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Who Do We Call A Scientist? · Through the IDEA Lens

• speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Science is a way to ensure that we're not fooling ourselves, which I think is a quote from Carl Sagan or someone. speaker-2: That's good one. speaker-0: Welcome to Through the Idea Lens speaker-2: The podcast speaker-0: that brings science and inclusion into focus. Join hosts Dr. Mahadea Sukai and Peter Field as they explore inclusion, accessibility, and belonging speaker-2: Longing. speaker-0: in STEM and beyond. Welcome to the Idea Stem Podcast. I'm Peter Field, and with me is Dr. Mahario Sukai. How are you doing today, Mahario? speaker-2: Doing. Well, thank you very much, Peter. How about you? speaker-0: Doing very well. This is our fifth episode. Hard to believe we're flying along this quickly already. And today we want to be talking about the scientist identity in the context of equity and inclusion. That is a mouthful. What were you hoping to get out of today's episode of Maddie? speaker-2: I think we want to spend some time unpacking what's it mean to be a scientist. And not just sort of the public perception of that, but I also think the scientist perception of that and whether there are hidden expectations and hidden barriers in kind of that perception of what's it mean to be a scientist. And I'm really looking forward to that conversation. speaker-0: Great. And we have a guest to help guide us through that discussion. Do you want to bring in our guest, Mahario? speaker-2: Absolutely. So Peter, I'm really happy for us to be joined today by Dr. Imogen Co. Imogen and I have known each other now for I don't know, ten, twelve years, something like that. And Imogen is a faculty member in the Faculty of Science at Toronto Metropolitan University and has a longstanding, I think the words you use, Imogen, are parallel career as a scholar activist in equity and inclusion. So Imogen, welcome to the Through Idea Lens podcast. We're really, really glad to have you with us. speaker-1: Thanks very much. I am absolutely delighted to be here and looking forward to a rich and fulsome conversation. speaker-0: So when we started talking about this last time, we keyed in on the principle of merit. And we talked about how merit is, I'll say somewhat narrowly defined. I don't know if everyone would agree with that statement, but I think that's kind of where we landed. And I'm wondering how much that definition of merit, such as it's practiced fairly extensively now, within the scientific community, impacts. On the scientist identity. speaker-2: Peter, let's riff on that a little bit and then I'll pass this over to Imogen. there's another piece that we need to talk about here. And is one a scientist if and only if they're in the academic setting or or the industry setting or a government lab? Like are there only specific places where you can actually be a scientist? Because if that's true, then to be hired in those specific places is is how the conversation about merit starts to relate to this. But Imogen, yeah, your your thoughts on Peter's question. speaker-1: Yeah, it's a great question. And it's something that comes up quite a lot, I find, when people ask me about sort of my career and when did you s decide to be a scientist. and I always say, well, I was always curious for as long as I can remember from the earliest my earliest memories I was trying to figure out how the world worked. I wanted to know how things worked. I wanted to you know, I want to know how the world worked and I was just curious. And so I Always maintain, and I've said this publicly, that we're scientists from the moment we're born. It's a baby's job to figure out the world. So being curious is really what a scientist is, and what a scientist does is figure things out. And so we're all fundamentally scientists, the same way we're all fundamentally artists. So I think the science identity has been sort of a bit co-opted, maybe by these sort of certain areas that have been screened off or perhaps are a bit elitist or exclusive, but actually we're all fundamentally scientists as long as we're curious. And that's my kind of view on what it means to be a scientist. speaker-2: I've always said, especially since becoming a parent, that the world's best scientists and and I think you're right, Imogen, the world's best artists are are toddlers and preschoolers. They're the ones asking questions. They're the ones thinking about their world and how to relate to it. And we as adults are the ones who get in the way and say, just because just eat your vegetables and stop asking why? speaker-1: Yes, and they don't have preconceived notions about what a scientist looks like or how they should act until they get a little bit older and have been influenced by media marketing, parental expectations, stereotypes and that kind of thing, and then become constrained in their kind of curiosity or their artistic, endeavors. So I I think we can learn a lot about the way, you know, our junior colleagues, let's say, approach trying to figure things out. speaker-2: Well, we've actually done a few times an icebreaker activity in some of the training that we do in Idea STEM where we actually say to folks, take five minutes at your discussion table or take five minutes on your own and either draw if artistry is your bent, or describe or narrate, or write down something to describe what a scientist quote unquote looks like. And it's always interesting the kinds of answers that come out of those exercises. Because, folks will sometimes unpack their expectations hidden and otherwise in describing a scientist. And it it really does get at that, you know, does a scientist have to be in a lab? Does a scientist have to wear a lab coat? Does a scientist, you know, have to be handling noxious chemicals every five minutes, right? Or does a scientist, as you say, think critically and and be curious about the world and try to figure out answers to questions? speaker-1: And in your observations over I think we have known each other more than ten years, have you seen any shifts in what you get back from people? has that changed at all? Is it are we seeing a broader kind of idea around what a scientist is and looks like and what they do? speaker-2: I think to some degree, yes, as conversations as conversations around intersectional lived identities have evolved and then evolved again. We're seeing some answers to questions that way. When it comes to disability representation, that's always been a bit of a thing because a lot of folks don't tend to see people with disabilities in those kinds of exercises. But it's really interesting because, you know, the first few times people