PhDivas

After the events of Charlottesville what has changed or SHOULD change for the start of the school year? How do we navigate family legacies if you're descended from the enslaved or have Confederate ancestors? What if these issues are in your face on campus? These debates hit close to home for PhDiva Liz and Dr. Jill Spivey Caddell at UNC Chapel Hill where the Confederate statue Silent Sam stands. Topics include Jill's research on Civil War monuments, revisionist histories, #NoConfederate, and the problems with teaching and representing the Civil War. How do you navigate being a Southerner in the North? Do monuments reflect the past, the present, or the hopes of the future? (Check out Charles Chesnutt's short stories and novels!)

PhDiva Liz's essay "Are Universities Prepared?": https://medium.com/@liz.wayne/are-universities-prepared-eb01d3c1bd0

Dr. Jill Spivey Caddell's article on Melville and Civil War monuments: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00370

More on Dr. Jill: https://jspiveycaddell.com/

Charles. W. Chesnutt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_W._Chesnutt

What happens when your project fails? Dr. Erica Pratt, researcher at University of Texas MD Cancer Medical Center, talks about the bias against discussing negative results in science and the struggle to succeed as a nontraditional student. If you aren't what people expect a scientist to look like AND are rather modest, you need mentors to go the extra mile as coaches. We discuss Erica's trajectory from her undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, which required all undergrads in the new biomedical engineering to have a second engineering major *just to be safe*, to her current postdoc work on liquid biopsy in pancreatic cancer. Liz, Xine, and Erica talk about evaluation beyond traditional metrics, morbid humor, depression, perfectionism, and pet peeves about science in popular media.

Learn more about Erica's work here: https://pratted.wordpress.com/

Follow her on Twitter: @pratt_ed

Katti Horng's path to studying HIV in the combined DVM/PhD degree at UC Davis began with a Chinese tradition for babies: infants are presented with objects symbolizing different professions to see what their futures will hold. PhDivas Xine and Liz talk to Katti about cow rectums, animal rights vs. animal welfare, and the difference between the cultures of professional and graduate degrees. We get a new perspective on sexism: even though women are now the majority in veterinary medicine, we learn that the gender gap is not so easily overcome. What does interdisciplinary medical research look like? Katti and Liz talk about the unexpected connections between their research on HIV, cancer, and chronic inflammation.

More on Katti Horng's research: http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/whatsnew/article.cfm?id=3631

Student protests inspired by Black Lives Matter have swept across American universities. What did these undergraduate activists want? PhDiva Dr. Xine Yao interviews Kristi Carey, one of the leaders of the 2014-5 protests at Colgate University. Kristi and her fellow women of color activists organized in the wake of Michael Brown's killing to draw attention to systemic problems on campus and to demand real change from the university. Sit-ins, death threats, candle light vigils -- what has happened since this momentous unsettling in the name of making the corporate university a safer, more livable space for marginalized students? Kristi talks about the aftermath having just finished a scholarly article and thesis reflecting on the extent of protest and change in the neoliberal higher education as part of her MA in Gender, Race, and Social Justice at UBC. What inspires a student to change from a major in math to one in education?

Kristi Carey's article "On Cleaning: Student Activism in the Corporate and Imperial University": https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.92/

Image: a poster from the Colgate protests depicting a person with a raised fist and "RECLAIMING OUR EDUCATION" in the background. Drawing by Anna Ríos-Rojas and design by Natasha Torres.

Summer vacation: when academics look forward to spending quality time... working on their research. Over the "holiday" weekend Liz and Xine talk about structuring their time and the unexpected emotional labour that comes when you do take a "break" only to frantically play catch-up on your personal life. We discuss the idea of breaks in a wider sense as well: figuring out strategic vulnerability, burning out because of social media, allowing ourselves to ask for help. How can we take a break from high expectations and over-achievement?

To decolonize or Indigenize the university? Sereana Naepi, an Indigenous Pacific Islander, takes on this question through her doctoral studies in Education at UBC on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. PhDiva Xine interviews Sereana about Education as a discipline unto itself and how she brings Indigenous methodologies into her work on Indigenous women's experiences as higher ed staff. As a Fijian scholar from New Zealand, Sereana explains how her community and family inform her work: the PhD gives you a right to serve, not a right not to lead. In this episode, we discuss the various erasures of Pacific Islanders in culture, climate change, the category of Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. And we had to talk about Disney's Moana!

