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The Lab and Field

~ Science, people, adventure

The Lab and Field

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Queer in STEM ask me anything – another LGBTQ&A

04 Saturday Jul 2020

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

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Tags

LGBTQ, QueerAndA

About 2 years ago, I opened up my inbox for you to ask quite literally anything about being LGBTQ+ in science. Since then, some things have changed in the world, and I’ve had a chance to engage with lots of new folks around equity, diversity, inclusion & access both in science, in the museum, and more broadly.

Pride Month this past June was also exhausting, and I know from speaking with a few people that some of these issues were new to them. That’s fine – we make our own journeys when trying to make our fields, professions and workplaces better. And I know it can be intimidating if this is a new area for you, and you don’t want to “mess up” or get things mixed up.

So what better time than to open up the ol’ inbox again.

So if you’ve got a question about being LGBTQ+ (in STEM or more broadly), you can ask it anonymously using this Google form. I’ll leave it up for the next week, and then compile the answers.

Don’t be shy – I have, almost literally, been asked everything under the sun in the 15 years that I’ve been doing LGBTQ+ education & diversity training in some form. If you want, you can also read a bit about my own journey here.

And now, over to you.

What a long year the last month has been

26 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

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Tags

diversity, LGBTQ+ STEM, Pride month

I know I’m not alone in feeling like there’s far too much wibbily-wobbly timey-wimey lately. We just passed 100 days of working from home because of Covid-19, the bubbling undercurrent of anti-Black racism and police brutality has (finally?) has broader recognition (though not without tragedy), and Pride Month has largely been replaced by Wrath Month (traditionally celebrated in July, but brought forward by unanimous consent after a Big Queer Meeting in which it was the first item on our agenda). For lots of folks, it’s like the hits just keep coming, as so wonderfully illustrated by this calendar my friend Izzy Jayasinghe put together for a talk:

Some self-promotion: I’m going to talk about my Pride Month of Protest this afternoon 👇🏾. I’ll also talk specifically why there is blindspot in the LGBTQ+ community in UK STEMM towards the experiences of queer folk of colour. You need to register to get a link for the seminar. https://t.co/DpJddaDX5v pic.twitter.com/MZmFmAuMY5

— Izzy Jayasinghe (@i_jayas) June 24, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

And even since Izzy’s calendar, we’ve had the release of a report from the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Diversity in STEM highlighting yet more disparity, and UKRI, the main research funding mechanism in the UK, releasing data on applicant diversity showing just how, well, awful it is.

Throw in some internal institutional battles and frustrations, profound disagreements with the UK government’s Covid-19 response, and our first heat-wave of the year, and it’s been tough. It seems like every week for the last 2 months I’ve felt utterly drained, and each week I seem to find more scope for further draining with even less respite. And no sign of respite in the immediate future (in the UK we still shouldn’t be travelling great distances for overnight stays, hotels etc are still closed, and work demands mean a week of leave isn’t really an option). Pride Month is also often quite tiring, as requests for guest blogs, seminars, and media ramp up in a way that suggests many of us don’t exist the other 11 months of the year.

As a friend and I discussed, it’s soul-level tired, to-the-core-of-my-being tired. All  I want to do is cocoon myself in a crofter’s hut in the Highlands for a week with good books, tea, and food and a couple of good friends that I haven’t seen in months. But that will have to wait.

—

I started to write this post early this morning, and promptly abandoned it until I read Ben Britton’s piece that touched on so many of the same thoughts and added some much needed fuel. In particular the utter frustration so many of us have when trying to address systemic inequities in science resonated quite deeply:

If you present at the hospital with a severed arm, your Doctor does not immediately start drafting legislation about the safe use of chainsaws, or even how best to trim a hedge. They fix you up, address your needs, and move on from there.

 

It’s an analogy I’ve used when talking about how we can address plastic pollution, another global systemic issue – it presenting at A&E with a bleeding head wound, one doesn’t start by thinking about how to clean up the floor.

And doing this – “causing trouble” as Ben puts it – is necessary. Progress will always be slower than we want, and I genuinely don’t know if “true” equity will exist in my career, or my lifetime (I suspect not seeing as we’ve made it this far and, well…). I’m a cis white man, and if *I* find it this exhausting, think about how my trans BIPOC friends & colleagues must be feeling (hint: it’s probably more tired, and for longer). But we keep pushing because it’s the one thing we must do.

