SciOut18 Flash Talk: Kyle Marian Viterbo
https://rockedu.rockefeller.edu/new_outreach/flash-talk-kyle-marian-viterbo/

Thank you so much for having me! I threw out my script too just because I feel like everything that I started writing out everyone was already saying in this room so I'll just start with I used to be a scientist for seven years. I did a lot of excavations out in Spain where once every month we would open the doors towards the end of the term to be able to invite communities from outside families to spend their Sunday just like watching archeologist, paleontologists, geologists, paleoanthropologists working together sort of like a human zoo. And there was one time early on in my SciComm career where I was still a scientist, I hadn't been trained in science communication at that time, where I decided well actually the director was like oh I have two foreigners who you know speak Spanish well enough so they'll lead the tour for everybody else. I was really nervous because obviously I didn't have the right kind of training to be able to properly translate why our research matters to the people that are coming in, who are people from Madrid families from neighboring small towns and so I'm going through the first field site and this wonderful multi-generational family of grandparents, little grandchildren running around, and their parents came with me. And as I'm talking about one of the field sites the old man with the cane comes up to me and he's just like "okay pero porque me quitandes todo este de mis memorias? Why are you taking away all of my memories? I grew up in this town and all you're doing is digging away the hills that my children should be playing with that, my grandchildren should be playing in" and I don't know about you but I'm a Filipino so to have a descendent of my colonizers who had 300 years erased our culture from the indigenous indigenous people in my country to then ask me how it feels to have their culture taken away. I'm sorry was my answer because my answer was tied to sympathy and empathy and I was also so aware that I'm not the right person to be talking to you about why our research is destructive but is valuable for you as well. That was my privilege and that was my own awareness of ok for this moment I can at least open the discussion to beyond these are the benefits that you're getting from doing research in your country in your background in your backyard. Even though we're destroying it I can at least talk to you about the true nature of science inquiry. But yes so much of it has been destructive and a lot of it tied to people of color, to minorities, to people who've been oppressed for years. J Marion Sims and gynecology and the history of torturing black slaves to be able to benefit the progress of science right? But you don't often get a chance to share that and so in that moment I turned it into a conversation about the process of science because that's what he needed. He didn't need me to tell him that what we were doing was somehow beneficial because these things are the things that we were finding are gonna end up in their Museum and so that's my first example of really actively listening to the people that you're supposed to be doing science outreach for. Whether or not they're the community that you're going to in their spaces just because you as a person go into a new space doesn't mean you're actually connecting with them and I see this time and again over and over. You see scientists who you know need different ways to be able to get to a point where they are adaptable enough no matter who they're talking to just get thrown into a new space that they're not prepared for and then end up giving the speech or the lecture that they've just prepared without being able to truly listen to the people in front of them and it's a missed opportunity to be able to build back and forth. The difference between what people think about what dialogue is where you're kind of just talking and letting people ask questions is not the same as you as a person in power asking and conversing with the other person on the other side and actually wanting to learn from them I kind of wonder how many people in the room who have job opportunities, funding opportunities, opportunities for someone to do outreach with your people actually ask the people in the communities that you're gonna do it for so your target audience do any how many people actually involve them in the creation of the content that you're in the structure that you're making? Great, mostly women. And I have to say too that like I kind of wish that I had the adaptable training like I as someone who used to be a scientist is now a science communicator but also heavily dabbles in comedy both in improv and standup outside of my silos of academia I have learned so much more from people outside with similar problems than I have in academia trying to solve the science outreach questions that I keep asking especially tied to diversity and inclusivity. It's so important to get out of those spaces because sometimes the solution to your problem someone else is already asking somewhere else and finding a solution for but we keep finding ourselves in the same circles of work where you're only tapping into the network that you're aware of instead of maybe asking the other diverse people in the room you I know you I know you so well that I know there might be someone else in your community outside of the sciences, the academia, outside of science outreach practitioning that would be beneficial for this. So my example would be the queer attraction lab that I produced for guerrilla science, specifically for a diverse group of queer folk and I structured it so that I knew I had a barrier to being able to put this up because I needed to gain the trust of queer people so that means I'm not the right person to be standing in front of those people to tell them this is how science applies to your dating and love lives especially when so much of science have erased them from research right. So I structured it so that the first event that I ran was a hetero version of attraction lab that was split into two parts: one section was for the daters, another section was for any couple or someone who brings in their partner and even though the idea was that we were bringing in a hetero community so many of the couples and partners that were in that space where queer folk who were like this is amazing, this completely applies to me and I would love to have one that's just for the community and then I took those learnings and built it to the next one so that I knew that my my hosts and my scientists had to be queer people. So I ended up having two trans folk who knew how to speak to their community and who knew exactly how the science goes into everyone's everyday lives in a way that they're not aware of. But likewise it also opened it up to the painful conversation of why people who are asexual aren't even studied and researched so do they even exist in science? People who don't normally get and you know get questions asked about them and so it opened the conversation more beyond just how sexy and fun science can be for everybody but also how the scientific inquiry can be changed if more diverse people can be in it and that anyone can also apply it to their lives. Time? Okay that's my time. Anybody? Oh sorry. Hi! My name is Helen Chang. I'm from New York Sea Grant and I had a question about that was a great presentation I really enjoyed it. I had a question posed to all the present presenters. So I feel like a lot of people are really ingrained in their ways and their behaviors and so there's this wall of distrust especially towards the science community and I wonder how we can sort of break down those walls so that this trust is reestablished and that there that science is you know a trusted source. The people who run focus groups, do you train up your facilitators to recognize when people start using their power over other speakers so that you can lessen that whole idea of I'm the expert and then you know just listen to me because I have the answers to what you're saying or you know are trying to recognize in those moments where you're creating a space for true communication between people with different powers knowledge bases where you can convince the experts in the room that like lay persons are also experts in a way that involve their you know they inform their own research because those moments are easy to do on a one-on-one especially if you've trained yourself enough to be aware of your own biases and your own privilege right? At least in my personal experience for example at guerrilla science I'm really great for grateful for someone like Marc who's my boss who in a space where producers are pitching ideas he sees my face start to crunch up because I don't notice it but it's a gut reaction for me as a person of color being like ooh that sounds so not good and then encouraging me enough to be like your voice matters you know share it share why share why you're feeling so uncomfortable right now. So I don't know any of the other presenters. I was just gonna follow up on that; do you have examples of that type of training that we can seek out or places where it's publicly available or if you guys have it is it publicly available at all? For facilitators you mean? Well I did my masters in science communication and public engagement at the University of Edinburgh and there is a Beltane network that provides training for scientists, for science policymakers to be better able to build community facilitation events like that and they have published a couple of PDFs and books that I could share with you tied to how to create those spaces so that you actually build understanding and it also defines the differences between things like you know the benefits and the pros and cons of what dialogue is, what debate does, what deliberation does from a social science perspective.