Context First

Okay. Now I'm putting on the earrings. Fantastic, that's great. Latasha, I think you may have heard this when you re-listened to the recording, but, you buying those earrings and then saying what you did about them in the call, it fulfilled my whole, that just fulfilled all I wanted for this project. Somebody to buy some earrings because they thought it was interesting to have a little Engagement Experience and then carry them with them and wear them every one in a while and have people ask them about it. That was the original inspiration for the whole project was me going to a fair and we were doing outreach there, but it was the usual thing, the tabletop and the tent, and the hands-on activities with the kids. Which is fine, but I wandered around. I didn't have to do that, so I wandered around and I was like, "Where else could we fit in here?" And then I had that little spark within, was what do we have to do to get into the vending area. Nice, yeah. In my original spark, it was a pendant. That was my original. But you know, that's all right. I'm an earrings' person. I don't really wear that many necklaces.

One thing that's like looking at these "identity," "reach," "connections"...... Even just within what I do and what Emily does, I think that we have different identities, and it depends on the reach. I definitely know to talk a certain way or behave a certain way based on if I'm at a market that's really touristy. Or, if I'm at the local market where there's a beer garden, you know I can be a little bit more informal or maybe... The identity is kind of a little bit of a pendulum, based on setting. So maybe setting is a good one. Yeah, setting.

I think you kind of put the nail on the head or not the nail on the head or whatever. It's not just the, it's not do this science thing well, it's like, do the market well, or do the shop well, or do the website well. And if you do that and your primary goal is getting people excited about science, you're going succeed. But

So we've talked a lot just over the past, I don't know how awkward it is for you Charity, but over the past 10, 15 minutes about who Charity is, which begs the question then, could anyone do this? And that's something that I've wondered about as I've tried to find a few examples to hold up of science engagement functioning in retail spaces. And in both cases, as it turns out, actually in both cases it's women who also happen to be astrophysicists who also happen to be really interested in fashion accessory work. So I wonder though, I mean Charity you have such a specific thing that you do and it's so unique as you said and it comes from a place that's really about your own unique identity and who you are. How do we try to hold this up as something that other people might want to try? That's a good question. I think, it's not about copying what I'm doing, it's about morphing it to what is already out there. And there's so many bases to cover. When you think about the retail world, you have markets like this, you have craft fairs, you have actual walk-in stores, you can go to conferences. There's all different kinds of conferences, you can go to women conferences, a bunch of people I know from the market do that. There's all these different places and I don't think that one company could go to all those places and do science engagement. I think you have to have different types. Whereas I would put myself in a really crafty, artsy type business, a lot of it's just me and what can I do in that lane. Then you would have people who are still active in academia, formal researchers who have great connections to science conferences, women in STEM conferences. What can they do in those areas. And I think the engagement component is completely different based on where you are and what you're doing.

you need to understand, yes, access and inclusion in STEM and in the tech field is a barrier that communities of color face, but it's also like within and embedded within so many other barriers that intersect each other. So it's almost like the best way I could explain it, is as somebody who was working in government, was doing a policy portfolio around advancing equity and outcomes for women and girls of color, working on a number of different issues, from criminal and juvenile justice reform to other education related issues, like exclusionary school discipline, like how black and brown kids are being suspended and expelled at disproportionate rates, to prison pipeline, to other educational barriers that they face. It is truthfully hard to think about their access and inclusion into science and what we're including in the classroom in terms of science, access and inclusion, when there are so many other just baseline when you think of like a hierarchy of needs. So many other baseline structural inequalities that are happening. So for me having that lens when I walked in from the moment, and I was kind of thinking about how I was going to go into Saturday, did I have to put on some special science lens or science hat? I said, "No, just go in as the researcher, as the ethnographer, as the sociologists that you are." That gravitated me towards just thinking about the community first, before I was even thinking about how folks would touch upon science that day, I was just looking at the neighborhood looking at, how folks were interacting with the fire department officials that were there, looking at what moms were talking about, were they talking about doctor's appointments? Were they talking about having to buy school supplies? Looking at the housing, the government assisted housing that was right across the street from the middle school. Looking at all of these other pieces that made this community what it was because you if you're going to understand how these folks, how kids, how families are interacting and engaging with science, or are included or excluded from science, you need to understand the context of all of these other systems and systemic barriers that they face on a day to day.

I think my position on it was twofold in a way in terms of how I experienced the event because on the one hand I was an observer of it in an official capacity, but also that's the neighborhood where I grew up. I told Jonathan I worked at a place that was right there. I went to that [inaudible], so that was really my neighborhood. I think I have emotional ties to the areas where it goes beyond just my observations. When I pulled up to the event and I saw everything I thought about just how rapidly that corridor is gentrifying. And I thought about how, "Wow, this really can seem like a colonial event where there's these outsiders who are coming in and they block the entire Cascade Road. Even though there was a big turnout of people who were from the neighborhood, there was a lot of turnout for folks who are not from that part of town. And probably have never been to that part of town before who were there for the event. So I think that on the outside looking in, not knowing the event...outside of Atlanta, just the Streets Alive initiative itself. I think that the way it flat down in that neighborhood, as somebody who's from there it read to me like, "Wow, okay, they're gentrifying this neighborhood. It's like a pilot test for, "How do we make this street more safe?" Because now they're justifying Café Corridor because that intersection has been dangerous. I didn't even know it though, because I never heard anybody say that before. But apparently it's been dangerous for a long time and nothing's happened all these years and now would it be different by and Belt Line is right there. Now Street Alive comes and now you have this cycle Atlanta Fest. And because I'm outside the neighborhood, I'm not coming. So it can read like, "Oh my God, these are outsiders coming in and what are they doing here?" And that was my initial emotional response to the event.

