Tag / history

by shannonchance

Racism in Science and Society

I just attended an online event called “Racism in Science and Society”. It involved an hour-long interview with Angela Saini, and it was supported by six or so organizations in Ireland, including Women in Research Ireland (WiRI) which a colleague of mine from the Marie Curie Alumni Association, Dr. Susan Fetics, helped establish. Susan was one of the moderators today.

Last social gathering of Marie Curie Alumni Association’s Irish chapter before Covid shut things down. Shannon Chance and Susan Feltics shown here. Susan was one of the organizers for today’s event.

I’ve read half of Siani’s book “Superior: The Return of Race Science” and have heard her speak in the past about this book as well and her prior book, “Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong“. I’ve heard Saini speak twice in person at UCL and 2 or 3 times now online.

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Angela Saini and the cover of her 2019 book.

Interestingly, Saini has two different master’s degrees, the first in Engineering from the University of Oxford and a second in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Since I research engineering education and I also taught at a Historically Black College/University in the States for 15 years, I follow her work closely. Simply put: it’s close to my heart.

In this blog, I share content from Tweets I posted during the event. I’m sharing this because the event wasn’t recorded, so I wanted a way for others to learn about the topic and what went on today.

The event was well-organized and they sent helpful reminders. The hosts of this online event even provided a sign language interpreter. I wondered: if this method was more effective than auto-captioning?

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The host, speaker, and sign language interpreter.

Siani said medicine is keeping race science alive today, more than any other area. Medicine perpetuates the belief in genetic differences that don’t exist. Genetics is the last place to look, she insists, it’s best to look first at social and cultural factors.

Histories of oppression have led to differences in health outcomes, not underlying genetics.

But, even now during Covid, people jump straight to the racial myths, Saini says.

Saini says some of the most promising work to rectify racial myths in medicine is happening in the USA, as there is the recognition that racism is still occurring. There’s more happening in the USA than in Britain and elsewhere in the world, she believes, as in the UK (where she lives and grew up) there is clear reluctance to accept how pervasive racism is.

Incidentally, Saini is of Indian heritage and grew up classified as black in the UK, I learned from her book. This helped me understand why a UK-based collegiate of mine calls herself black, whereas she’d probably use a different term if she were of Indian heritage and living in the USA.

These ideas about race are steeped into us from a very young age. It’s all about power, she says. The dominant group frames their dominance as if they have some innate… superiority.

Saini left Twitter earlier this year due to experiencing abuse, which explains why I couldn’t locate her to tag her. Those with extreme views try to engage journalists and scientists via social media, and suck them dry. They and the algorithms they use are clever; often they have few followers but they cause frustration because they aren’t going to change their opinions but they demand ongoing conversation, they dish out abuse, and they drain energy that can go to something more productive.

Of course, for those without other outlets (Saini is a very well-known journalist in Britain), social media does give us a voice, she acknowledges.

I, for one, miss having her on Twitter.

She helped found “Race and Health” @raceandhealth, a group that looks at issues identified above.

Saini says she wrote “Superior” to get things straight in her head. She hopes readers share in some of this clarity she found by writing it.

She spoke about being surprised things have changed so fast right following the death of George Floyd, such as the re-naming of lecture halls and theaters.

I, myself, have seen Floyd’s murder as a tipping point. I’d been expecting things to boil over in the US–I envisioned another summer of 1968 as the only way that an adequate level of change would happen. Things just weren’t improving fast enough. It was one of the frustrations that caused me to leave the USA and move to Europe. I am glad to finally see change, but I am sad that it’s going to be painful to acknowledge the past and heal.

Recently, UCL announced, via campus-wide email I received, that it is changing names of a building and a lecture hall. Eugenics and race-science had a home at UCL, and the university is seeking to right some wrongs.

Saini says that universities need better systems of accountability; the balance of power in universities is still out of whack. Accountability has to come from the top. Groups like the ones hosting this session today need to work together to lobby universities for better accountability, she says.

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The sponsors for today’s event.

She ended by saying that our societies need to change through education and by teaching empathy from a young age.

