Academic Mixtape #20

stuff you might have missed that is worth your time

The case for the science popularizer.

“Teaching the way I wish I was taught: Design and implementation of a class on historically excluded and underrepresented scientists” This is good stuff.

Centering Indigenous Knowledges in ecology and beyond.

In the department of “role models are great, but never have heroes”: It turns out that Alice Munro was aware of her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter, and allowed it to continue. This is put into context well here by Julie Lalonde.

I think this is fascinating stuff about how much variation there is in people about how we process our own internal thoughts. Do you process a silent voice in your head? Some do, some don’t. It’s really funny (to me) but I was deep into adulthood before I realized that when adults tell kids to “use your inside voice” when they’re being loud, they were asking them to just be quiet rather than keep their thoughts inside their heads.

A pep talk for when everything sucks [in the world of politics]

Another piece of “quit lit” from the Chronicle of Higher Education, about another professor who realized that this job is not necessarily the gem that folks can make it out to be.

With climate change accelerating changes in species distributions, what’s the difference between an invasive species and a climate migrant? Here’s a piece of journalism that I think provides lots to think about.

Even the folks who run the science citation reports are saying that the trust and quality are more important than quantitative citation indicators of scientific article performance?

At one point I stopped seeing references to Snopes. I didn’t realize that it had basically gone bad, here’s the story, it’s more interesting than you might suspect.

As Juneteenth rolled around and the statistical authorities in baseball (which apparently is a thing) finally incorporated statistics from Negro Leagues into their records, Reggie Jackson was asked to reflect on what it was like to reflect back on the earlier days in his career, and its a story worth listening to.

“This conceptual paper explores how underlying racialized cultures in academia incentivize People of Color to commodify their racial identity when participating in the faculty job market… we expose how diversity imperatives shape the faculty hiring process at historically white institutions in ways that commodify, exploit, and devalue People of Color.”