Shafaq Zia Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Shafaq Zia / April 29th 2022 / Alumni News

With ‘Vagina Obscura,’ KSJ Alum Rachel Gross Rewrites the Narrative of the Female Anatomy

How much do we really know about the vagina? In her book, “Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage,” published last month by W. W. Norton, former Knight Science Journalism (KSJ) Fellow Rachel E. Gross makes a compelling case that we don’t know nearly as much as we should.

“Vagina Obscura” is, in many ways, a corrective to that knowledge gap, laying bare the vast disparity between our understanding of the male and the female anatomy. In medicine, the male anatomy has long been used as a standard to understand all bodies. As Gross writes, it was only about 30 years ago that the federal government, pressured by the women’s health movement, required researchers to include women and minorities in clinical research. The female body is still shrouded in mystery because science, a profession that historically excluded women from its ranks, has neglected to ask questions about it.

For her book, Gross set out to ask those questions. She spoke with scientists like Marci Bowers — the first trans women to perform gender affirmation surgery and an innovator who has elevated this science to an artform that helps create beautiful and sensitive vaginas and vulvas. Gross challenged science’s assumptions and biases and told deeply personal stories of scientists who are at the forefront of the shift in the way we think about female anatomy.

KSJ recently spoke with Gross about the inspiration behind her new book, and about the challenges of covering a sensitive, complex topic that scientists still know relatively little about. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

KSJ@MIT: When did you first start thinking about the lack of science on women’s bodies?

Rachel E. Gross: I was the digital science editor for Smithsonian Magazine in 2018, and I was doing a lot of coverage around women in science. I had launched a column on unsung women who shaped science and the history of science. At the same time, I was covering a lot of reproductive health, reproductive biology, and animal sex. And I started to realize that there was an intersection between these two areas of coverage, where there was clearly this dearth of women in the history of science. And once they got into the field, they were asking all these new questions that nobody had thought to ask. Meanwhile, on the reproductive biology and health side, it was clearly behind in many ways and we were still learning this very basic science [of female anatomy], and so I realized that the two things were part of the same problem: The lack of good science on women’s bodies had a lot to do with the lack of women in the history of science.

I like to talk about my body and other bodies. And I definitely like to talk about topics that make other people uncomfortable, which — unfortunately — includes vaginas.

KSJ: Why are you personally drawn to this issue?

RG: I’m the daughter of scientists. My mom is a medical doctor, my dad’s a theoretical physicist, and my step-mom’s a molecular geneticist. So I’ve always been very outspoken, nerdy, and shameless. I like to talk about my body and other bodies. And I definitely like to talk about topics that make other people uncomfortable, which — unfortunately — includes vaginas. So I do think that made me the right person to try and illuminate some of these issues that people get really squeamish about and don’t want to talk directly about.

KSJ: Your book is about the inclusion of female bodies in science. How did you make this book inclusive for people who do not identify with the gender binary?

RG: It did start out as a book about the science of vaginas. But it quickly became apparent that I was talking about a larger constellation of body parts—what we might call the sexual and the reproductive system. And there are so many types of people with so many types of bodies who have these body parts, who resonate with these stories, and who are also part of this narrative. Trans-men, trans-women, non-binary people, intersex people, all of these groups came into the story at some point, and it was really important to me that they felt themselves reflected in its pages. So it really became more about looking at all bodies through the lens of what we’ve historically thought of as a female body.

For instance, there’s a whole chapter on the the history of gender affirmation surgery, and it’s about how a growing understanding of male and female anatomy — and really all the shared anatomy between them — is pushing the advancement of gender affirmation surgery and the surgical creation of vaginas that are aesthetically pleasing, feel pleasure, and have the same sensory qualities as any other vagina. I also talk a lot about the history of endometriosis and how historically it has been seen as a disease that affects career minded, neurotic white women who aren’t having children. And so I made a lot of effort to include how the experience is different for Black and Brown women and for trans-men who have endometriosis, and the stereotyping that affects diagnosis and treatment.

