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Hawai'i

Misria

The ASTROMOVES project captures the career decision-making of astrophysicists and those in adjacent sciences, with particular attention to ‘intersectional’ identities, sex/gender diversity and visible/invisible disabilities. Qualitative interviews were recorded online (due to the Pandemic) and each scientist was assigned an Indigenous Hawaiian pseudonym. This was a subversive move to remind astrophysicists of the enormous debt they owe to the Hawaiian people for the use of their sacred mountain tops. All of the scientists consented to having a Hawaiian name. Seven scientists chose their own pseudonyms, most were Hawaiian place names: Maui, Waikiki, Waiheke, and Holualoa. Two Brazilians likewise chose Indigenous place names: Caramuru and Paraguaçu. The last name chosen was Kū'oko'a. Kū'oko'a is the Hawaiian concept of freedom, of which I was unaware. When questioned by editors, I had to evoke my Oahu birth as my right to use Hawaiian pseudonyms. For my visualizations, I chose to not use the Mercator projection which artificially enlarges Europe, instead I use the Peters projection or equal area map. Thus, Europe is de-emphasized by showing its area relative to the rest of the world. 

Holbrook, Jarita. 2023. "Visualizing Astrophysicists’ Careers." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11

Data direct us

tschuetz

"Instead of treating data as independent sources, we should be asking, Where do data direct us, and who might help us understand their origins as well as their sites of potential impact? The implications of these questions are threefold. For practitioners who want to work with data, understanding local conditions can dispel the dangerous illusion that any data offer what science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway calls “the view from nowhere.”For students and scholars, attention to the local offers an opportunity to compare diverse cultures through the data that they make or use. Finally, local perspectives on data can awaken new forms of social advocacy. For wherever data are used, local communities of producers, users, and even nonusers are affected." (p. 3)