Series Overview#

In this lecture series we will create a space for new interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary conversations and collaborations across the STEM/Humanities divide in service of an antiracist future by hosting a series of Black scholars who experiment with bridging this gulf in their own work. Through four invited speaker visits, the URI community at large will learn from individual scholars who incorporate the humanities into their STEM scholarship or who examine STEM with a humanist lens. Each talk will illustrate specific scholarly techniques, experiences, and findings that exemplify the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the challenge of racism and the radical possibilities that can stem from integrating these traditionally incongruous approaches.

STEM as Social Justice: Integrating Approaches to Achieve Socially Good Outcomes#

Lauren Quigley#

  • Time: Wednesday Feb 1, 2023 at 4pm

  • Location: Eng045

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and Social Justice issues are often considered disparate if not opposing centers of work for academic and professional pursuits. Students and professionals are typically expected to choose STEM or the social sciences, arts and humanities as separate and distinct categories of work that are difficult to intermingle. Aside from public health, disciplines that center equity, human and civil rights, history, and sociology are situated conceptually and physically apart in curriculum, libraries, and university campuses. This leaves the social sciences and social justice far from scientific and technical advances with the most urgent problems facing society as the challenging divide between. Several scholars have contributed research and practice to formally integrate social justice ideas and areas of STEM to critique solutions, propose curriculum, and imagine an interdisciplinary future. This talk will explore and reframe STEM process, products, and knowledge through the lens of social justice as a possible path toward the Beloved Community and STEM for human and social good.

Lauren Quigley, PhD is a Research Scientist leading social impact projects at the intersection of technology, data, and social justice. Her work aims to answer two broad questions: who gets to be an engineer/technologist? and what good can technology do? To achieve these goals her work focuses on identity and critical theory use in engineering education and data-centric solutions for social justice. Lauren has authored several peer-reviewed publications and has led international STEM education programs in higher education and industry. Lauren earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Spelman College, Master of Science degree in Optical Engineering from Norfolk State University, and PhD in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. She is currently a Research Scientist at IBM Research in the Responsible and Inclusive Technologies group and Affiliate Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering.

A double consciousness: my journey in data science#

Ashia Wilson#

  • Time: Thursday Mar 2, 2023 at 4pm

  • Location: Anchor Room at the Welcome Center

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on” in fetishized exceptionalism and pity. “One ever feels [her] twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” This statement was written by Du Bois in his book “Souls of Black folks” and was amended by me. In this talk, I will reflect on how this sentiment describes my experience as a data scientist.

Ashia Wilson joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT as a Lister Brothers Career Development Assistant Professor in January 2021. Wilson received her PhD in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. Her research centers upon optimization, algorithmic decision making, dynamical systems, and fairness within large scale machine learning. A National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Wilson has received the NeurIPS ’17 Spotlight Paper Award for The Marginal Value of Adaptive Methods in Machine Learning, and has performed research with Microsoft and Google AI. Her papers have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, and in the International Conference of Machine Learning, among others. Additionally, she has served as a reviewer for NeurIPS and the Journal of Machine Learning.

Sweetness, Laboratory Life, and Social Death: The Problem of Diversity#

James Doucet-Battle#

  • Time: Wednesday Mar 29, 2023 at 4pm

  • Location: Honors Auditorium in Lippit

James Doucet- Battle will present an overview of his scholarly journey beginning with his first book, Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (Minnesota 2021), and how this research informs his examination of the bioethical intersections of race, science, technology. He argues that the lack of underrepresented diversity among students and researchers in STEMM and STS raises larger questions of justice that supersede extant discourses centered on consent and inclusion. Toward addressing the diversity gap in STEMM and STS, Doucet-Battle will discuss collaborative efforts of the Science and Justice Research Center (SJRC), the Genomics Institute (GI) at UCSC, and North Carolina A&T State University to create bidirectional pathways for attracting HBCU students for graduate study at the University of California. Drawing from Latour, Patterson, and DuBois, he will bring this discussion full circle to outline his current project, Laboratory Life and Social Death: The Problem of Diversity in Science and Society.

James Doucet-Battle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley/University San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of science, technology and society studies, development studies and anthropological approaches to health and medicine. He applies these interests to study the political economy of genomic discourses about race, risk, and health disparities.

Eutrophic Estuaries and Racist Systems, A love story#

Tiara Moore#

  • Time: Thursday Apr 13, 2023 at 4pm

  • Location: Coastal Institute’s Auditorium at GSO

Nutrient pollution has been impacting coastal ecosystems like estuaries causing devastating impacts for decades. Biodiversity loss, habitat destruction and reduction of natural resources are among these major impacts. Similarly, racism has been impacting every ecosystem causing devastating social impacts for centuries. Mass murders, community destruction, and reduction of social resources are among these major impacts. Working at the intersection of these spaces, Dr. Tiara Moore has found a way to turn trauma into triumph.

Originally from Greenwood, South Carolina, Dr. Tiara Moore completed her B.S. in Biology in 2011 at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where she developed an interest in marine science during a research trip in Costa Rica. She received her M.S. in Biology with a concentration in Environmental Science in 2013 from Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, where she conducted research on the water quality of the Chesapeake Bay linking sediment oxygen demand and nutrient cycling to the eutrophication of the Bay.

After completing her M.S., she spent 2 months in Bali, Indonesia identifying the diversity and abundance of meiofauna in marine sediments across the coral triangle. Dr. Moore earned her PhD in Biology from UCLA, where she conducted research in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, Carpinteria Salt Marsh, and Upper Newport Bay. In Mo’orea, she observed the effects sedimentation and nutrient pollution have on the proliferation of coral reef macroalgae. In Carpinteria and Newport, she explored the effects of macroalgal decomposition on sediment biogeochemistry and the microbial community using environmental DNA (eDNA) to assess the biodiversity of entire ecosystems with only a soil sample. Dr. Moore completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington and The Nature Conservancy where she used soil eDNA to develop a biodiversity census of Ellsworth Forest comparing species diversity across management treatments over the past 10 years.

Currently, Dr. Moore is the Black In Marine Science Program Lead at The Nature Conservancy. Inside and outside of the lab, Dr. Moore hopes her research in biodiversity will translate to increasing the overall diversity in science. She dedicates her time to mentoring minority women in the lab and in after school programs. Founder of A WOC SPACE, Dr. Moore aspires to make a safe and inclusive workplace for women of color (WOC) through WOCShops, individual personal trainings, and community outreach. To round things off Dr. Moore combines her experiences as a WOC Scientist with her upbeat personality in her Academic Standup Shows, both communicating science and the struggles of being a minority in STEM.

Closing Panel & Reception#

  • Time: April 19th, 2023 4-5:30pm

  • Location: Hope room @ welcome center

The series will culminate in a final hybrid panel discussion and reception where all speakers will engage one another on this theme, and the URI community will gather to sustain the momentum of the series and innovation sessions and to collectively imagine the path forward for our scholarly work.