That pushing, though, takes effort. You can’t expect Sisyphus to run a marathon between each ascent of the mountain up which he pushes his boulder. When research/academia already feels like a Sisyphean task, fighting to make it a more inclusive, equitable, diverse and accessible part of society can feel like running the marathon. And then another, and then another. This is where other folks can help.

I have a fraught relationship with the term “ally”, especially when self-applied. It’s a transitive state that’s defined by one’s actions, not one’s desire to be so labelled. Allegiances can change, diverge, or be revealed to be something else. Ben Britton (can you tell I’m a fan?) has adopted the term “co-conspirator” or “accomplice” because this means the person has some skin in the game (i.e., if you get cornered & need to fight out, they’re also there), and it’s rooted in action, the doing of things rather than just cheerleading from the sidelines that leads to so many empty statements (hello organizations with rainbow social media avatars in June), promises of further study and working groups and committees that will have no genuine power, influence, or resources to achieve anything.

We don’t need allies. We need accomplices.

—

In The Guardian this morning is coverage of a EU Fundamental Rights Agency report on LGBTQ+ experiences across Europe. It paints a pretty bleak picture. It contains many sobering statistics, but the one I find most straight folks find the most confronting is whether someone would avoid holding hands with a same-sex partner in public for fear of being assaulted, threatened or harassed. Looking at at my own demographic (gay/queer man in the UK) tends to bring this home. 37% say “always”.

And when we toss in those who answered “always” or “often”, it’s 70%.

70%.

Including me.

It’s not about abstractions, or fighting for the sake of fighting or equality “league tables”, or causing “trouble”, but real tangible impacts on people’s lives that many just can’t even fathom.

And that’s in science, in academia, in research, and in our broader society. It’s not easy, it’s bloody exhausting, but when it matters this much, we have no choice but to keep fighting. I often say that “science is people” – and people will always come before “science” in my books. That’s part of the unseen and/or unrecognized community mentorship and support that many marginalized groups do, and will continue to do.

I can’t say it’s been a “happy Pride Month” (not that last year’s was much better). But (he said, wanting to end on a marginally positive note), the fight goes on.

The gap in queer activism and the stories untold

22 Friday May 2020

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

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activism, LGBTQ

It’s coming up to Pride Month in June, and this summer also marks 15 years of marriage equality in Canada, so I find myself in a particularly pensive and reflective mood. This is especially true with the lockdown in the UK at the moment which affords my brain ample time to run amok. This is also not much of a sciencey post.

Last weekend was the 30th International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), and in some reflections on Twitter, Shaun O’Boyle flagged this 45-minute documentary he co-produced on the 2 years since the equal marriage referendum in Ireland for Newstalk Radio (and it’s now been five years today, as it happens). In it, they interview folks that they spoke to during the campaign in 2015, and see how the experience had affected them. It’s brilliant and you should go listen to it.

And I found myself thinking about my experience in Canada. The situation was different; we had several years of provincial governments passing legislation until the 2004 Supreme Court Reference Re Same Sex Marriage (wiki page here) and then things slowly swept across the country, either through legislation or provincial court cases (marriage is a provincial rather than a federal matter). But in the intervening 15 years, there’s been, well, not a lot of public reflection like Shaun’s piece about Ireland. And what defined a cohort of queer activists (and queer bystanders), all those experiences and more than a decade of fighting, might be lost, like so much queer history in Canada. This feels particularly the case outside the big cities, and most acutely on the east coast.

But perhaps this isn’t all that surprising. Unlike the UK did in 2017, we didn’t mark 50 years of decriminalization in 2019. Talking with younger queer folks today, few know the landmark pieces of history: Vriend v Alberta (wiki), Egan v Canada (wiki), M v H (wiki) or Hall v Durham Catholic School Board (wiki). Now, I’m not trying to be the “old man yells at cloud” kind or be all “when I was your age…”, but these cases defined the national equal rights agenda for much of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. It’s what I read about in the newspaper every morning at breakfast (because I was a nerd, even from a young age). It’s what was on the 10:00 news on CBC. 

And then equal marriage in Ontario in 2003, and nationally two years later. I still remember hearing on CBC radio when the decision for New Brunswick came through from the Court of Queen’s Bench in June 2005 (Harrison v AG of Canada). I wasn’t yet out, struggling greatly with that burden and also the first field season of my masters, and wondering what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks I was doing. I felt relief (though given the wave of other provincial decisions and the reference question at the Supreme Court, the chances that it wouldn’t happen in New Brunswick were slim), and though I couldn’t really celebrate (being closeted and all), it was an indication of where society was going. That decision by Justice Judy Clendenning (and the positive media coverage around it) was part of what ultimately prompted me to come out 4 months later, because I could see something that would make life easier, even a little.

