PhDivas

PhDiva Liz is now a tenure track Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering! After preparing for the job market, how do you prepare for the anxieties of negotiation and starting the job? In this first part, Liz talks to PhDiva Xine about the rapid professional growth that can only happen through this major career transition.

Are Asians apolitical? What is the term "Asian American" anyway? PhDiva Xine talks to Rachel Kuo of the Asian American Feminist Collective about racial identity in online spaces and histories of Asian American political organizing. Rachel gives us insight into the latest wave of digital activism in the Asian diaspora galvanized by Black Lives Matter. How can Asian American feminists work in antiracist solidarity with other peoples of colour rather than colluding with white supremacy or falling into ethnonationalism? #notyourwedge #notyourAsiansidekick #modelminoritymutiny

Artwork of the Asian American Feminist Collective by Angel Trazo

Website: https://www.asianamfeminism.org/ (specific links to our zine here and our First Times series here)

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/aafc.nyc

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aafcollective

Donation: https://www.paypal.me/aafcollective

Grad school is trash for POC. The whisper campaign of academic trauma. Ciarra Jones's essays went viral in 2018, drawing from her experiences during her MA at Harvard Divinity School. This is not just about white antiBlackness or white fear about speaking out, but also how BIPOC students can internalize their own oppression and undermine others under the guise of care. PhDiva Xine learns from Ciarra about the hope, grace, and love those in progressive circles can get from faith practices like queer womanist theology.

@ciarra_milan: Ciarra Jones is a master's candidate at Harvard Divinity School studying African and African Religions with an emphasis in Gender and Sexuality. Ciarra is a writer, speaker, and activist who is particularly concerned with how to cultivate belonging and disrupt the reproduction of trauma in academia. You can find Ciarra's work on Huffington Post, the Tempest, Black Youth Project, and Medium.

The Whisper Campaign of Academic Trauma: https://mystudentvoices.com/the-whisper-campaign-of-academic-trauma-fc917686fcc3

Grad School is Trash for Students of Color and We Should Talk About That: https://mystudentvoices.com/grad-school-is-trash-for-students-of-color-and-we-should-talk-about-that-af672814b3ee

Who was actually scandalized by the 'scandal' about rich people using their money to get their questionably gifted kids into elite American higher education? PhDiva Xine discusses structural inequalities in US and UK higher education with Maryam Toorawa who works in Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion and whose experiences span Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Oxford, Yale, SOAS. Initiatives to combat inequalities are vastly different on either side of the Anglophone Atlantic -- and the level of recognition about what problems exist in your own society as opposed to what you can loudly and easily decry elsewhere. Are you really cynical if you are recognizing the truth?

It's application season! PhDivas Dr. Liz Wayne and Dr. Xine Yao share strategies for applying to graduate school in the humanities and STEM -- and how to make an informed decision about whether to apply at all. A how-to advice episode that reveals disciplinary differences amidst the shared stresses of the application process.

Why are the PhDivas interested in tarot cards and the art of divination? PhDivas Liz and Xine separately delved into tarot: this is their first full conversation about their practices of self-care. The classic Western deck has been reimagined by disenfranchised peoples. Xine draws from her research about the importance of QTPOC tarot, especially the Asian American Tarot and Dusk || Onyx Melanated Tarot for the African diaspora. Liz the scientist challenges the dichotomy between tarot, forms of belief, and STEM. They talk skepticism, the Queen of Swords card, the Death card. How do we care for ourselves as scholars, as vulnerable people in this world? Will you try out a new practice of self care you might be skeptical about after this episode?

Asian American Tarot by the Asian American Literary Review: https://aalr.binghamton.edu/special-issue-on-asian-american-mental-health/

Dusk II Onyx Melanated Tarot by Courtney Alexander:

https://dust2onyx.com/

For an easy introduction check out the free Golden Tarot app.

Little Red Tarot is a queer feminist tarot website with lots of tutorials: www.littleredtarot.com

Asali Earthworks curates and reviews QTPOC tarot decks: https://www.asaliearthwork.com/tarot-of-the-qtpoc/

Poetry can be for everyone! PhDiva Xine interviews 2017 Green College Writer-in-Residence Anne Simpson about dying well, pedagogy, and publishing -- and lifting heavy weights as a feminist act. Winner of prestigious Canadian literature awards like the Griffin, Anne has published poetry, novels, and essays. Featuring brief segments with Tiara Kerr (economics) and Wes Yocom (law)as glimpses into how a poetry workshop environment can be enriching regardless of your disciplinary background. How can medical students benefit from creative writing? How might drawings of neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, groundbreaking neuroscientist, inspire poetry that allows us to work through our relationship to memory? As Audre Lorde once wrote, poetry is not a luxury.

You can find out more about Anne's work here: http://www.annesimpson.ca/

How can we address global inequalities in this era of climate change? What disciplines, methods can we use – and how can we do this research ethically, collaboratively? UBC Forestry PhD student Saori Ogura is working with Indigenous peoples in Zimbabwe and the Himalayas to support their knowledges about traditional nutritious crops as a counter to monocultural cash crops like cardamom. Saori tells PhDiva Xine about her research journey from Japan to Berkeley to UNESCO involving agricultural sciences, political science, ethno-ecology, and art. And most importantly, living with communities and learning from them, not just extracting knowledge as capital. Networks of ecologies mean considering the ethics of these transnational relationships. What does diversity mean across these different contexts? How is art integral to Saori’s project and what are the vital differences between drawing and photographing plants?

Ep image combines 2 drawings by Saori

Saori won the 2018 Nikon Miki Jun Inspiration Award for Photography. You can view more of her work here: http://saoriogura.info/

https://www.grad.ubc.ca/campus-community/meet-our-students/ogura-saori

https://expeditioneducation.org/

https://ced.berkeley.edu/events-media/news/ced-alumna-saori-ogura-receives-prestigious-nikon-salon-photography-award

Here come the trolls! Degrees, peer-reviewed publications, respect in the field -- markers of academic respectability do not shield scholars, especially BIPOC women, when people don't want to hear what we have to say. Remember PhDiva Xine's naivete in our previous episode? A month after recording, she tweeted a critique about Asian American appropriation of Blackness tied to the erasure of antiBlack, antiLatinx racisms when the media takes the Harvard affirmative action case as solely about anti-Asian sentiment. And then the racist and race traitor tweets began. PhDiva Liz interviews Xine about coming under attack from both alt-right white supremacists and MRAsians (men's rights activists Asians). When should we become concerned about backlash? How can we protect ourselves? We talk practical tips from friends and our previous episodes.

Apologies for some audio quality issues -- Xine had packed her equipment since she was moving to London just a few days later!

Image from Xine's research at the American Antiquarian Society

Earlier episode with Drs. Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne on alt-right attacks after the Washington Post raised the profile of their research: https://soundcloud.com/phdivas/politicsofcitation

From ABD to the verge of becoming faculty: PhDivas Liz and Xine have been doing this podcast for 3 years strong! We had no idea what impact, good or bad, this might have on our lives as junior scholars. In this episode we reflect upon public scholarship from scicomm to public humanities to TED Talks. We're proud to build a public stage to help raise other women in academia -- and you can join in too!

(Enjoy Xine’s naivete before listening to part 2.)

Images taken from a gif by Libby VanderPloeg: https://giphy.com/gifs/cute-feminist-girlpower-3o7abBphHJngINCHio