it's all very situational. I like this, situated, word in this. I think that's a big deal that could come out of this, is even some pieces of, "Here's what it's to go into environments that we're usually not in, and that we don't own, and we don't control." There's a whole piece that I've been very impressed with, that came out of the medical field, of particularly a couple of women in the San Francisco Bay Area. A doctor, and a nurse, who are working with diverse communities, and realizing that the medical treatments weren't working, because they weren't being respectful of the cultural context in which they were working. And that they had to become, not experts, but become humble, and understand the situations that they were actually in, so that they could actually meet folks on the terms of the people, who they were trying to help medically. And that's pretty profound some of that stuff, that spills over into this learning environment. That's where a lot of the strength, and power, and all is in this.

I do think the reaction to science comes from ... people cheering for the fact that science was on the sign, I think probably stems in a large part from the fact that it is a parade, and that's the accepted behavior. And so it's probably very likely that they were cheering for every bit of it that came by because of, "Hey, it's also part of the parade." So I think some of it was getting caught up in the atmosphere of the parade itself, but I do think that this was in some ways a unique subset of people in Atlanta that had an open mind towards science and science fiction and fantasy and gaming and that subset. Not necessarily everybody, but I think it's a case of, there's people who were on the fence and didn't know what they wanted to do with it. When you're in that environment and seeing how positive it is and you're left with this reaction of, "Oh, that was kind of cool. Maybe there's just some things that I want to start looking into."

What's the function of being in a parade? Well, I mean, you're connecting with people that you wouldn't meet otherwise. Of course you're connecting with the people you're marching with, which is what I was emphasizing a moment ago, but you're potentially rubbing shoulders with and interacting with people who you might not meet at work or at school or in your neighborhood. So that's where the incredible strength of this gathering of people is really fabulous. And the crowd really was way more diverse than I expected. I think that's really amazing. And I think the idea that science can be fun, that science can be exciting, that's already implied in the fact that you're marching in a parade. So I think though there could be ways to make that even more fully realized in the interactions, but I think that that's a strong element of what already was presented this year.

I guess I would add just a little more about the parade crowd itself. In downtown Atlanta the streets are really wide and I have to say, coming from new Orleans, they're super clean, and the audience members are four or five people deep. The kids are sitting on the sidewalks, many of them wearing superhero costumes, so they're in full spandex. They're really excited, they're parents are really excited. So there's diverse ages, and I would say in terms of race ethnicity, there's quite a lot of diversity as well. It's hard to say for sure about income and education, but that's probably the case too. And so I was really impressed with that, and also with just how incredibly focused and enthusiastic the crowd was. They were reading the parade really, really closely, and they were looking for things to figure out. And I think in terms of just describing the setting, I think that's really important for understanding what a good idea it is to do this with science, I think, and also the opportunity there, that the scene presents. And

There's something else maybe that we haven't quite spoken out loud today that has to do with the way that parades and festivals and maybe actually science fiction itself as one of the themes of Dragon Con is by taking us out of ourselves or of our ordinary every day, it makes it possible for us to think about how the world can be different. And I think on a really deep level science does that too. Thinking about how things work can also help us to think about how things can work differently. Things don't always have to be the way they are now, which is sometimes an incredibly hopeful message for us to have. And certainly, that applies to... Yeah. So a parade like Pride that takes potentially out of the closet or out of heteronormative just to use the jargon or space. It might help us to think "Oh, no, I can actually be who I am." Our culture, what could actually be different than what it is now. Maybe there can be a little more of an open community culture around who we are. And I think parades and festivals do this in a variety of ways by taking us out of our everyday ways of being and thinking about what can be. So I think that's inherently powerful,

I come from communication science. And one of our big theorists, Marshall McLuhan has a really famous statement, the medium is the message. And I think that that very much applies here. You cannot separate the context from the message itself, it is the message, it is what you are trying to do at these events, is inevitably molded and formed by the event that it is in. The people that you deliver it to change because of that event, the way that people are going to process, the messages that you are giving them are going to naturally change because of the context it is delivered in. So yes, what that means specifically for a parade? I don't know. I don't know if it means that these themes will only appear in a parade. I don't think so. But I do think that it means that the context of a parade will always to be different than the context of a Science Festival of a museum, of a science center, of a lecture in a classroom, that they must be examined on their own merits.

I would say that in the way that we presented science it's like, "Here's the thing you're learning in the middle of all of these other shenanigans." And the subtle message there is that science is more serious, I think, or less inventive