have always sort of drawn the lab coats and talked about the lab and the last time I ran this, people were a little bit more creative and were saying, Well, anyone can actually be a scientist, which actually gets at the root of the challenge, I think, with respect to scientific identity, because anyone if anyone can be a scientist, then science isn't elitist, right? Science is for everybody. speaker-1: Right. So that's actually quite encouraging really to see that maybe there is a little bit of broadening of that kind of stereotype. speaker-0: If we could have some examples of that I think would be useful, what are s some of the more non traditional roles? I think you might even get into that image in where people would be considered scientists now. speaker-1: There are the academic scientists, there are the scientists that we know work in RD in industry, or they work at NASA or the Canadian Space Agency. There are also scientists that do things like implementation science. So there are scientists who are absolutely critically important in terms of how we develop, for instance, public health interventions. I think people often don't think about those people as scientists. There are social scientists who help us think about evidence-based data-driven policy. There are scientists who work on wearable fashions, that kind of thing. So I mean I think any body, any organization, any group, any collective that's using that scientific approach, that iterative method of trial and failure and experimentation and data collection and development of of evidence collection, building the consensus, that kind of thing. All of those things can be can be science. And those people are scientists. We see a lot of citizen science going on or community-based science, I think, which hasn't always been appreciated or treated with the same level of sort of legitimacy or credibility as that ivory tower kind of academic science. I think science integrated into society or scientists as being part of the fabric of society is what we really wanna be promoting and advocating for and celebrating. speaker-0: That's that's really interesting. Go ahead, Matthew. speaker-2: Sorry, Peter, I'm gonna drill down on a couple of things Imogen just said. So Imogen, you mentioned citizen science. Pardon the pun when I say this. In spaces like astronomy. Get it? Get it? No? yeah. Okay. Nobody's laughing. In in spaces like astronomy, citizen science, the ability to crowdsource a sky survey, for example, right? Or the old search for extraterrestrial intelligence at home where everyone donated free memory on their local computers to actually Crunch numbers and do stuff for setting. That's citizen science, right? And in places like astronomy, I'm trying to avoid the word discipline and also trying to avoid the word field. Those kinds of things and that those kinds of approaches are actually very, very well integrated, right? Like they're part and parcel of, right? In something like, you know, molecular biology, where you actually need more complex tools. in order to do the work, it's hard to actually be a citizen molecular biology it it's hard to be a citizen molecular biologist in your own space because not everyone has a, a polymerase chain reaction thermocycler hanging out in their closet. Right. And so I'm mindful that science is about asking questions and contemplating possible answers to those questions and then testing those answers, figuring out if they're right or wrong, right? And Nine times out of ten, they're gonna be wrong and that's okay. That's science. The other thing I would say is, I I once had a mentee who actually was a PhD in literature, whose first question to me as part of the mentorship session was, So how does it feel to not be in science anymore? And I said, What are you talking about? And they said, You don't do science. And I said, What exactly in your conception is science? And what they described was the lab, right? And not just any lab, but a lab with bubbling retort stands and equipment and acids and bases and buns and burners and flames and, you know, things that could go boom. And so it doesn't matter your your level of education. There's sort of this perception that that science has to be done in a place, science has to be done a certain way. And science has to be done by people who look like something wearing something else. Right? And the only thing that's actually true there is that science has to be done A certain way and the way that that science quote unquote has to be done involves asking questions and figuring out how to answer them. speaker-0: I was gonna say, Imagine, I think you got to that earlier when you're talking about a method, right? So science scientists or people you would consider people scientists if they're following a particular method rather than publishing a particular number of papers. speaker-1: Well, I don't think those are th those are mutually exclusive, but there's this misconception that even am amongst science students that science is a collection of facts that they have to memorize or they have to, you know, they have to absorb somehow. Whereas science is actually a process. So it's less content, it's process. So when we talk about science, it's a way Science is a way to ensure that we're not fooling ourselves, which I think is a quote from Carl Sagan or someone. speaker-2: That's a good one. speaker-1: Yeah, science is a process to make sure that we can reliably understand the world around us because our brains, our human brains, have evolved to be very misleading to us. So, and this is the way I teach critical thinking to science students is Our brains are wired in ways because of evolution, because of neuroscience, that makes them somewhat unreliable when it comes to figuring things out or making decisions or making snap decisions, that kind of thing. So we have this thing called the scientific method, which is this way of collecting, you know, collecting data, of making an observation. I see something, I don't understand what it is, why it's doing that. I come up with some ideas, some working models, I then come up with experiments and ways to test those. I then collect the data and I see what that's telling me. I refine the model and I keep doing that. And it's just it's not a one-off. We want lots of people to be doing that because the way we come to some conclusion about the way the universe works is by consensus of that reproducibility, that you know, ability to replicate findings. And that's how we get to vaccines. save lives. Climate change is something that we need to pay attention to, that kind of thing. So I I think it's this ability to have curiosity, to look around and say what's going on, to have b creativity