he runs a program for people from underrepresented backgrounds at Iowa State University, specifically focused on people in STEM. And one of the things that I learned to say out loud from Corey was that we need to get away from the deficiency framework, where we are fixing students and telling students that they have deficiencies that need to be repaired, rather than thinking about what are the strengths that the students bring to the table, right? And so for example, the student in front of me seems to know a lot about organizing. How is that a form of capital that can serve her in the physics community, in the physics classroom? To see that as a strength that I'm bringing into the room as opposed to being like, well, she didn't actually take a real AP physics course, so, she's kind of behind, which was like how I experienced it at Harvard. So, I think regardless of what you call your program, how your program is structured, it has to come from a place of, we are creating space for you to do science. That should be the goal. And I think about this like before I wrote the book, I was talking to my agent, I got into some low residency MFA programs, masters of fine arts for writing. And I was talking to my agent about it. And I was like, should I do this? And she was like, you should only do an MFA, particularly because they involve going into debt a lot of the time, if it will buy you time to write. And a low residency program's not going to buy you time. So it's probably not worth your time. Okay. There are the reasons people might do a low residency MFA. I don't want anyone to feel bad if they've made a different decision, but that was the piece of advice that Jessica gave to me. And I think it's a useful thing to think about that all of these programs, your goal should be how do you create room for students to be themselves and be the full scientists that they are? And if that's not what you're thinking about, you're probably doing it wrong. And it should be a community accountable endeavor, which means that it can't, like I can't just go off and start a program and be like the Chanda Prescod-Weinstein school of thought, nobody else gets to make contributions, I have no accountability to anybody else. I have to be in conversation with the community about best practices. I have to be in conversation with the community about what my goals are. And so, I think that that's a piece that's often missing is how do you make room for the students to just do it?

- Yeah, I think about creating the room and also making space for the students to not just come with where they're at, but like how do you create the room and the agency for them to keep growing and growing and pushing up against those boundaries that they're going to keep hitting even once they get through this supportive cohort program, they're going to be. So how do we not just say, well, keep your head down and do it the way that this landscape has been evolved? How do we say you can be part of evolving the landscape, and what do we do to make our landscape more amenable and flexible to the new voices coming in and the new experiences and perspectives?

- So I think a big piece of it is when you're talking about like making room for the students, the other thing is if you think through the lens only of individual programs, you're thinking too small. And this was one of the messages that we wanted to get through when we posted the call for the Strike for Black Lives, is if you are not thinking about whether it's safe for your student to walk down the street near your campus or far from your campus, then you are not thinking big enough, because it's not just a matter of what's their experience in the physics classroom. When you're talking about creating the room for them to be able to do their work, to think, to dream, to just sit under a night sky and wonder about it, then that requires thinking about what are all of the conditions that are shaping their experience? Do they have enough to eat? What is the cost of their textbooks? Are they being treated differently? So, the example I gave at dinner yesterday was being forced to do work study when Harvard could quite reasonably afford to just put that cash in my pocket, right? Those are the kinds of things that we need to be thinking about. And it has to go beyond the program. And it also sometimes does involve sitting down your student and saying like, look, you are going to face some shit. Be honest about it, but that has to be paired with I'm here. I'm fighting with you and I will continue fighting with you, and I will fight for you. It cannot be a pep talk where you send the student into the battlefield by themselves. You're supposed to be a shield on some level, and not you by yourself, you the community, right? We are supposed to be linking arms together to work together to make that happen. And I think that that's the piece that gets missed a lot. There's too much individualism. And I will basically pretty much any question that you ask me the answer, this is all very long-winded ways of saying solidarity is very key.

- Yeah, so I have a question about that too. So, I was really touched by how you write the letter to your mother at the end of the book. And you say, "As I grow to be more and more like you to understand the contours and nuances of your organizing decisions and strategies, I understand that inclusion isn't liberation work, and that liberation work is often lonely, and even without the movement, sometimes unpopular. I'm also becoming aware of important questions. What am I organizing for? Who am I organizing for? Who do want to organize with? What do I want us to achieve?" So I have a couple questions. The first is, can you expand on the distinction between inclusion and liberation work?

