Blogs

Where I announce THATCamp Kentucky and reflect on my experience at THATCampSE2013.

I am writing this on a bus from Dublin to Belfast. Bill and Ben, my brother and sister-in-law, one of my nephews, and my cousin and her husband are all taking the trip.

What happens when you bring together sixty scientists, engineers, medical researchers, and gender experts in a series of international, collaborative workshops? You get something radically new. That’s the goal of Gendered Innovations. A Stanford startup, Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment adds value to science, medicine, and technology by deploying methods of sex and gender analysis.

I am puzzled and dismayed by all the hostility toward being generally educated these days. Apart from high-profile slams on entire fields of study by a governor who was disappointed by his daughter’s choice of major, so declared it universally useless,there is the fact that in the budget just signed this week, the National Science Foundation has been instructed by Congress to only fund political science research if it benefits national security and the national economic interest. The implication is that advancing knowledge does not make our country more secure or better off.

I’ve been in D.C. for the past few days at a Project Directors’ meeting for several Federal grant programs. The conference was heavy on plenary sessions, which I’ll admit is not my preferred style. Much of the oratory has been of the “hooray for us” variety, which keeps the peace but doesn’t really help us do our jobs better. That said, though, I found a useful breakout session about improving students’ financial literacy. The session was standing-room-only, which I actually took as a good sign; at least there seems to be widespread recognition that this is a real issue.

Is hosting your own webinar on your radar screen? Perhaps it should be. When I say webinar I mean a synchronous online event that is free to anyone who registers. An event where a subject matter expert presents something, and where (hopefully) there is time for questions, answers and discussions.

One of the most exciting aspects of grad school is the opportunity to engage with senior scholars in your chosen field. For grads of color, this can also be an opportunity to meet one of the few professors in your field that not only shares your research interests, but might or might not look like you, talk like you, or share a similar background. Using African-American professors as one of many groups of color, we can see that the academy has a different structure for people navigating it from this specific social location.

My previous post explained how a portion of the sustainability community is coming to view our challenge not primarily as an environmental issue but as a societal one. The difference is far more significant than just its effect on the wording we use in our job descriptions and performance reviews -- it fundamentally reshapes the relationship between higher education and issues of sustainability, and vastly expands higher ed's capacity to address the problem. Let me try to explain.