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Hawai'i

Misria
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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

Kauri burl-as-tumor

tschuetz
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Upon entering the Formosa Plastics Group Museum in Taoyuan, Taiwan, the first thing that visitors see is a large piece of wood, kept under a dome of glass. The label at the bottom reads:

This magnificent piece of New Zealand Kauri burl had been buried in the ground for more than fifty thousand years before being unearthed. The timber is a rare hard resin-filled solid wood. This beautifully-shaped burl weighs 8.5 tons, well over the the 6 ton piece held by the British Museum in London, making it unique in the world. In 2002, Chairman Wang Yung-ching came across the Kauri burl in Kaohsiung and was drawn to its strength so much that he decided to make this Kauri burl the centerpiece of his collection. This remarkable piece of wood on display here at the entrance to the museum symbolizes the vitality of the Formosa Plastics Group capable of immeasurable possibilities. and longevity.

I later learned that a burl is considered a tree's natural response to "some form of stress such as an injury or a viral or fungal infection" (Wikipedia). I also looked up the Mandarin translation for burl, which is 瘤 (liú). This term can mean hump, knurl, lump, nubble, or tumor. The latter invokes environmental and health impacts, such as high cancer rates in petrochemical fenceline communities. However, these issues are not addressed in the museum. Instead, the piece of wood is paired with an all-plastic recreation of a New Zealand rainforest in the museum's B1 gift shop. This recreation includes chirping bird sound effects, leaving visitors with a greenwashed first and last impression.

However, one way to capture the ambivalent meaning of the object at the center of the museum is through Kim Fortun's (2019) reflection on "toxic vitalism," a term that describes "the way systems can take on a life of their own, often beyond what experts planned or expected.

further queries

ntanio
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1. In the different instances of PECE (D-STS/TAF/etc.) are the artifacts/essays you have created in once instance available to cite/share in another? For example, how would you link an essay built for VTP into a TAF-California essay?

2. How to navigate the various levels of restriction remains unclear to me. For example, if I want to share and build an essay with a research partner but the project is not ready for prime time, how do I set restrictions to share work in progress? Is there a way for me to do a quality control tests to see how an essay looks to not-me participants.

3. I want to use PECE to build an annotated bibliography that typically addresses Traweek's 5 key aspects of a reading. Importing the citation to zotero is easy, and typically I would add notes to the zotero file, but if I want a more uniform notetaking and accessible bibliography PECE seems to be a better fit. For any given project how should I go about building a PECE essay that would be consistently allow new citations to be added along with ongoing and layered/laminated annotations?

Expectations of data management

ntanio
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Most of my experience is not with funders but with IRB. In multiple IRB applications I have had to assert that data will not be shared and in fact will be stored on a hard drive that is not connected to the internet in a locked environment to protect the privacy of research participants. This may be because much of my research to date has involved minors in and outside classroom learning environments. However even on team projects where sharing data is assumed, we have has to assert that data will be stored offline except during short periods when using a qualitative analytic program like Dedoose.