Identity Crisis: Stories about what makes us who we are
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2020
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we present two stories about people struggling with their identity.
Part 1: When science journalist Katherine Wu interviews a scientist about a new facial recognition algorithm, the conversation turns more personal than she expected.
Part 2: Hurricane Katrina gives Mary Annaise Heglar a new perspective on both her grandfather and home state.
Katherine J. Wu is a Boston-based science journalist and storyteller whose writing has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, Scientific American, NOVA Next, and more. She's also a senior producer for The Story Collider. In 2018, she earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunobiology from Harvard University, where she studied how bacteria deal with stress so she could one day learn to do the same. She can spell "tacocat" backwards.
Mary Annaise Heglar is a climate justice essayist and communications professional based in New York City. Her writing has been published in Vox, Dame Magazine, Zora, and Inverse. She writes regularly on Medium and rants almost daily on Twitter.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | I felt it was right. |
| 0:08.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. We are your host, Aaron Barker. And Liz Neely. And this week, we are presenting stories about what makes us who we are. |
| 0:39.7 | Today's episode is identity crisis. |
| 0:43.7 | And it will probably not surprise any of our listeners. |
| 0:48.9 | It turns out stories are really important for helping us figure out who we are and how we fit into the world. |
| 0:54.3 | Especially for the question of like, how do we fit into science, right? |
| 0:59.4 | Figuring out questions of identity are always challenging because we balance internal and external pressures, |
| 1:04.7 | trying to figure out who we might be and what we might want maps on to what's possible. |
| 1:12.3 | And this is why when we have representations of scientists as being overwhelmingly white and largely male, |
| 1:18.0 | we know that this can discourage students who don't fit into that demographic from seeing science as a thing that people like me, you know, do. And one of, yeah, one of our important |
| 1:24.8 | collaborations in the past few years is with Jeff Shinsky and his colleagues. |
| 1:30.1 | They created a homework assignment. |
| 1:32.6 | It's very simple. |
| 1:33.4 | It's called Scientist Spotlights and uses StoryCollider Stories as well as others from scientists to share the reality of what it's like to go into a career in science or to do research. |
| 1:47.1 | And what they find is that those counter-stereotypical descriptions are really valuable. |
| 1:55.1 | The students who listen to them shift their language, so they don't have as strong of like old attitudes and stereotypes |
| 2:03.0 | about what scientists are like. And they seem to have a greater interest in science, a stronger |
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