I was glad to hear Saini say this, as my colleague, Dr. Carlos Mora, and I are working to study empathy in engineering education. And in a similar vein, I’m working to create a special focus issue on empathy in engineering practice and education to be released next spring.

by shannonchance

Learning London: At the lovely Bethnal Green library

img_5776Aongus and I stopped by the public library in Bethnal Green over the weekend since I wanted to show him its glorious architecture. It’s in the park we traverse en route to the Central Line Tube Station. The woodwork and the natural lighting in the reading rooms are superb.

And since Aongus selected a new thriller from the shelf, it freed the copy of “Brooklyn” he was carrying along in his bag. I dug it out of his bag on the Tube and read much of it in the course of over our weekend adventures. Granted, I normally read non-fiction since it’s much less addictive. Once I get started with a novel, I can’t put it down.

img_6125As such, I’m nearly finished reading the novel now. It is, as you probably recall from the contemporary motion picture by the same name, about a young Irish woman who boldly moves, alone, across the Atlantic to start a new life. I empathize with her experiences and I recognize many of the places she describes–both in Brooklyn and around Enniscorthy town and county Wexford, her original home. I’ve enjoyed both the book and the feature film but have learned more about Ireland form the book.

Aongus borrowed the paperback of “Brooklyn” from the Idea Store in Whitechapel–a modern edifice but also lovely. It was designed by architect Sir David Adjaye, who we learned much more about later in the weekend while visiting the Desing Museum. More on his exhibition in a future blog!

In any case, Aongus and I are very lucky to live near great libraries here in London!

by shannonchance

Research Methods of Philosophers

Philosophy symposium 1

Philosophers sometimes use primary documents in ways not much different from the historians I mentioned in my previous blog. According to Yale:

Primary sources provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. They are created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented. Often these sources are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later. Primary sources are characterized by their content, regardless of whether they are available in original format, in microfilm/microfiche, in digital format, or in published format.

For historians, primary documents include photographs, letters, news clippings and the like. For philosophers, I’d say they could include original texts where an idea first appeared in written form. As a social science researcher, I myself am collecting audio-taped testimonies of female students who have first-hand experience of first-year engineering education. All three of these examples–philosophy, history, and social science research–involve high levels of interpretation of documents, ideas, and stories contributed by others.

Whereas my historian friend, Cecilia Hartsell, is investigating phenomena that include both the 1916 Uprising as well as the return of soldiers from WWI, my colleagues in philosophy spent a recent weekend discussing the phenomena of intentionality and normativity. These historians and philosophers seek to understand the context of events and ideas arising in the past, and what the authors of various documents meant at the time they spoke, or wrote.

 

february-workshopI joined a group of philosophers for a February 19-20, 2016 seminar that explored various aspects of phenomenology. The event was hosted by the School of Philosophy at the University College of Dublin but held at Newman House, on Saint Stephen’s Green in Dublin.

Attending the seminar, I learned much more about phenomenology. I also learned more about the way philosophers think, study, generate new knowledge and new understandings, communicate with each other, test ideas, and seek to uncover the complex meanings embedded in writings by philosophers throughout the ages.

I am indebted to Prof. Dermot Moran and Dr. Elisa Magrì for inviting the public to their event so that I could attend, and to DIT’s new PhD student, Diana Adela Martin, for notifying me about the event.

Much of the discussion focused on phenomenology, which is both a philosophy and a social science research methodology. I’m currently using the methodology to study women’s experiences of STEM education, and will submit later this week a manuscript on another phenomenological research study of teachers’ experiences working together to implement Problem-Based Learning at Dublin Institute of Technology.

Related to experience, I must admit that visiting Newman House was an exquisite one. In this house, John Henry Newman founded University College Dublin (originally called the Catholic University of Ireland). I believe that he later became a cardinal and was beatified by the Catholic Church, despite the fact that his views did not always match the official sanctioned interpretations of the Church. Today, one can visit Newman Houses on campuses world wide, like the one I attended while a student at Virginia Tech. I’ve attached photos of the formal entry hall at UCD’s Newman House, for your enjoyment. I got so caught up in discussions at each coffee break that I never made it all the way to the lovely formal garden behind the house. Maybe next time!

by shannonchance

Fulbrighting at Glasnevin Cemetery

Hanging out with Daniel O'Connell. My photography exhibition was held in the house where he used to live, on Merrion Square.

Hanging out with Daniel O’Connell. My photography exhibition was held in the house where he used to live, on Merrion Square.