More on Sereana Naepi's work: https://www.grad.ubc.ca/campus-community/meet-our-students/naepi-sereana

Watch the Pasifika Samoan movie Three Wise Cousins: https://www.threewisecousins.com/

Free West Papua: https://www.freewestpapua.org/

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's essay "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor": http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630

If you survived the academic job market, what comes next? Xine catches up with Dr. Nadia Chernyak who will be tenure-track at UC Irvine in the Cognitive Science department. Nadia does amazing research on cognitive and moral development in children, but as it turns out, nothing truly prepares you to be a #newprof. What is involved in setting up a lab, which could be described as running your own small startup?

We want YOU to help #SavetheNEH. If Congress passes this budget, the National Endowment for the Humanities will be eliminated in 2018. What do we, as a society, stand to lose for savings of a mere .006% of the federal budget? Liz interviews Xine about the devastating impact this would have on the cultural, historical, artistic, and ethical lives of communities of every size everywhere in the US. The PhDivas share the specifics of the "human" in the "humanities." Xine put out a call for stories from academics who received funding from the NEH -- and in less than 24 hours, received an overwhelming response. We try to do justice to these stories from scholars from every rank and institution who wrote in about their innovative NEH-funded research, teaching, and archival projects. This work has directly and indirectly contributed to mentoring and training, the lives and concerns of local and international communities, and the public understanding of everything from historical and present sciences to media to immigration to personal artistic practices. We end with recommendations on how to TAKE ACTION.

National Humanities Alliance on what you can do: http://www.nhalliance.org/take_action

Interactive visualization of NEH impact created by CUNY Digital Fellows: https://digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2017/04/04/visualizing-neh-open-data/

Many thanks to those who responded to our call on social media and on the C19 Americanists listserv. We did our best to represent your work and to pronounce names properly! In no particular order, thanks to Jonathan Senchyne, Rose Casey, Catherine Gouge, Kevin Modestino, Sandra Petrulionus, Edlie Wong, Anne Boyd Rioux, Lucinda Damon-Bach, Stephanie Ann Smith, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Phyllis Weliver, Hsuan Hsu, Michelle Tong, Linda Luu, Seth Perlow, Dana Luciano, Katy Chiles, Michele Currie Navakas, Peter Reed, Evan Cortens, Matt Fellion. And special thanks to Jennie Row and Brittany Pladek who first brought Xine's attention to the NEH Appropriations report.

Conferences are like icebergs: there's a lot going on below the surface. We give you insight on the secret life of academic conferences. First, Liz and Xine cover the obvious considerations about STEM and humanities conferences. But in the majority of this episode we discuss the hidden dynamics: institutional privilege, social ecosystems, and how cliques make visible professional power dynamics. In some ways, academic conferences can be like a teen movie! You enter as an overwhelmed junior person trying to break into the scene and you hope to eventually become prom queen. Who do you eat your meals with? Can you make connections with the "cool kids," the superstars in your field? What do you do about the pressure to drink? Does social media change the game? What do you wear? What are the very real financial costs to conferences, not to mention the toll it can take on introverts, the chronically ill, or those who can't get childcare?

Senior scholars, please take conferences as an opportunity to help junior and contingent scholars! Just buying someone a coffee and chatting with them can go a long way.

Here's the inside scoop on #TED2017 in Vancouver from TED Fellow and PhDiva Dr. Liz Wayne who delivered a TED Talk about her research on cancer drug delivery. Xine interviews Liz about the application process, preparation process, and life-changing experience of the TED Conference. What is it like to take science communication to the next level? What entrepreneurs and creatives did Liz rub shoulders with? Congratulations to Liz on continuing to develop her black excellence!

Liz's TED Talk was highlighted as one of the Big Ideas of the first day of #TED2017: http://blog.ted.com/in-case-you-missed-it-the-big-ideas-from-day-1-of-ted2017/