and say, I think I've got an idea of what's going on, and then have the creativity to create the the way to test that. And that's a lot of work. That takes time, that takes teams, that takes a lot of building on previous knowledge, that takes, a broad way of looking at things, open mindedness. It takes a lot of human characteristics which I think have not been promoted as being scientific. So, the ability to recognize the role of emotion, to be to have humility, those kinds of things. And one of the things The reason I asked Mahadeo if you were seeing a change in terms of how people were defining or describing scientists is because the one thing that I see consistently, probably over about the last six, seven years, when I've asked this question of students is or when students have come to me, I should say, about I don't think I can be a scientist because I'm too artistic I like the artsy side of me or I'm too emotional. That always is really disappointing to me because The best scientists are the fully emotionally engaged scientists. So this idea that being objective and rational and serious and unemotional is actually doesn't help you be a good scientist. We want people who are fully human and can recognize humanity and can be fully engaged in like all aspects of science. And those are the the best scientists. So it's it is a process and it's learning how to sort of harness and practice that process. And that's something that everybody can do, even a little bit. You don't have to be in a lab. You can be out in a community. You just have to be curious and you just have to understand the process. speaker-2: So there's an interesting sort of thing that that just came into my mind. And this this might completely make this conversation go sideways. And so I'll drop it in the thread, see if we want to pick up on it. And if we want to pick up on it later, we can do that in a separate conversation. Cognition's energy intensive. And being curious is serious cognition, right? And the funny thing is adults are the ones who coach and shape children's curiosity. Right. But also we're the least curious people on the planet sometimes. And there's so many adults, and there's I'm not saying there's anything wrong necessarily with this. I'm not passing a judgment on it when I say it. I'm just saying that there's so many adults who actually just want to do stuff that that they don't have to think about. And that's you know, thinking requires energy. It's the one thing about human beings. We evolutionarily came to consciousness because consciousness was an evolutionary advantage. But it's very energy intensive and as you say, our brains are not very good at it. It they take a whole bunch of shortcuts to save on energy. speaker-1: Absolutely. And I think, it's requires constant self awareness. So again, when I'm teaching critical thinking, the f the first thing we start talking about is metacognition. How do you think about the way you think? It's really quite disappointing and worrying that in our science students they're often not thinking. They don't think it's about especially in the life sciences, it's about the consumption of content. So if you go and talk to psychology students or students in other disciplines, then they will be thinking about their think how they're thinking. And certainly our arts and humanities students, it's absolutely what they do, But that how do you think about the way you think? Where are you know, it is hard work and it's important that we recognize that and that we appreciate that that's how we get better at things. It's particularly alarming in this age of AI The of course we want the convenience. We have been evolutionarily selected for that. But if the default is always to offload that cognitive work to your phone or your laptop, then you know, inevitably brains are gonna atrophy and we're gonna lose we're gonna lose the ability or we're gonna certainly not develop the skills. Maybe that's more generous way of thinking about it. And we need that in science students. We need the curiosity, we need to process. speaker-0: There's a certain element here of wanting to stay in the status quo, is what I'm hearing. Is that perhaps as we age and we get comfortable, we like the comfort and there's really no need to kind of think beyond that to change that. Is that partly what's going on here? speaker-1: Well, maybe, maybe, but I what I see more is, when we're talking about the science identity or the idea of what a scientist does and how we think about science or science excellence, I I'm seeing it particularly in young people who have grown up in the age of social media who have a lot of stuff immediately accessible to them. whether that stuff is right or wrong, whether that stuff is high value, low value, whether that stuff is in placed in context or not, or whether that stuff is understood in context, a lot of that is lacking. But because of the pressures of the world we live in, you know, maybe the academic environment, stereotypes and assumptions, there is a bit of a default to what is convenient and what is fast. So I would say that I've always been somebody who's wanted to challenge the status quo. So certainly I don't want the status quo. And I think the status quo for our students, our young people, has been is problematic, which is why I do a lot of work around equity and diversity, because we need more people, more diverse people, more people of different kinds of backgrounds and experiences in science. And that hasn't been the case. And now there are other pressures coming in which make it even more challenging for even the the ones that make it into science. You know, I think everybody is driven by convenience and comfort. That's just the way we are as human beings. And that's not good f for many reasons. speaker-0: This concludes part one of our conversation on who as a scientist. For parts two through four of our discussion, tune into Through the Idea Lens starting in february twenty twenty six. In the meantime, we'll be devoting December and January's podcasts to exploring ClueLab, Idea STEM's new innovative game being launched on november twelfth. Tune in to Through the Idea Lens starting in December and find out about how Idea STEM. Is gamifying inclusion in STEM. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Through the Idea Lens. The conversation doesn't end to you. Get social with us on YouTube, speaker-2: Instagram. speaker-0: TikTok, and Facebook at Idea STEM Canada. You can also learn more about our work at www.idea-stem.ca. speaker-2: W W speaker-0: And you can email us directly at info at idea-stem.com. speaker-2: Dot CA speaker-0: Until next time, through speaker-1: Keep looking forward. speaker-0: the idea webs.