At the national scale, marriage equality was such a unifying issue (though not entirely) for the LGBTQ+ community because it had such a broad relevance, and it was a big win in Canada, Ireland, Australia, the UK, the US… in many places. And now, 15 years on, we often say “the fight doesn’t stop with equal marriage” because there are so many other challenges that LGBTQ+ folks face, in science, in research, in academia, in society more broadly. But in a way, it HAS stopped. Or it seems like it has. What are we collectively fighting for with the same fervour and determination of 15, 20, 25 years ago? We can’t, as a community, point at something and say to someone “This. This is what we need to do because…”. Maybe we’re all tired, maybe we don’t care as much, maybe the problems are too nebulous to use the old tools and tactics, maybe the challenges are perceived as too “niche”. But it feels a bit like we were a light going through a prism – before, we were focused, unified, together, united, and after though we were a beautiful rainbow, we spread out, going everywhere, divided. Or maybe I’m stretching this analogy too far.

When I look at Canada, even though it’s now 6 years since we lived there, there doesn’t appear to be a leading queer advocacy organization with the same power and pull that Egale had in the early 2000s. Yes, Egale still exists, but one rarely hears them in the national press (and certainly not when I dip in and out of Canadian news coverage from the UK). In the UK, there is Stonewall who do amazing work, but we’re not all rallying around them leading the charge on The Next Big Thing For Queer Rights. Perhaps that’s because there’s also been a shift in activism to smaller local, grassroots organizations who do not have a media presence. Their work is no less important, it’s just outwardly less visible. And that lack of public visibility in the way we had in the early 2000s could be interpreted by some as an implicit license for their discriminatory behaviour or hateful acts.

And I come back to Shaun’s documentary about Ireland, and how that very public fight for validation, equality, and basic rights affected people, much as it did in Australia in their 2017 postal survey. And I look at Canada, and the experiences (and aftermath) I and my peers had, which is largely a story untold. It’s a bit of a gap in stories about queer folks – there are more and more films, documentaries, and reportage on the AIDS epidemic and aftermath (I highly recommend How To Survive A Plague, Pride, and 120 BPM for starters), and a recent flurry of contemporary takes on queer life (Love, Simon, God’s Own Country), but that in-between period that means so much to me is absent (the contemporaneous Queer As Folk notwithstanding). I can’t help but wonder if that is also at least a partial function of the aimlessness in the shadow of marriage equality, but also how we can become focused again, fight the fights that need fighting, and tell the stories that need telling.

 

With thanks to Shaun O’Boyle and Landon Getz for their critical feedback and inspiring discussions; opinions and errors remain my own.

Some thoughts on The University

03 Sunday May 2020

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

higher education, universities

Apologies in advance if this comes across as overly ranty, and though I try to at least include some pointers or thoughts on where things go, this feels, to me, like trying to turn a supertanker going 120 knots while the crew get flung off so may lack my usual positive outlook.

And it goes without saying that though my comments may be broad & sweeping, but they are not meant to be universally applicable. There will be exceptions, of course. But they reflect the last 20 years attending & working with universities across 6 (English-speaking) countries.

I did my undergrad at a Canadian “liberal arts” undergrad institution, and thought of The University as this fantastic place where people pursued their interests, developed & grew as people, were mentored, and made discoveries (both personal and professional). It was very much the ethos of the school, and reflected what many of us think of as the ideal, as articulated by Liz Coleman in this TED Talk from 2010 that I still find inspirational on some level. It was a time where the journey was more important than the destination, and everyone worked, or seemed to, with the same purpose. But near the end of my biology degree, I found myself wondering “what DOES one do with a degree in Classics anyway?” – the first cracks had appeared.

As a graduate student (2 degrees, 2 universities, 6 years) the hard truths about universities as institutions came rapidly. The need for funding, the amount of (often contradictory) paperwork, and the notion of “competitiveness”. I learned about “overheads” or “on-costs”. I saw better evaluation rubrics in the theatre tournament I ran than for some graduate evaluations, and I saw first-hand how poor management can impact people and projects. The harsh realities of the “job market” and bizarre hiring practices (and let’s face it, they ARE bizarre compared to nearly every other employer) were first uncovered.