- So, the way that I think about this is through the lens of... I was actually, this is great, 'cause I was formulating some thoughts about this earlier today. It's generally speaking the thing that black folks are going to root for black people doing things that white folks told them not to do, right? So, Issa Rae famously said a few years ago, "I'm rooting for everybody black," right? That's a community ethos. And we're going to root for someone like folks rooted for Colin Powell, even though Colin Powell was involved in some real questionable stuff. But people were like, well, that's a black dude doing things that black folks were told not to do, so we celebrate that. I think that we have to start interrogating that a little bit. The Colin Powell example comes up because I think that that's a great example. Sometimes there are things that white folks told black folks not to do, that nobody should be doing, right? And so, actually you don't want to be included in that mess. Like Colin Powell got himself included in that whole Iraq situation and that was a mess and he should not have, right? So I think sometimes it has to be, I'm asking, what are we trying to get included into? Maybe the whole thing is a mess that we want nothing to do with. And so let's talk about what it would mean to rebuild and build something better. So, at dinner last night, we were talking about ending apartheid in South Africa, and it was super cool to hear some of the stories of the faculty like Jacqu and even the president who were involved in anti-apartheid protests in the '80s. When we look at what happened in South Africa in subsequent years, technically, the people in power now are black, they're included in the leadership structure. But the power dynamics of the society are such that white people still have extraordinary amounts of undue power. And so the logic of apartheid lives on even under black leadership. So, inclusion doesn't help us address the power dynamics. And so I think what I want to encourage everyone to do is to start thinking not so much about how can I make the room look different in terms of the population, but is this even the room that we should be in? And how can looking at power dynamics help us rethink that decision?

- So I'm aware of the time passing here, and I know you all have these great cards to put questions on. And so, while I ask my next question, if folks could pass those on, I don't know if Victoria is collecting them or, but yeah. Would be happy to take some questions from you all. So, the follow up question is about your commitment to keep asking these questions about what are you organizing for, who are you organizing? Who do you want to organize with? What do you want to achieve? So what is your process? And it sounds like some of that is just the continually writing and revising for asking those critical questions. And how have you seen your thinking shift through adopting that practice?

- So you were asking way earlier about mistakes that we've made. So one of the things that I think about, and at least this one's like a little bit funny to me. I was involved in the Harvard Living Wage Campaign when I was an undergrad. And so we were fighting specifically for janitors and dining workers to be paid what was at the time, below $15 an hour. Our aspirations were not high enough in the end, I think. And I showed up at my first Living Wage campaign meeting, and I came from this organizing family. I spent my childhood on picket lines and at protests, I went to my first protest when I was two months old. I was in a occupation of a church by mostly prostitutes in London. You can actually find a photo of that on the British Library website. I went in there and I was just like I know about organizing. And I immediately just started telling them that like, they were doing things wrong, and telling them like what they should do differently. And I like, look back on that. And I'm like, oh, 17 year old Chanda, like that's very cute. And you're lucky Ben Macin still speaks to you. So, I'm looking back on that and I have like patience and amusement, but I'm also thinking about what was the mistake that I was continuously making, which was there were ways in which it was valuable for me to both show humility. And I had to break out of some fixed ideas I had about what organizing and what good organizing looked like. I will say though, I was vindicated. I told them that we needed to have a sit-in and it took almost two years to come around to that. But then we made national news and lit up the National Labor Movement when we did it. Right?

- Yeah.

- So the key piece was like maybe my intuition about what tactics we had to use was right. But I had to learn about getting people on board and working in community, because I might have the right idea, but if I don't have a community to do that with me, then ain't shit happening, right? So, I think that's an example of like, even thinking about that and using that also as a reminder, that there are things I have to learn from young folks who have come up as organizers, which was not the case with people my age at that moment in time, that most people had not, and that we are now dealing with a very different generation. And so I think a big part of that is paying attention and asking questions, always asking questions, whether you're doing science or organizing.

- That's such good advice, and these are such good questions.

- This is like a tough job. I'm so glad I just have to answer that.

- Oh. I was going to hand you half the pile. Okay, so here's what-

- No, I can take.

- Can you? Okay. Yes. Okay. Talk amongst yourself.

- I'm not a total jerk.

- Think pair share please. Oh, gosh.

- Okay. Here's one. Should I say who asked these questions or?

- I think if they put their name there, they're proud of their question.

- Okay.

- Be proud.