KSJ: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while reporting on this issue?

RG: Well, there were a lot of challenges. I set a really broad mandate for myself in trying to cover most of the organs in the female reproductive system. Each chapter is essentially an entirely different field of science. So it’s not just anatomy, it’s the science of hormones, bioengineering, micro-dissection, and surgery. And having to wrap my head around each of these fields was massively challenging.

Another huge challenge is that, as the title suggests, there is a huge dearth of knowledge about the body parts I’m talking about. So to write a book on the science that we know about these body parts was always going to be difficult. It actually turned out that one of the hardest chapters to structure was the vagina chapter, which was completely ironic because, again, this book was about the science of vaginas, and vaginas are very central [to the book] in more ways than one. I assumed that would actually kind of be the easy chapter… but it turns out that all these very basic questions I had about vagina science have not been answered by anyone. So things as basic as what is the size and shape of the vagina? What is the spectrum of vagina shapes and sizes? How does the vagina change as we age, hit puberty, give birth?

KSJ: What was the most rewarding experience in this process?

RG: Oh my gosh. It’s already been so rewarding. I don’t even know where to start. I have a small example. Patty Brennan, the animal vagina researcher, we’d been talking for a year over zoom because of the pandemic. Together, we spent so many hours delving into her childhood in an all-girls Catholic school in Columbia and how she first came across duck penises and got so involved in illuminating female genitalia and the experiences she’d had with older male colleagues who were so taken aback by her work. So we had all these like really intimate conversations, but I’d never met her. And just as I finished the book and the pandemic restrictions lifted, I was able to go visit her in person at Mount Holyoke University and we dissected some snake vaginas together. So, I got to actually connect with her in person and see her lab, which is fantastic and full of vaginas and clitorises, and have this experience with her. And I just felt that it kind of made the experience [of writing the book] feel so much more whole and complete for me. It also made me more confident in my reporting, in that I had captured the essence of what drives her in her work and what she’s trying to do.

KSJ: Why did you choose to call your book “Vagina Obscura”?

RG: I’ve always been fascinated by the camera obscura. So these are the early pinhole cameras that will take an image and project it onto a wall. But in doing so, it kind of distorts the image. It gets a lot dimmer and it’s often turned upside down. And I always thought that was really interesting because it’s doing something really important. It is capturing and reflecting the outside world in a way that wasn’t possible before the advent of this technology. But it’s still giving you a very specific lens, a narrow lens, that is kind of blocking out other interpretations and other ways of seeing the same world. And that’s how I saw early anatomists mapping the female body. They absolutely gathered information and came up with names that help us talk about these parts and think of them concretely. But what’s often overlooked is that they came from this specific narrow viewpoint. There is so much more to learn and to know about this landscape. And it took new types of thinkers and explorers to reveal that and to kind of broaden out this pinhole camera to full, wide-lens perspective.

Shafaq Zia is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Shafaq Zia / February 25th 2022 / Fellowship Life, Guest Posts

KSJ Fellow Ferris Jabr Is Reexamining Our Relationship With Earth

Ferris Jabr grew up in California’s Bay Area, surrounded by diverse landscapes and vibrant wildlife. Some of his most vivid memories are from school field trips to Natural Bridges State Beach in Santa Cruz, which introduced him to the spellbinding beauty of monarch butterflies that migrate to the state park’s eucalyptus grove every fall.

Now in his thirties, Jabr, an accomplished science writer, continues to regularly indulge what he describes as an “almost innate” interest in nature. He spends hours in the great outdoors and in his garden in Portland, Oregon, observing and photographing local wildlife.

Jabr’s deep appreciation for the many different forms of life on the planet, and his perpetual desire to understand them, are apparent in the body of work he’s amassed as a writer for The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and other outlets. “This is something that has just been thrilling to me from childhood all the way until now,” said Jabr. “I love the opportunity to see animals and other living things in their natural habitat and learn more about how they work and who they are.”