Shifting to a postdoc, and I had all these experiences validated when, in a workshop for “how to land an academic job”, I found out that universities are not for teaching. I was hung out to dry by my institution for the first time. My own department encouraged me to apply for one job for which I was then ranked “uncompetitive”, and another where I was told I had “insufficient knowledge of ornithology”.

And now as a researcher (either in government, NGO, or museum) I work with university partners and see perverse incentives to publish (incentives aren’t all bad, mind you), an increase in courses and associated required projects, the rampant proliferation of short-term contracts lasting, in many cases, DECADES, and little/no mentoring of new faculty (who mentors the mentors?). At a higher level, there’s chasing rankings (be they the meaningless third-party metrics, or national schemes like REF/REF2: Evaluate with a Vengeance), abysmally low pay and increased workload. Communication and process seems to be optional, shifting, and always on a whim. Unless you don’t follow it, in which case too bad.

I know the above looks like a gripe list, and “it’s not all that bad”. No, it’s not. But certainly my experience (and that of many others who don’t have the privilege of being a white cis male) has been far from positive. I know faculty who’ve been bullied by colleagues, superiors, undergrads and even their own grad students who, when they went through the “proper channels” were branded troublemakers, and asked “what is wrong with YOU?”. I know faculty that in a year made less than the students they supervise because part of their contract wasn’t renewed, but who were still expected to work 40 hours/week. I know faculty who do All The Things (supervise 4-6 students/year, publish often and in “good”/”high impact” journals, have strong teaching evaluations from 2-4 units/courses, bring in grant money, do heaps of well-recognized outreach and media, and otherwise work their butts off) who are on 9-12 month contracts despite looking across the hall at their permanently employed colleague who has 1 honours student, published 1 paper in the last 24 months, submitted no grant applications, and taught 1 course/unit. I know faculty who’ve been thrown under the bus by their institutions in various processes because their attempts to make their department, school, and discipline a more inclusive, welcoming place ruffled some feathers either from above, or from within.

And raising any of these concerns within The University is like asking for a thicker blanket and being given a moth-eaten linen sheet.

—

We have built research systems that rely on graduate students for research capacity (which itself is Not Good), universities that have had massive funding cuts from government in the last 30 years (in Australia, and the UK, for example) which means that nearly every discussion comes down to money (either from grants, or tuition) and anything that might threaten that is beaten back with a huge stick.

Universities have the management & communications skills of a soggy turnip, and are filled with survivorship bias. This has effectively turned many into business-model-driven factories where top-down comms may be frequent & positive, but local-level management & mentoring is non-existent or flat-out harmful.

In a system where for so many people they are told their best isn’t good enough while others fail upwards, it’s deeply demoralizing, frustrating, and exhausting to try and exist. Trying to push back against these systems from the outside (as I’ve done with several over the last number of years) is doubly so.

Look, I know these are not the universal experience, but they’re at least sufficiently systemic that they should be worrying. But enacting change, especially by faculty themselves (many of whom do AMAZING things in spite of the above) feels like trying to turn around that supertanker, except you’re part of the crew being flung overboard. And yes there are advantages and good things about universities, but for me these are outweighed by the negative and the apprehension of the as-yet-unknown negative I might encounter.

And on a personal level, it’s sad that I now have to start out being highly skeptical, suspicious, and wary of the same institutions I idolized less than 20 years ago. But I’ve had to because they’ve so consistently let me, my friends, and my collaborators down.

Rainbow crosswalk vandalism isn’t just an isolated local event, but a national problem

06 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

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This is a joint blog post by Landon Getz and Alex Bond, appearing today on both their blogs. If you’re interested in reprinting it, get in touch.

From Grand Falls-Windsor, NL to Burnaby, BC, Pride is celebrated in Canada across the summer months. Towns and cities across the country raise the rainbow flag and celebrate with parades, concerts, and parties. Increasingly, many are following the lead of Sydney, Australia, which painted a giant rainbow crosswalk in 2013 to mark Sydney Mardi Gras. Local councils describe these as great ways to signal the welcoming and inclusive nature of the town, and celebrating its diversity.

New rainbow crosswalk painted white overnight in Gibsons on Sunshine Coast BC Canada. https://t.co/2rDEsqz1zu pic.twitter.com/LEA5yzSeYB

— Duane Burnett (@DuaneBurnett) July 13, 2019

 

Sadly, not everyone shares that view. Because also from Grand Falls-Windsor to Burnaby, there have been more than 40 incidents of deliberate vandalism of rainbow- or trans-flag-coloured crosswalks since 2015, with new vandalism occuring on an almost weekly basis. The damage ranges from tire burn-out marks, to paint, to actually trying to dig it up from the road. Further, this damage is often covered by local media, including an interview with someone from the LGBTQ2S+ community describing how disappointed they are, and someone from city council expressing surprise that someone in their town could do such a thing and vowing to have it repaired. That’s usually where the story ends.

