academia

Grad School Podcasts

Our latest guest Brianda is at a turning point: pursue a PhD in STEM or follow her dream of growing Flyy Science, which combines science communication with hip hop and style. This is a coming-of-age in academia episode that everyone can relate to! Liz and Xine chat with Brianda about her current work as a certified Medical Laboratory Scientist, the gap between STEM degrees and jobs, and the journey from realizing you love something to what it means to develop a career. Why don't kidneys get the same attention as hearts in popular culture? Brianda asks the PhDivas for advice on the next steps as a possible pre-PhDiva  and what the best path might be for someone who describes herself as a mix of Bill Nye the Science Guy, Aaliyah, and Left Eye.

Brianda on Twitter: @flyyscience1
On Tumblr: http://flyyscience.tumblr.com/
On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKzUwVctzKHV6_VGB8cp1KQ

Season 3

S03E20 | Coming-of-Age in Academia: Interview with Brianda Beverley of Flyy Science

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.

S03E23 | The Secret Life of Academic Conferences

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

S03E26 | Decolonizing or Indigenizing the University? Interview with Sereana Naepi

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?

S03E27 | Can We Ever Take a Break?

"Dead, drunk, or dancing": Kavelina SnowGiggles Torres​ (Yup’ik/Iñupiaq/Athabascan) seeks to challenge the usual media representations of Indigenous peoples. PhDiva Xine Yao​ interviews Kavelina about her work as a writer and filmmaker selected for the Sundance NativeLab Fellowship. What can narrative do that documentaries can't? Yugumalleq/Shades of Life (2014) is currently on exhibit at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her play "Something in the Living Room" will be performed spring 2018 at Green College, UBC on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Musqueam people. This episode contains references to Star Trek, Firefly, The Fifth Element, and much more scifi geekery.

Duncan McCue is attributed to the quote “drumming, dancing, drunk or dead”. He heard it from an elder. His rule is called the WD4 rule. A Indigenous/Aboriginal will make it in media if they are a “Warrior, drumming, dancing, drunk or dead”.  He is an Anishinaubae, from Ontario, a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation.

Kavelina's Twitter: @SnowGigglesAK
Vision Maker Media: https://www.visionmakermedia.org/bios/kavelina-torres
"Yugumalleq" is part of "The Abundant North: Alaska Native Films of Influence" at the Institute of American Indian Arts: https://iaia.edu/event/abundant-north-alaska-native-films-influence/

S04E07 | Alaska Native Narratives: Interview with Indigenous Filmmaker & Writer Kavelina Torres

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

E04E12 | On Being in Public Pt 1: 3 Years of PhDivas! Lifting Others, Lifting Ourselves

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

S04E13 | On Being in Public Pt 2: When Our Voices Make Us Into Targets

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.

S04E17 | Thinking of Applying to Grad School? PhDivas Advice for Humanities & STEM

Podcast about academia, culture, and social justice across the STEM/humanities divide. Dr. Liz Wayne and Dr. Christine "Xine" Yao are two women of color Ivy League PhDs navigating higher education. Biomedical engineer meets literary critic. Both fans of lipstick.