- Okay, so this one came from Julio Morales, who said, how have you walked the line of being an academic and not committing career suicide for being as outspoken as you are? Much love. So, there are ways in which I did, right? So, I should just be forthcoming. So I write a lot in the book about the fight over the 30 Meter Telescope of Mauna Kea. I'm not going to summarize that here, 'cause it will just end with me going on a long rant, but need to say it involves native Hawaiians objecting to use of their land in ways that they did not consent to. It took me longer to get a faculty position. And when I did, I got a faculty position in a department where nobody does optical astronomy. I don't think that that is an accident. I think I had to go somewhere where people were not invested. And that may have affect the ranking of the institution I ended up at. I think that that's highly likely. I really like my department. So that's not to say anything bad about the University of New Hampshire, but I do think that there were options that were foreclosed. And there are parts of me that feel like angry and resentful about that. But also, I have like zero regrets about what I did because I know who I am, and I did what I needed to do as a Bajan woman, as a person from a community of one of the islands, I stood with other island people, and I didn't step on other island people just so I could have something that I wanted.

- So, when you notice the power dynamics and structures in the room, what are the tactics that you use to disrupt them or make them visible? From Kendall.

- It really depends on the room. So it depends on what the topic at hand is. So if you know, I'm at a particle physics conference, it may be that I just keep doing what I'm doing, which is focusing on doing particle physics. Probably also, I will tell somebody about it. I will write about it. It will make its way into my writing. So I will say like if I haven't said it in the room, you're going to hear about it later. Someone was asking me earlier today about how I kind of handle all of the things that I see. And one of the things that I said is that I have a long memory, I remember. And I think the example that we were discussing actually is a time that I got into an argument with the curators of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum about categorizing Caroline Herschel as an assistant, rather than calling her an astronomer. Yeah, I remembered that 10 years later, right? It helps that they put themselves on record in writing. So you can just like go and look at the stupid emails that they sent. And frankly, I don't think that they were good emails, right? So I think the big thing is that it comes out some way, and sometimes it's my writing.

- So maybe on the other end of that, how do you not scare away people you're encouraging to get involved?

- I mean, maybe sometimes I am, but I'm not going to lie to folks, right? The thing that I can say to people is that this belongs to all of us. The work that I do, these questions of dark matter, being curious about dark matter, being curious about quirks, that belongs to all of us. It doesn't belong to a small group of white men who are able bodied and wear their hair and their khakis in a certain way, right? It belongs to all of us. So that's the thing that I can say. The thing that I can't say is that don't worry about it, because we need to worry about it, there's no way around that.

- Yeah, I almost thought you were going the other way to say this belongs to all of us, this work, this fight, this speaking up, this educating ourselves, just finding ways to be solidarity of this sacrificing like you did to give up on potential future career possibility for what you believed in.

- I will accept that addendum. Yes, for sure.

- So, some questions about as educators. So what is the biggest responsibility for science educators today and kind of along with that, what are your thoughts on professors that do not include intersectionality in their STEM teachings?

- So, I had to think about this for a second. 'Cause one of the comments that I made at dinner yesterday was that often people just want to talk about intersectionality, and I usually use it as a vehicle to talk about whatever thing that I want to talk about. And so, the speech that you were talking about at the beginning that you first read, that was the speech I was telling the story about at dinner last night, where I said, I was asked to talk about intersectionality, but what the community needed to hear was about colonialism. So, I gave a speech that pulled colonialism and intersectionality together. And for me it was just a vehicle. I think more broadly, maybe the question isn't about intersectionality, but is about what work that person is doing in shaping what that space is like for everybody in the room and making sure that everybody has the space, time to do their work, right? So just going back to what I was saying earlier, that everybody has the space, time to do their work. That can come out in a lot of different ways, and it doesn't necessarily mean I am okay and now this is the hour where we talk about racism. Sometimes it's making sure that you use pedagogical practices that minimize students being distracted by things that shouldn't be happening to them. So I think it's valuable for people who are seeking out the building of those spaces to be expansive, and how they understand what can be involved, which is it's not sometimes they hit you over the head. This is inclusion. My syllabus has all of these things in it. And sometimes, it's thinking about the ways that I remember black women students in particular, myself included feeling very anxious about asking questions in the classroom. And so, one of the things that I emphasize really heavily is the importance and significance of asking questions and asking any question that you have, and making really clear with students from day one, that they will score zero and maybe even get negative points from me by making it difficult for people to ask questions. On the face of it, that doesn't seem like it has anything to do with gender or race or disability or anything like that. But I'm also very aware that it changes the culture in the classroom so that people feel more entitled to the education that somebody is surely paying for them to get. And so I think that that can be one of the ways to do it. And so the thing that I would say is to encourage your professors. I think that the question is partly like what can students do to encourage professors to think about the cultural practices in the classroom that make it feel more hostile for you if you're feeling like the classroom is a hostile place for you? I want to make one comment about this, which is for the students who don't feel like they fit under the marginalized umbrella, please don't let the marginalized students be the face of this by themselves. And so, just to come back to how solidarity is the answer, what I would love to see is groups, multiracial, multi-gendered, multi status in a variety of ways, groups to come together, and then the students who have the most social capital being the ones to come forward and say, I have decided that I will put my name to this so that other people don't have to put their name to this, and to be willing to put yourselves on the line because it will simply cost you less overall. And that's one of the ways that you can use the power that you have and redistribute the power that you have. And I'm not saying speak for people. I'm saying that sometimes you're the face when other people have told you what to say, or you've decided as a group what to say.