The reality is that defacing rainbow crosswalks is quite obviously a nation-wide problem. Vandalism has been reported in 7 provinces (none that we could find in PEI, Quebec, or Manitoba), in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, and small towns like Eastern Passage, NS and Coldstream, BC. In some places, there’s repeated vandalism following repairs, including a record six times in one summer in Miramichi, NB.The effects are more than a bit of soiled pavement.

These events portray a repeated and deliberate attempt to show LGBTQ2S+ people that they are still not welcome, at least not openly, in these communities. Although city councils are aiming to show LGBTQ+ folks that they are welcome and supported, vandalism of these crosswalks shows that members of these communities, nationwide, do not always agree. And although it is a minority, it’s a sizeable one, with 1 in 4 Canadians opposed to same-sex marriage 14 years after it became the law of the land.

This is further reflected in the repeated criticisms of rainbow crosswalks in commentaries from religious groups, so-called “concerned” citizens, and others. This opposition sometimes takes the form of direct frustration with LGBTQ2S+ people and their “sins”, and sometimes takes a shot at the use of taxpayer dollars for “ideological” symbols, even though many rainbow crosswalks are paid for by private organizations.

Vandalism and vocal criticism tell and show LGBTQ2S+ folks that they still need to be careful where and when they embrace and openly share their identities, and that they still need to “code switch”, changing the way they behave or talk based on who else is around. This burden, of constantly being aware and choosing when to express oneself, is a tiresome effort and one that is not always available to the more visible among the LGBTQ2S+ community.

In media stories covering these acts of vandalism, they are portrayed as being one-off, isolated, local incidents. In reality, though, it’s a much bigger, nation-wide problem. However, acknowledging that the surrounding community has Queer-supportive folk, and ensuring visible allyship in many forms (including rainbow crosswalks) can go a long way in pushing back against these acts of vandalism. Collectively, the message vandalism to these symbols sends is that we still have a long way to go,and a lot of work to do, before LGBTQ2S+ folk are not just tolerated, not just accepted, but included in Canadian society.

Lessons for the academy from non-academic research: on management

21 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

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alternative academic careers, grad students, management

I’ve never technically worked for a university. Two postdocs in government research centres, a stint at an NGO, and now at a museum mean the structures, pressures, and opportunities I’ve had in my professional research career of the last decade have been different to those of my academic (university-based) colleagues. It’s a useful comparison because, at least research-wise, we share many of the same goals. And whereas my friends at universities have teaching & admin, I have curation & admin (or more often, admin and more admin).

One area where I think universities can take a lesson from non-academic research environments is in management. As a rule, researchers make terrible managers, and managers make terrible researchers (exceptions do apply, of course), but when I compare the management I do/receive with that of academic colleagues, it strikes me as an easy win for universities.

By management, I mean the formal reporting, oversight, and support system in place for workers. This includes graduate students. Everything from taking leave to annual reviews and career progression to setting work plans and hiring in academia (as I’ve experienced it) could take something from outside and be improved.

 

Recruitment

Here, I’m mainly talking about graduate student recruitment. Often, it’s up to just the supervisor to deal with recruitment, resulting in a veritable mishmash of processes. Of course, the university will have a formal application/admissions procedure, but the steps before there (or in some cases where students are allocated after admission) is a bit of a mess. A few things to think about:

  • are adverts written in a way that minimizes gender bias?
  • what essential (required) and desirable (optional) criteria are there for the role? Are these assessed by the application, CV, or interview?
  • who else is short-listing applicants for an interview?
  • who else is sitting on the interview panel?
  • what set questions are being asked of every candidate?
  • how are criteria being scored & evaluated?

Daily management

Academics are used to a pretty loose reign and that flexibility is one of the incentives. The same goes for grad school. But there should be expectations of a standard set number of hours worked per week on an agreed schedule (allowing flexibility where possible) that takes into account other university-related tasks, such as courses, TAing, and professional development. I often say that students/staff I manage should work 36-40 hours/week, but I don’t have strong feelings on when those hours occur. Equally, there’s an expectation that once that agreed schedule is in place, deviations should be agreed or at least communicated (e.g., days working from home).

