PhDivas

From seminar papers to pieces for The Guardian -- how do we write for the public and how can our graduate training prepare us for non-academic work? Meredith Talusan is BuzzFeed's first openly trans LGBT staff writer and was a PhD in comparative literature. We interview Meredith about what it means to be a professional trans woman in the media and writing for different audiences. How do we balance the complexity of our expertise with the necessity for simplicity in communication? If we're at the "tipping point" of trans issues, what battles must be fought against transmisogyny? How do we represent ourselves but also our communities? Meredith chats about everything from colorism to taking criticism online to relative privilege to (lack of) support for LGBT students in the academy.

As of this writing, Meredith has moved on from BuzzFeed and is working on a few books! Good luck, Meredith! You can follow her on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/demerith?fref=ts) and Twitter @1demerith

"YOU'RE the professor?!" What happens after the first day of teaching through to tenure and full professorship on top of positions as a program director and department chair? We talk to Xine Yao's Cornell PhD adviser Shirley Samuels about her 30+ year career journey as an acclaimed scholar of American literature, feminism, and visual culture. Shirley gives us her view of changes in the profession as a whole as well as the continued relevance of American studies as politics and education come together. Liz and Xine ask how do you advise graduate students given the current academic job market? How do we make our disciplines matter in the neoliberal university and translate our work into public visibility?

How do we approach the power of America's founding myths? Topics include class differences, fostering community, and students asking "YOU'RE the professor?!" The work-life balance question is a cliche for professional women, so what about imbalance? Choose your battles! Survive and try to be happy.

Many thanks to Shirley Samuels for her generosity and time! She is active on Twitter as @SRSamuels and you can learn more about her work here: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/srs8/

If you have every kind of privilege, how do you #staywoke? The PhDivas talk to their physicist friend Philip Smith Burnham III, a white upper-middle class straight cisman who is a staunch ally. How do you offer support without being a self-important savior? We discuss how to listen, the long, slow process of awareness, and how privilege should be leveraged as an asset for change and not just a source of guilt. An aspiring astronaut who is sometimes mistaken for a frat guy, Phil talks about the relationship between Indigenous ways of knowing, Cherokee basket weaving, and developing better scientific access and education for underprivileged communities. This episode is for all our listeners -- or our listeners's friends! -- who have wondered what the next step is after checking their privilege.

Note: when talking about American Indian blood quantum laws, Phil mentions that Cherokee people need a grandparent who is Cherokee. This applies to one specific band of Cherokee called United Keetoowah

www.philipburnham.com

Cornell CCMR Outreach: http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/

Cornell O-stem: https://www.facebook.com/oSTEMatCornell/ http://ostematcornell.weebly.com/

American Indian & Alaska Native Genetics Resource Center (talks not only about the science but about the ethics): http://genetics.ncai.org/

Science Museum of Minnesota: https://www.smm.org/

One Laptop per Child: http://one.laptop.org/

Other stuff:

Cherokee baskets - http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/Culture/CherokeeArts/CherokeeBaskets.aspx

A piece on Phil's stepdad's basket weaving - http://indigeval.aihec.org/Shared%20Documents/2-WeavingTheBasket.pdf

Phil's lab's website: http://devlaminck.bme.cornell.edu/

Wikipedia for blood quantum laws in case people want some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_quantum_laws

Book Phil likes about an innovative kid from Malawi who fell in love with physics: https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Harnessed-Wind-Electricity/dp/0061730335

And his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_how_i_harnessed_the_wind?language=en

Meet the real-life Leslie Knope: Erica Ostermann is an Assistant Dean plus a full-time graduate student in Information Science. From Bowdoin, to Stanford, to Cornell, Erica is former boss to Liz and Xine (as well as activist Deray McKesson of #BlackLivesMatter!) She is possibly the most organized, driven person we know. But accidents are still important -- how do we take moments of randomness or even injury and make them into learning experiences? How do we find balance between our Type A tendencies and need for self-care? Get a new perspective on student life, accessibility, and building a healthy team in higher ed -- and juicy details on new aspects of Liz and Xine!

Graduation! PhDiva Xine Yao was chosen as the baton-wielding degree marshal representing all graduating PhDs at Cornell for the 2016 Commencement. As a gesture of solidarity, she raised her fist when entering the stadium and on stage where it would be projected on the Jumbotron and recorded for posterity. Is Xine the "modelliest model minority ever" and can she try to use her visibility for good causes? Drs. Liz and Xine talk about struggle, success, privilege, and vulnerability amidst the pomp and circumstance of graduation. Xine met the amazing Paula Vogel who was kicked out of her PhD in the 70s for writing a feminist dissertation -- and who went onto positions at Brown and Yale. We also pay homage to some of the amazing undergrads we know. Farewell and may we meet again!

How can we teach and care for our students in ways we are still learning to do for ourselves? It's not just about content, lessons, and assignments -- it's also about vulnerability and emotional labor. Join us for the laughter, tips, and anecdotes in the second part of a two-part series where Xine brings together Mariana Alarcon, Elizabeth Alexander, Aurora Masum-Javed, and Renia White from the Cornell English PhD and MFA programs for a lively conversation about teaching while WOC. We talk about the rewards of teaching, negotiating our authorities in the classroom, and developing our teaching personae. How do we teach #BlackLivesMatter and "let the world into our classrooms"? Hope you find this episode as generative as we did!

Grades are in, teaching evaluations are in! Who is being judged and how? Women, people of color, and especially women of color (WOC) have the most to fear about how their teaching and authority are evaluated. In the first of a two-part series, Xine brings together Mariana Alarcon, Elizabeth Alexander, Aurora Masum-Javed, and Renia White from the Cornell English PhD and MFA programs for a lively conversation about teaching while WOC. Join these women as they discuss topics from being seen as "too racially affliated" to whether our students should be "baby revolutionaries" to teaching microaggressions and Serena Williams in Claudia Rankine's Citizen. How do we as teachers learn from our teaching? We reflect on the biases, successes, and failures of our students and ourselves as we continue to develop our pedagogical practices.

Do you ever feel like you don't belong? Imposter syndrome names the feeling of being out of place that even successful people can experience -- and this is widespread in all levels of the academy. But when can we have anxieties as women of color that might not be about being an imposter? There's so much about power and structural inequality, from the brand power of schools to academic credentials to how performances of intelligence are recognized according to norms of race and gender. Liz was the only black person -- not to mention black woman -- doing her undergrad in physics at Penn, while Xine is one of a few scholars of Asian descent in early and 19th century Americanist literature. How can we recognize our own experiences without invalidating those of others? We talk about vulnerability, self-doubt, coping strategies, and infiltrating the system to change it from within.

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End of the semester struggle is so real! This is a teaser for our upcoming discussion about imposter syndrome in academia. Good luck to all of you! Thrive and survive! <3

International grad students are the majority, but why don't we hear from them? We chat with Dr. Michelle Tong about visas, labor precarity, culture shock, and stereotypes about the model minority and alienness. This ep includes discussions of the dynamics of scientific methods. Michelle just earned her PhD in psychology working on smells and memory; in her words, she can't diagnose you but "would have to take out your brain and slice it." Together we reflect on the blurred lines between our research and ourselves.