Outsiders: Stories about seeing things from the outside
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2019
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we present stories from two scientists who were confronted with their status as an “outsider.”
Part 1: After getting hit by a car, Ph.D. student Reyhaneh Maktoufi must navigate the recovery and paperwork as an immigrant from Iran.
Part 2: When scientist Danielle Lee travels to Tanzania to study pouched rats, she finds she's more of an outsider than she'd expected.
Reyhaneh is a Ph.D. candidate in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. Her main fields of interest are science communication, curiosity, and public engagement with scientists. She is a visiting researcher at the Adler Planetarium, where she studies science communication and facilitates workshops on communication skills. Before starting a Ph.D., Rey has been working as a health communication facilitator and campaign manager in Tehran, Iran. She also produces comics and videos about science and the science of science communication. In her free time, Rey enjoys staring at a wall and making up stories in her head or play bad ukulele and scare off birds while singing high pitch.
Danielle N. Lee is an outreach scientist who studies animal behavior and behavioral ecology. She studies the behaviors of mice and rats in the Metro St. Louis area and the natural history of African giant pouched rats. Lee was selected as a 2015 TED Fellow and was named as one of EBONY Magazine’s Power 100 and a White House Champion of Change in STEM Diversity and Access. Her current science outreach efforts emphasize engagement with broader audiences via science communication. In 2013, Lee helped found the National Science & Technology News Service, a media literacy initiative to bring more science news to African-American audiences and promote science news source diversity in mainstream media.
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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. |
| 0:25.7 | Welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:30.2 | We are your host, Erin Barker. |
| 0:32.1 | And Liz Neely. |
| 0:33.4 | And this week we're presenting stories about feeling like outsiders. |
| 0:37.8 | Oh, which is one near and dear to my heart. This is definitely something I grew up feeling. |
| 0:44.8 | Oh, how's so? Well, I mean, like, a simple question, like, where are you from? Makes me freeze, right? Like, my shoulders come up and I kind of stumble every time. And then I do the whole like, oh, you know, I'm from everywhere. I moved every two years my whole life. But yeah, like growing up in the Air Force, like I did, it meant I never stayed in one school for very long. I never had like a set group of friends. I didn't have a |
| 1:11.3 | hometown. Yeah, I feel like the perpetual outsider. I see. It's hard to imagine the Liz |
| 1:18.6 | Neely as an outsider. I feel like the Liz Neely is a construct. No, what I mean? I felt it too. |
| 1:26.4 | Like after I left science, it was like, |
| 1:28.4 | well, I'm not a journalist, but I'm not a scientist. And then I joined Story Collider, and I was like, |
| 1:33.8 | well, I'm not a performer and I'm not a New Yorker. I'm surrounded by all these super cool people. |
| 1:41.1 | I carry baggage, Erin. I carry baggage. We all do. We see this a lot at StoryQuiliter. We see |
| 1:46.9 | folks who are, you know, really into art and also science. And maybe they feel like an outsider |
| 1:52.6 | and one or the other. But at Story Collider, everybody is an insider. It's a great thing about it. |
| 2:00.3 | No, I mean, like, but it is really interesting, right? Like, |
... |
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