The same applies to annual leave. Staff and students do (should!) get a certain number of days off as annual leave, which should be taken with the approval of the manager. My take has always been that it’s up to each individual to manage their own time, and I will approve leave so long as there is leave remaining. But the key thing is that everyone knows how much annual leave there is, and when it’s occurring (which is particularly important when folks work remotely, and it’s not possible to easily tell on a given day whether they were working or on leave).

Annual reviews & work plans

One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed is in how annual work plans are set, agreed, and evaluated. At the museum, I spent about 2-3 hours with each person I manage setting out their plan for the coming year (they put the first draft together themselves). We then go over it, look at how realistic is, what resources they might need, balance it with other commitments, and then monitor it about half-way through the year. At the RSPB, we allocated defined percentages of time for specific projects; we don’t do that at the museum in part because we had more externally-funded work at RSPB, and at the museum many projects run together and separating time isn’t terribly efficient or useful. The key, though, is that both the staff member and manager agree on the plan, and when progress isn’t being made, it’s reevaluated and actions put in place to allow the person to succeed.

At the end of the year, we again sit down and look over the work plan, see where the successes and challenges were, and use that to inform our plan for the year ahead. This can be easier for permanent staff, where HR structures are in place to support them, and their managers, when goals aren’t met. For short-term/contract staff and graduate students, this is harder because the length of the period of employment is set by external funding.

And the same principles apply when doing one’s OWN review/work plan. Many academics are left to their own devices, except for a short chat with a head of department once a year. A friend of mine at a university has less than half an hour a year with their nominal boss. This is woefully inadequate and results in a plethora of requests for activities throughout the year, often at short notice. Granted, it’s also trickier in universities where one can be beholden to several functional managers — one person assigns teaching roles, another has more interest in the research & admin side, and they don’t always (ever?) talk to each other when setting annual workloads.

 

Now, I’m not advocating for micromanagement (which seldom works, and takes a LOT of time), but I think the pendulum needs to swing back somewhat in university environments. Structures to support managers, both in their own work and in managing the work of others, just aren’t there and this causes a great deal of frustration, anger, and chaos. The flexibility, freedom, and independence is why many pursue careers in academia, but in many places (certainly not all, but most that I’ve encountered/heard of) there needs to be better and appropriate support.

Few in research get any training in effective management; heck, I’ve picked it up along the way. But a combination of being sensible, compassionate, and understanding combined with structures to support both my staff and I have resulted in, I like to think, most successes, and dealt with any bumps along the road in an appropriate way. There’s always room for improvement in any organization, granted, but I’ve found it to be one of the areas where academia lags behind non-academic science institutions significantly (for a variety of reasons).

Two’s company. Three’s a crowd. Breaking away from the ‘limited choice’ between emails or conference calls.

03 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

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This is a guest post from Ed Morris, an ecologist practitioner for a large protected areas network in Canada.

 

I work for a large organization. I’m a public servant and an applied scientist. We have a main office, but many of us work in regional offices that are each separated by several hundred kilometres. Face to face meetings are increasingly rare, and you won’t see us attending conferences. So how do we stay in contact with one another? Mostly through email and conference calls. We’re addicted to Outlook.

It’s too easy to compose an email, add attachments and just keep adding names to the distribution list. Everyone does this, causing our in-boxes to balloon. Then the senders of emails are often disappointed with low response rates, and those few responses that do arrive are sometimes hastily thrown together at the eleventh hour. That’s not the outcome anyone wants.

As for conference calls, it’s easy to snoop into peoples’ calendars and schedule them into meetings. We’ve dropped the formality of using Robert’s Rules of Order. Yet, too few of us have the self-awareness to be a good participant, and fewer still have the skills to be a good moderator. We can all think of people who speak long and often, and others that never speak. Big booming voices that sit next to the phone, and quiet voices that sit beyond the microphones’ range. We’ve experienced people who have difficulty staying on topic. We’ve experienced people who derail the discussion with their alternate takes. Full disclosure: I am sometimes one of those people too.

I was about to make major revisions to a landscape ecology model, but wanted to discuss it with certain peers first. I loathed the prospect of writing a long-winded email, as it is a complicated subject. I also loathed scheduling a conference call with this particular combination of personalities. Neither communications tool was going to give a satisfactory outcome.

What did I do? After some thought I booked individual person-to-person phone calls. This decision will be obvious to some of you, but it was a lightbulb moment for me. It felt weird to break away from the ‘limited choice’ of email or a conference call. This is the unintentional corporate culture we’ve created.  