Jabr, currently a Knight Science Journalism Project Fellow, is now at work on his first book, tentatively titled “A Symphony of Earth,” a sweeping tale of how life has changed the planet throughout its history and helped create the world as we know it. Once a prospective scientist, Jabr looks to this project as a means to explore his lifelong passion for biology and life sciences, while tackling the most important crisis of our time — climate change.

“The current planetary crisis is part of a larger story that goes way, way back in time and begins with how life itself started to change the planet billions of years ago. And we humans are the most recent chapter in that epic story,” said Jabr.

Jabr, at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota (Photo by Caitlin Casar.)

The book project, like much of the work Jabr has done throughout his career, will draw on diverse fields of study, including biology, ecology, and geology — disciplines that Jabr describes as “so thoroughly connected that it makes more sense to think of them together.” The book will explore profound and hidden connections between organisms and their environments — relationships that Jabr first started thinking about when he came across the idea of plant behavior and communication during his time at New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. There, he found himself deeply intrigued by the idea that plants were much more aware and active than most people realized, sharing information with each other, and changing their surroundings for their benefit. These fascinating discoveries became the basis of his first feature story for New Scientist magazine in 2011.

Over the ensuing years, Jabr would start to connect the dots between individual studies across many sciences and piece together a picture of how living organisms and their environments have continually changed one another over billions of years, transforming Earth in the process. He would come to the understanding that life is intimately involved in the geological and meteorological processes that shape our planet.

“As far as I could tell, few people were writing cohesively about these insights for the general public, in part because they drew on such a wide range of different scientific disciplines. I started making folders on my desktop where I would put in these studies and my thoughts about them,” said Jabr. By 2018, he knew that there was something there — an idea about living organisms making and remaking Earth throughout its history — that was big enough to merit a book.

Jabr snorkels over seagrass meadows near Catalina Island in California. (Photo by Lorraine Sadler.)

To Jabr, reporting for this book is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that has already taken him to kelp forests off the coast of California, an experimental nature reserve in Siberia, and a former gold mine-turned-laboratory nearly a mile below Earth’s surface. Despite more than a decade of writing professionally about nature and science, this book is by far the biggest professional endeavor he has ever taken on, and it comes with its own challenges: Each chapter must work with the others to build a holistic story, and Jabr, like most authors, has had to think deeply about structure and continuity from the outset.

Through it all, Jabr’s love for life in all its messy, interconnected forms burns strong. And he sees the value in his book being able to offer a much-needed perspective on climate change. “We’re in the midst of what will hopefully be a revolution in how we live on this planet and how we understand our relationship to the planet,” he said. “It’s the most important story of our time.”

Shafaq Zia is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Shafaq Zia / February 7th 2022 / Alumni News

To Write About Megafires, KSJ Alum Maura R. O’Connor Joined the Front Lines

In a recent piece for the New Yorker, “What It’s Like to Fight A Megafire,” former Knight Science Journalism (KSJ) Fellow Maura R. O’Connor took an intimate look at the deeply personal experiences of wildland firefighters. Even before she delved into the story, O’Connor knew that wildland firefighting was a tough job with long hours, dangerous working conditions, and little job security. But when she started training to become a firefighter herself — as part of the research for the magazine feature and a forthcoming book — she began to understand with new clarity the risks that were arising for wildland firefighters in this era of climate-change driven megafires. Across America, firefighters now pay a bigger price for an already risky job, with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal thoughts bringing many to a breaking point.

For months, O’Connor immersed herself in this world, and the result was a powerful tale of courage, compassion, and, most importantly, resiliency. KSJ spoke with O’Connor about the experience of covering this complex topic and the challenges of reporting on the sensitive subjects of trauma and mental health. (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

KSJ@MIT: How did you first come across this story idea?

