Emotionally Swayed Science
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein writes her personal experiences into a blogpost about her life in the scientific realm. Her dreams of becoming a physicist, a cosmologist, and a hero were crushed into feeling a realistic isolation in her professional community, stating that the people in her career are not her people. Although she learned Spanish, attended Harvard, and received her Ph.D., she felt a big distinction between the knitted community and herself due to one major fact that played a role in science: black women discrimination. She had the ideology that science would bring people together without much biasness and much more discoveries because “[s]cience is a social phenomenon, with problems of its own to solve,” yet the racial discrimination in her workplace deters people of color. Prescod-Weinstein compares herself to a successful token for black women representation in science, and the people that are already dominating science in a high rate are white males. She writes the following:
My presence in the field represents a broken barrier, and I often feel that I broke that barrier with my bare hands, even though I know the ancestors began the work long before I was born.
She was able to break a barrier even though she didn’t believe there was “any capitalist workplace really that is a healthy place for Black women.” In her experience, she continues to talk about the difficulties of ethnically marginalized groups in science, and that they can not talk about “the wonders of the night sky without talking about the fact that people are running for their lives beneath the same celestial structures that [she] get[s] paid to think about every day.” Human rights in science is quite opaque in the eyes of the people who are already accepted, and due to the separations between people who are accepted and people who are simply in the field without recognition for their scientific abilities, the role of emotions are only mattered to those who are accepted.
David Kirby’s Evangelizing the Cosmos: Science Documentaries and the Dangers of Wonder Overload addresses the concept of “wonder” and its existence in contemporary science. He states the following in his piece:
Wonder has proven to be a useful means of attracting casual viewers to a science documentary, but such a deep association of science with wonder is problematic; not least ways because of the historic connection between notions of wonder and religious conceptions of nature.
He notes that science is idealized as something wondrous, and that factor contributes to the engagement of the public. However, it pulls us and science as a whole back from what science is supposed to do. Science should not be determined by wonders and religious idealizations of nature, yet some people twist it to fit how they define science. He uses the example of the Cosmos re-boot, and he notes that the series “frequently utilized religious metaphors to help explain scientific ideas such associating DNA with the phrase ‘holy sculpture’ and referring to the physical laws that govern the universe as ‘commandments.’” The Cosmos used the framing tool of wonder and awe and pushes the God’s creation narrative to sway us away from actual science. This puts science at risk of informing the public of how wonder, appreciation, and worship is deciphered.
Reading these two powerful arguments, I can definitely agree with the flaws of modern science. Even discussing amongst classmates can lead to an emotionally swayed scientific discussion, and I have experienced this during my freshman year of college. I understand the narrative that Kirby notes in his writing and can place myself in his shoes, but I will never be able to understand the pain and the trouble of being racially scrutinized as a person of color in my professional career like Prescod-Weinstein. Both concepts from the readings relate to Bucchi’s article, Of deficits, deviations and dialogues: Theories of Public Communication of Science. In this article, Bucchi notes that there is an opaque lens that inadequately reflects/filter scientific facts and that the vision has emphasized “the public’s inability to understand and appreciate the achievements of science due to prejudicial public hostility as well as to misrepresentation by the mass media, and adopts a linear, pedagogical and paternalistic view of communication to argue that the quantity and quality of the public communication of science should be improved” (p. 58). The value and use of emotion in science communication is so grand, and the public must understand that there must be a separation between facts and innate beliefs that are not proven by facts.
References
- Bucchi, M. (2008). Of deficits, deviations and dialogues: Theories of public communication of science. In M. Bucchi & B. Trench (Eds.), Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology (1 edition, pp. 57–76). Routledge. (PDF in D2L)
- Kirby, D. (2015, January 25). Evangelizing the Cosmos: Science Documentaries and the Dangers of Wonder Overload. http://thescienceandentertainmentlab.com/evangelizing-the-cosmos/
- Prescod-Weinstein, C. (2019, March 23). The right to know and understand the night sky. Medium. https://medium.com/@chanda/the-right-to-know-and-understand-the-night-sky-3a9fb4e04d92