Those calls were fabulous. I set my phone to hands-free, and recorded them with a voice recorder. I posed questions, and did my best to be quiet while my peers spoke uninterrupted. Personality traits that would have been disruptive in a conference call never surfaced. We explored subjects in a way that we never could in a conference call. At one point I wondered if I should go to the trouble of editing the recordings into a podcast-like summary. Maybe. In any case, I have the information I need to proceed, and I know that my peers are more likely to endorse the final product.

Think about breaking away from the false, limited choice between email or conference call. A series of person-to-person phone calls can take more time, but it will be productive time. It is also more personal, which contributes to making you and your peers form a team in practice, not just in name. Maybe that too will help the next time you find yourselves in yet another conference call.

 

Wanderlust

21 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by Alex Bond in Uncategorized

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There’s lots of discussion in scientific fields that involve travel about the relative merits of going somewhere far away for field work, a conference, or seminar. This post is not about those things.

As a kid growing up in eastern Canada, I remember the first time I went to British Columbia (for a lawn bowling tournament. Yes, you read that right). I remember touching the Pacific Ocean for the first time. I recall my first international trip, to Jamaica in 2003, and landing at the airport in Kingston. I remember my first flight to Australia in 2009, with a long layover in Melbourne (and a very nice chap who complimented me on my watch while I was too clueless and jetlagged to realize he has likely hitting on me).

In my professional life, I’ve been lucky enough to visit some incredibly amazing places, some where few others have been, and places where I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was the first person to step in a particular spot. It’s awe-inspiring.

A Google Map of the places I’ve done field work, and from where I’ve analysed data

In the field, we always brought an atlas, and could spend hours (HOURS!) just browsing its pages, imagining the landscape, the people, and cultures, the foods, the weather, and more. So over the last several months, I’ve been starting another map, one of places, for one reason or another, I’d quite like to see some day. Some I have almost zero chance of visiting, others are quite likely. Some are for professional reasons, others are more personal, and a couple are a mix of both. And with today being the autumnal equinox, with the days getting progressively shorter, the dark evenings are an opportunity to daydream, to wonder, and to flip through the pages of an atlas.

A Google Map of some places I’d quite like to see some day

 

So here’s to that sense of wanderlust that takes so many of us to the field, and to exploring our world.

The unreconciled dimensions

18 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by Alex Bond in Queer in STEM, Uncategorized

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field work, LGBTQ, rural

I grew up in Atlantic Canada, a region comprising the provinces of Newfoundland & Labrador (9+ years), Nova Scotia (4+ years), Prince Edward Island (sadly never lived there), and New Brunswick (15+ years). It’s the sort of area where within about 5 minutes you can easily find a common connection (you both went to school with Jack’s cousin’s brother), where doors are still kept unlocked, and if you’re lost you just knock on the nearest door, and they set you right (after a cup of Red Rose tea and a Dare maple leaf cookie).

I spent uncountable nights camping in fields, forests, beaches, mountains, and rivers and was totally at home. I’ve hiked every marked trail in Fundy National Park (including two complete “Fundy Circuit” treks, a connected loop of 45 km of trail, including about half a dozen river crossings traversing the park). It’s where I did my very first field work, at the Point Lepreau Bird Observatory back in 2004. Where I discovered my love of the outdoors, working at Cape Enrage from 2002-2004. And where, despite not living “back home” for almost a decade, I still feel drawn.

I cut my teeth as a field biologist, working 3+ month field seasons for 9 years between 2005-2015, in some pretty remote places (check out a map here), some of which were me and one other person with no resupply for 11 weeks. I loved it. I had amazing techs and collaborators in the field, and I’d hire each and every one of them again if I could. We weathered massive gales, volcanic eruptions, semi-aquatic beach landings, and even one 3-day stranding. We lost generators and batteries halfway through the season, tents were destroyed, water in short supply, and challenges seemingly insurmountable. But we always made it through. I loved it.

What links my time in the field with growing up (and living) in Atlantic Canada is remoteness. They’re both places where there are few people, where it’s easy to get away or be alone, and teeming with nature. They’re also both not the most queer-friendly.

Here, dear reader, is the reconciliation I have yet to achieve: my love of ruralness/remoteness and my queerness.

And that pains me.

So it was with a stomach-clenching feeling that I read about the intentional vandalism of a rainbow crosswalk outside Riverview High School earlier this summer. That was my high school. The place where, for four years, I successfully(?) hid who I was out of fear while savouring my first introduction to science and research.