M. R. O’Connor: I was in Australia reporting on my second book about human navigation. And in the course of traveling in the northwest territories of Australia, I encountered a lot of fire and got really interested in the history of human ignited fires, which in the U.S. is called prescribed burning these days. In Australia, there’s this incredible history of aboriginal land management through ecological burning — many, many, many thousands of years of those traditions. And seeing fire on the ground in that way was totally bewildering to me. I had never encountered that before.

Eventually, as I got more interested in the subject matter, I started realizing that there’s a whole history here in the United States around wildfire management and human ignited fires, and it sort of encompasses areas that I already found interesting: anthropology, ecology, history, and Indigenous knowledge. So I just started thinking, Oh, I really want to pursue a big journalistic enterprise around this topic.

The New Yorker story is within the umbrella of this book research that I’m doing… The book is much more focused on people who are putting fire into landscapes intentionally. But part of the picture right now is climate change — a new era of megafires induced by climate change and landscape management and creating these epic fire seasons.

I was directly accountable to my sources in a way that usually as a journalist you’re not because you’re on the sidelines observing.

KSJ: While working on this story, you decided to undergo training to become a wildland firefighter. What was that experience like?

MO: I think what’s different about this project for me than past research projects is that in other cases, you know, if I’m writing about conservation biology, I’m not going to go get a graduate degree in conservation genetics in order to be able to write the story. But with fire, it’s very different. The barrier for me in being able to train as a wildland firefighter doesn’t involve a Ph.D. It involves 40 hours of online coursework, some field experience, and being able to complete a strenuous physical task. I realized pretty quickly that I can really access this world in a way that my previous journalism didn’t necessarily allow for. And that was really exciting as a writer because I was able to write about this from a very different perspective than before, when I was always essentially an observer. This was much more of a embedded experience.

It took me a few months before I actually went out on a fire… and then once I did go out on a fire, it was tremendously exciting because I had never done it before. It involved a lot of physical exertion and effort, which was really different for me as a journalist. And I was around people who knew a lot more than me, it felt like being a student again… I had to perform and employ the information and learning in order to be a contributing crew member and carry out successful burns. So I was directly accountable to my sources in a way that usually as a journalist you’re not because you’re on the sidelines observing. It felt like a new dimension of journalism that I hadn’t experienced before and I was really grateful to have found. And I immediately discovered that wildland firefighting was just brimming with wonderful, smart, delightful characters who have such a deep understanding of policy and ecology.

KSJ: What was the biggest challenge you encountered while reporting this piece?

MO: Once I realized that there was a story I wanted to try and tell about trauma, climate change, and mental health issues among wildland firefighters, I immediately also realized that I was going to have to bring a sort of new level of sensitivity to respect to my sources because the nature of what we would be discussing was so difficult in some cases. And it’s not that I don’t think I bring respect and sensitivity to all of my interviews, but when you’re talking about trauma or extremely sensitive issues like suicide, I think it was important for me to bring renewed attention to the way I conducted interviews, how it’s explained, fact checking processes, and set people up to understand what the process would be like to make sure that they were on board for that… I also had to really think about how I would report in embedded situations because on the one hand, I was a crew member who was working alongside them and would be with them for possibly 16 hours a day. And on the other hand, I’m a journalist and, I’m not one of them — I’m an outsider who’s coming in.

Ultimately, I also decided that I did not want to be paid as a crew member in order for there not to be a conflict of interest… I think it it was an unusual model, and I, at times, felt like I was threading a needle to figure it out as I went, but I think in the end, I managed to show respect to my fellow crew members while avoiding conflicts of interest and making sure that I wasn’t taking advantage of their trust and exploiting them.

KSJ: During your reporting, was there an experience that stood out to you and felt especially rewarding?

MO: The most rewarding thing was the conversations I was able to have with wildland firefighters who have been doing this for decades — what they have seen, what they have witnessed, and what the price is that they’ve paid for their work, it really filled me with a deep respect for what they do. They’re incredibly interesting, thoughtful, hardworking individuals.