Our Fulbright shin dig included a visit to Glasnevin Cemetery.  I’d spent about an hour here, just outside the gate, one evening near Halloween when Esther was visiting. That was part of the (very worthwhile and historically accurate) Ghost bus tour and we followed it up with a visit to John Kavanagh’s “Gravediggers” pub.

The cemetery itself was started outside the city, at the same time the same thing was happening all over the USA. The American cemetery movement actually sparked the American park movement, believe it or not.  The historian J. B. Jackson explains that people found they loved going to the suburban cemeteries — which were new and had wide open (corpse-free) spaces.  These early cemeteries were well-designed and had beautiful architectural features, as you can see on the home page for Thornrose Cemetery where my grandparents lay today.  In any case, in the ten year period of the Civil War, nearly every American city built a “central” park, and Frederick Law Olmstead’s office designed many of them… and many college campuses too.

Wikipedia has some of the most interesting info online regarding this particular cemetery:

Glasnevin Cemetery (Irish: Reilig Ghlas Naíon), officially known as Prospect Cemetery, is the largest non-denominational cemetery in Ireland with an estimated 1.5 million burials.[1] It first opened in 1832, and is located in Glasnevin, Dublin.

The stories I heard on our tour of the cemetery brought to life for me the history of Michael Collins and Daniel O’Connell, two of Ireland’s most important political figures. Éamon de Valera and Countess Markievicz are also buried here.

The 2012-13 Fulbright Ireland crew…
…visiting Michael Collins grave…
…at the famous Glasnevin Cemetery.
Michael Collins grave…
…draws a crowd and is visited…
…each and every day of the year.
There’s also a monument here…
dedicated to Daniel O’Connell.
Although he was a pacifist…
..his monument was bombed by Loyalists.
And today there is still no stair to the top.
We learned about the man…
..and the history of this place.
In times of disease, they sealed coffins like these carefully to keep illness from spreading.
Countess Markevicz, the first elected female minister, is buried here.
We learned about mass graves…
..and famous writers.
We visited the oldest grave…
…and learned how they’d bought remains of a famous person from the UK here, to convince people to use this cemetery.
Today there’s massive restoration work…
…being done…
…to rectify the lack…
…of proper foundations.

by shannonchance

Reflections on Francis Hutcheson

This is the plaque that Fergus Whelan posted on the stair tower at the Church on Mary Street (a religious building now operated as a bar and restaurant). The plaque honors Francis Hutcheson, “Father of the Scottish Enlightenment,” whose ideas made their way into the US Declaration of Independence.

The plaque’s coverings catch refections of the buildings across the intersection, at the west end of Henry Street. Here you see Primark’s world headquarters (the lovely red brick building with the patina-ed copper dome) to the right of Francis’ likeness.

Francis Hutchenson plaque

by shannonchance

History Lessons (for the Irish, Italian, Tunisian, English and American crowd)

Fergus Wheelan is a walking archive of Irish history and politics.  He’s a self-made historian who brings complex history to life and makes it simple to understand.  Every guest who visits I find reading his book, Dissent into Treason. It’s available from Amazon in the US. I can’t fathom the amount of time he spent in libraries and archives research this book — nor the time it took to understand, structure, and explain the information in such an enlightening way.

It’s no wonder Fergus drawn to the Cobblestone Pub, a place operated by Tom Mulligan (a man with a degree in Irish history and policies himself).

Every visit to the Cobblestone is a lesson in tradition for me.

Last week, I had more friends in tow.  Here you see Toni Grey (an English friend who retired to Tunisia many moons ago) and her Italian boyfriend, Toni and Giuseppe Conte.

Incidentally, Giuseppe rents apartments and B&B rooms in Rome.  I visited one of the apartments and found it to be quite charming and extremely well located (near Campo de’ Fiori).  You can contact Giuseppe at <g.conte@promedinternational.com> for more information.

Headed to the Cobblestone with Toni and Giuseppe.
My English/Tunisian and Italian friends at the Cobblestone Pub.
We were too far from the musicians’ corner to hear what was going on, so I asked Fergus to come sing us some tunes.
And, of course, he told some stories.
And we learned more about the history of Irish religion and politics.

by shannonchance

Irish Roots

Image of Cobh downloaded from the Visit Cobh website.