I’ve also had two field work instances where I’ve felt either unsafe or purposefully excluded because I was out (though lots of others where I’ve felt isolated).

– –

Being a queer scientist has been, for me, a series of reconciliations. I still remember when I was told that my out-of-semester research component of my honours thesis (4 weeks counting migrating seabirds in southern New Brunswick) would be *paid*. Until then I had no idea one could be paid to do science. I mean, I obviously knew several professional scientists at the university and the local Canadian Wildlife Service office, but that *I* could be paid to do science was revolutionary. I still remember telling a good friend and mentor, and he simply smiled.

And of course, the process of coming out is one giant reconciliation, of two lives lived in parallel, neither of which was entirely satisfactory. And at the time I first came out (September 2005), the advice included “have some cash, and a place to stay if things go badly”, and was only a few short years after Mathew Shepard’s murder.

Then for several years I thought I had squared every circle, and was wonderfully out and wonderfully science-ing. But it took meeting a visiting speaker in 2010 for the other shoe to drop: I could be a queer scientist. It seems silly to say, but I’d had no concept of what that meant, how to do it, or why one would even want to. But over lunch, it was like a wall came down (the product, dear reader, is a growing corpus of posts on this increasingly queer blog).

So it’s in this vein that I share with you the latest challenge I find myself facing: my love of rural places, the very places where I find it more challenging to be open and out.

Atlantic Canada has a reputation for being relatively conservative (particularly outside of major centres), strongly religious, and where “the men are men, and the women are too”. Of Canadian regions, it had the lowest support for same-sex marriage in a 2019 poll (PDF). Yes, there are wonderfully accepting pockets, and of course it will have a different level of acceptance than where we currently live, half an hour from central London on a fast train. I just wish it was slightly less awkward for queer folk.

This reconciliation was brought to the fore when I watched the 2017 British film God’s Own Country which, without spoiling, features the struggles of a young Yorkshire farmer, and the two lives he seems forced to lead. I do highly recommended it. Though not parallel, there were definitely glimmers of similarity between myself and Johnny Saxby (though, thankfully, not the drinking to excess), both looking to merge who we are with where we are (or indeed where we might want to be).

– –

On the field work side, it was particularly wonderful to see the British Antarctic Survey’s team at King Edward Point raising the rainbow flag on LGBT STEM Day. And it reminded me how much I ended up code-switching in the field, even through I’m still out, and that’s generally known among my fellow field workers. But I’ve never brought a rainbow flag to the field, though that will change on my next field trip.

And perhaps, eventually, we’ll end up back in Atlantic Canada, queer, happy, and rural.

2019 goals

01 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by Alex Bond in navel gazing, Uncategorized

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goals, year in review

I’ve done an end-of-year “By the Numbers” post for the last 6 years, but last year was the first time I did a looking-forward post on goals for the year ahead. How’d it go?

Well, one of the long-languishing projects got submitted in December. The other remains largely untouched :/

Research kickstarted: tick!

Grant application: err, no. Sigh.

First main supervisor PhD student: Yep! And there’s still a week to apply if anyone’s interested!

Museum digitisation: Oh yeah. Lots of fundraising around this one, but it’s paid off. Hopefully more on this soon.

Natural history paper: not quite.

Genetic barcoding: uh, sorta?

Photography: that’s a hard “no”, sadly.

L&F posts: made 17, which is far more than I thought.

 

So what about 2019?

Get that languishing project off that was missed in 2018 off my desk. I mean honestly, it’s been forever. With a paper submitted in December, this is now my “oldest” active project. Sorry, postdoc supervisors & collaborators… it’s coming, I promise!

Same goes for that grant application. But at least there was some logistical progress (and the granting agency ditched deadlines!).

Build a local group of friends – it always (n = 4) takes me about 2 years to build a group of outside-work friends. A mix of not having kids, not living where I work, and moderate introversion. So far so good for 2019.

Provide better mentorship – I think “mentor” is a title best applied by others to someone who provides mentorship. But ultimately who mentors the mentors? Thoughts on this one gratefully received!

Make STEM (or at least my little corner of it) a better place for queer folk. Part of that is keeping up the same battles, but part of it is also looking to gear up for what’s next on the horizon. There’s some exciting stuff already planned for 2019, but I know I already operate in a very queer-friendly online bubble. Thoughts? Let me know what I might be able to help with.

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and safe 2019 everyone!

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