- So, here's a question that asks about the statistics for queer students in STEM, and maybe the experience, I guess. We can both speak to that, but you go.

- Yeah, so this is a good week to be asking about it because just yesterday, Physics Magazine put out a group of articles and op-eds and a podcast which I was actually a guest on, talking about the LGBT plus experience in physics, and building on the LGBT Climate Report, and the LGBT Plus Physics Climate Report that came out a few years ago. I'm very lucky to be colleagues at the University of New Hampshire with Elena Long, who is an amazing nuclear experimentalist, just a wonderful person, a wonderful friend. She's one of the co-authors, she's also a barrier-breaking trans woman in physics. And Ellie and I talked about that climate survey a lot when she was putting it together with the group and doing the writeup. One of the complicated issues for LGBT statistics in particular is that it's hard to do statistics, because this is an identity that people come into at a variety of points in their lives. Their understanding of it changes with time, and their willingness to come out even in an anonymous survey and say here I am, also shifts with time. So when I talk to Ellie about it, I remember Ellie very distinctly saying to me, "I don't know if we can use the word underrepresented because we don't know." And that tells us something about paying attention to the specificity. Marginalization is like a good catch-all word, but then we need to pay attention to the specificities of anti-blackness, of queer phobia, of black queer phobia. We need to talk about the fact that marginalization isn't always just the numbers game, but sometimes it's a... And very often it's also a power game, and sometimes it's not a number game.

- Do you have any others in your pile that you want to draw on as we're drawing to a close? I know you've had a really long day, so you could also make up a question you wish you would've been asked.

- So, there's a question here from Jennifer Enus, are there particular points in the educational pathway that are especially damaging to potential scientists with marginalized identities? And I will say just damage happens all along the way, unfortunately, to a lot of people. I want to say importantly that's not a guarantee. There are some people who have positive experiences, and I'm always excited when I hear about that, right? Like that's not bad news. That's good news. That's really good news. I want more of that for more people. I think that maybe the comment I will add onto this, which isn't quite the question that I was asked is that so for example we return to this question about the number of black students who are earning bachelor's degrees in physics in the United States, a danger I see in the discourse, in the conversations that have arisen, since people have become more aware and concerned and conscious about that, is thinking that the question of undergraduate education is a self-contained box, where you can just think about what happens to the undergrads, and you don't need to think about what happens to the graduate students and the postdocs and the faculty. But if you treat undergraduate education as a self-contained box, you get black students who are maybe only being educated by non-black faculty. So, you need part of that conversation about the experience undergrads are having is to ask, how are we going to get those black professors into the room, at the same time, not pressuring black students and other students to feel like they have to become academics, but we have swung so much in the direction of, I want students to have the opportunity to make money in industry and all of these other things, and to make sure that they have options outside of academia, that people aren't realizing that the professorate looks about the same and is not changing. And that means that those black students are still not being educated by black professors. And I think black students are entitled to black professors. I think everyone should have the experience of having a black professor if you're a black student. So, I will say that I think that part of the damage is when we start to think that we can contain solutions, and not think about the way that these problems are related to each other and have to be co-solved.

- Solving multiple equations, multiple times.

- It is almost like a non-linear coupled set of differential equations.

- So beautiful. All right. So, I think we will thank Chanda, and then I believe you're going to sign some books for those of us who are lucky enough to win them in the raffle and/or bought our own. And if you didn't, she'll be here the rest of the week. Please go out and buy them now. So, let's thank Chanda. Thank you.