Image of Cobh downloaded from the Visit Cobh website.

Recently, I’ve uncovered more and more roots to my family tree in Ireland.

For me, it starts with my great grandmother, Teresa Neenan. She was a smart, spry, and energetic woman who was a dear part of my early life. We called her “Nanny” and spent a number of holidays with her.  I vividly recall images from an Easter she spent in Staunton, Virginia (my parents’ home town).

My great grandmother was born in Astee and christened in Ballybunnion (in Co. Kerry) in 1890. She left Cobh (in Co. Cork) in 1912. Like so many others, my great grandmother left Ireland when times were very hard, and opportunities limited.

Nanny left Ireland as Bridget Neenan and emerged from Ellis Island as Teresa Neenan. (There seems to be a data entry error in the records at Ellis Island, as someone translated the into n into an M somewhere along the way.  Fortunately, it’s spelled properly on the wall at Ellis Island.)

In the States, Teresa married “Beppie” O’Mara who owned a taxicab company in Millburn, New Jersey.  They had four girls, including my grandmother Alice who was born in 1916.  That was a pivotal year in history when Ireland began its final quest for independence….

I visited Cobh recently and saw the breathtaking neo-Gothic cathedral that marks the summit of the town.  I have enjoyed my visits to Cobh immensely.  It’s amazing to realize that this Fulbright scholarship brought me back to Nanny’s homeland. It’s a land that has become my spiritual home.  The welcome I have received here has been inspiring and heartwarming.  I hope Nanny would be proud.

My mom and I look forward to visiting our “cousins” in Kerry in May.  We’ll get to retrace more of our roots then and meet even more family!

by shannonchance

Marking History with Fergus and Francis

Fergus Whelan, Jerry Crilly, Tom Mulligan, and Shannon Chance at the Cobblestone last night.

Fergus Whelan, Jerry Crilly, Tom Mulligan, and Shannon Chance at the Cobblestone last night.

Kevin Donleavy  had written me to inquire about the plaque I mentioned in the blog post “Peace in Ireland.”  Last night I had the chance to learn a little more.

I was at the Cobblestone to meet Jerry regarding a little Christmas project we’ve got in the works.

And Fergus Whelan, the organizer of the December 1 event, happened to be there too.

The plaque, Fergus explained, was to honor Francis Hutchinson who was born in Northern Ireland but died in Dublin.  No grave marker had  ever been installed.

Plaque for Francis Hutcheson. You can click on the image to see a larger version.(Photo provided by Fergus Whelan.)

Plaque for Francis Hutcheson. Please click on the image to see a larger version. (Photo provided by Fergus Whelan.)

Fergus has righted this oversight.  A plaque now shines near the church on Mary Street in Dublin.  This group unveiled it on December 1, 2012 — the day I met them in the Cobblestone.

The December 1 events commemorated that remarkable man, Francis Hutchinson, who, among other things, influenced the American Declaration of Independence.  He did so via his friend Thomas Jefferson.  The plaque is well worth a read!

The December 1 event was so very striking, however, because the group of men gathered on that night had travelled down together in a single bus from Northern Ireland (where Hutchinson was born).  This morning Fergus sent me an email with photos, saying:

Hi Shannon

As explained the group shot are formers prisoners from both sides i.e. loyalist and republican. They came to Dublin to be present for the unveiling of the plaque.

Best, Fergus

Fergus asked these folks to travel down to Dublin together, on one bus, and to attend events together celebrating the life of Francis Hutchinson.  They put aside decades of ill will and united for this cause… because Fergus asked them to come.

I know this story will matter to Kevin Donleavy.  He has a similar project underway (that I’ll tell you about in due time).

What amazing experiences — sharing evenings with people who have such divergent points of view and yet finding unity within them. I’m thankful for Fulbright and thankful for my friends at the Cobblestone pub.

The group from the north of Ireland who came for the unveiling. (Photo provided by Fergus Whelan.)

The group from the north of Ireland who came for the unveiling. (Photo provided by Fergus Whelan.)

Pat Goode singing at the Cobblestone after the plaque unveiling. (Photo provided by Fergus Whelan.)
Jerry learning to use ” ” in conversation last night. He still needs some work!
Jerry’s song “I could have been a giant said the bonsai tree….”
Meeting musician and Irish track star Linda Maye.