Science Identity

I think especially for someone like me, who has a hard time identifying as a scientist still because I'm not teaching in a college and I'm not actively doing research. This has been good for me to make sure that I'm promoting women in science, and younger people in science, and weird people in science. Not being that cookie-cutter. So that's a big, big thing I'm very thankful for with my shop.

I think that there's another category that could be explored that's just about Charity's identity. We've now spent some time together, like no, we don't know each other, but I feel like she's a really interesting person and I think that bringing out her identities of artist and scientist is another part of the selling of science. Like who is a scientist and not all scientist consider themselves not artists. Many scientists are also artists, and so to have someone who had a biography in the shop or who proudly display information about other scientists who have these dual identities, like maybe someones a scientist and a rock climber, whatever. Scientists have very many, many things, they're multidimensional, so I think that, that's another point of opportunity to have emotional connection that could be explored with The Science Boutique, but in other types of retail environments, is emphasizing the person who is a scientist.

There's a lot of nuances to what I do. One of them being... And it's so hard to explain unless you're in the science world, is I'm an artist and I think it's always been a hard thing for me because I'm part of academia, but I'm also an artist and my husband's a professional artist. So I'm in two worlds at once and this is me trying to blend them together. Just as much as I try to engage artists in science, I also try to engage science in art.

A couple of cool quotes I took were, one was from a woman who ended up winning a prize for technical work, she was in this Victorian era Captain America costume and she said, "I work in clinical trials, and cosplay and knitting and lace making is a lot like that. It feels to me like a puzzle." There's this iterative process of testing and problem solving and that she loves it for the challenge, and that felt interesting to me. And then other people had a lot of technology built into their costumes, and they talked about they were doing it for the tech, that this allowed them to take their technical skills and be creative with them, that this was how they could express themself. And they talked a lot about the soldering and programming and all this other stuff, and that felt like yeah, this maker STEM aspect felt stronger to me.

And I think it's important to remember also the larger political moment that we're in, which is, a lot of people who do science don't feel that what they do is necessarily highly valued in the dominant structures of power in our society. So having science in public is really, really powerful, and I overheard a woman saying, "Yes, I work in science. I have a very good job. I really love science." She was sharing that with us, which just seems crazy, but she was shouting it to everybody. I never would have expected something like that would happen. That was somebody in the parade audience? Yeah, exactly. So there was that feeling of recognition. You all are parading, you all represent science, and I'm also a science person, I'm connected to you. And everybody around her was laughing like, "Yes. Okay. That's great."

my emotional reaction I think was of awe almost, like, "Wow, so many people are really, really excited about seeing science here." And so it was a shock almost that in this very fun, to be blunt, and kind of cartoon superhero fantasy, this very performative space, that science was so highly cheered, even seeing people cheer for the word science on the sign, that was interesting to me. As someone who knows science is in all of these things, but it's less explicitly stated. I think when you're looking at a Chewbacca costume or R2D2, you're looking at the fantasy not the science. I'm still trying to piece together how people receive science in these contexts, because science is so categorized as one distinct discipline away from our everyday life, that I'm not sure how to even process what people were getting from it, if that makes sense.

What's really important to the Festival of Science is being able to show people like themselves involved in pretty amazing things. It seems to be important and important hook if people can engage with scientists or see themselves as scientists or see themselves in the lab coat or in a situation, in the field research station, in the laboratory, in the observatory, that seems to be really important to see somebody like themselves doing science. That was our real angle this time in the festival parade.

I feel like I've made friends, but I will add a more personal thing. I will self disclose a little bit. I identify as gay, and I also identify as a scientist. This was my first pride event ever, and so it really was quite something for me. I started in the life sciences, switched over into the social sciences, but I did all of that without any particular ... How to put it? Mentors that were like me. I have never really seen very much of: We are scientists, and we support the LGBTQ community in such a direct way. And so that really meant something for me to see now and especially as an adult and someone who is working their way up the academic ladder. As I saw all of it, it really struck me with, okay, this is important. This is a place where we should be as scientists. This is a community that we should talk to as scientists. And so it meant a lot to see you all doing that.

we have an external audience that is our official target audience, which is the public from that whatever community that is or event or whatever. But we also have our internal audience, our scientists, our volunteers, our just committee members or whatever. And we're in choosing to participate in a variety of different kinds of events, it is an opportunity to activate their interests.

I just think we need to acknowledge and I think science still has that stigma where it's this thing that other people do, that really smart people do or a certain kind of person does. So being there, we're breaking those stereotypes and we're showing who are actual scientists and we're involving people that are just showing up for a general public event. And they're actually involved with science by wearing these refraction glasses or learning something about the stars or whatever it is that science is not separate from the rest of the community. And I think that was one of our big takeaways that, yeah, by all means we should be in places like this.

So I think one of the take ons for me was I appreciate that I'm a scientist and I know I'm scientist and I know science is important. And I as a human being, I go to parades, I go to gigs, I go to events. And quite often you don't realize that those two things can and should interact.