You know, in some cases, these jobs are difficult because you’re being tasked with carrying out policies that may be flawed or are very complex. It’s not always black and white — whether it’s good or bad or whether it’s part of the solution or the problem when it comes to wildland fires. So just seeing how they navigated that with a lot of integrity, it was amazing. And I’ve worked on stories before where I felt grateful for being able to have these conversations with people, but this was definitely much more intense than some of those [conversations] in the past, and it was incredibly rewarding.

With some of the people I was interviewing, I was spending many, many hours and over many days discussing difficult subject matter. And I think that the weight of that wasn’t really apparent to me until the piece was finally published, and then I felt much lighter and a sense of relief.

KSJ: As you continue to report on sensitive topics, what lessons do you value and is there any advice you hope to share with other journalist?

MO: I think, for me, it’s a lesson that humility is so critical as a journalist. I graduated from journalism school in 2008, so I’ve been doing this for a fairly good stretch. And yet, I think every time I come to a new story or a new interview, a new research, a new source, a new experience, it’s like humility is important because it forces us to be honest about what we don’t know and what we need to find out. And then that questioning in that pursuit becomes the arc of our narrative, of us seeking to understand something not in a simplistic way, but in a really deep way and from multiple perspectives and angles so that we can bring readers and audiences a very complex, hopefully truthful, and amazing story. So, I try to cultivate humility and am always bringing that to my engagement with people, so that I’m never missing the real story because of my own pride.

Shafaq Zia is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Shafaq Zia / December 27th 2021 / Alumni News

KSJ Alum Eva Wolfangel Is Helping to Forge the Future of Science Storytelling

As a science journalist, Eva Wolfangel has had her fair share of experience communicating complex scientific terms and ideas to the lay public. However, it was two years ago, during her time as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, that she really started thinking about newer, creative forms of storytelling.

Until then, Wolfangel had worked mostly with the written word. But at MIT, she began more deeply exploring other formats. She developed virtual reality spaces where audiences could interact with scientists as they work. And last year, after she interviewed a doctor at an underground Syrian hospital who had been the subject of a recent documentary, Wolfangel had a revelation of sorts: She realized the power of visual media to communicate science in ways that did not strip it of our lived experiences, that did not leave it cold and sterile.

So, this year, when Wolfangel had the opportunity to serve as curator of the SilberSalz conference — part of an international science and media festival in Germany aimed at fostering a culture of experimentation with science engagement — it seemed like a perfect marriage. Now in its fourth year, Silbersalz brings together scientists, filmmakers, and storytellers from all around the world to share ideas about the future of science communication. This year’s conference included case studies on using virtual and augmented reality for immersive storytelling, a talk by Tunisian feminist Aya Chebbi on the art of reaching diverse audiences, and a panel discussion on the art of science communication.

KSJ spoke with Wolfangel to learn more about her experience at SilberSalz and how the festival is transforming scientific storytelling. (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

KSJ@MIT: What is SilberSalz, exactly?

Eva Wolfangel: SilberSalz is a two part event — a festival and a conference. The festival lasts about a week, normally in June. But this year it was in September in Halle, which is a city in former eastern Germany. So during this week, you show the public award-winning science documentaries everywhere in the city. They had, for example, an old mall, which is empty. So they built a pop up cinema into this former mall. It is all really impressive.

The conference on the other hand is closed to the public. Participants of the conference are science journalists and documentary makers as well as science communicators and scientists who want to communicate better. At the conference we are working on the future of science journalism and communication. So typically we discuss interesting new formats and we take pitches from film makers as well as scientists about documentaries they wish to produce. So the idea behind both the festivals and the conference is to help produce more and even better science documentaries, explore new formats and, not just that, but also create experiences for the local community as well as for audiences around the world.

Eva Wolfangel, right, moderates the closing panel of the SilberSalz conference. (Photo by Joachim Blobel.)

KSJ: How did you get involved with the conference?

EW: When I was at MIT for the KSJ Fellowship, I started really thinking about how we as journalists can communicate science effectively. How can we write and report about science in a way that makes it interesting for the audience, and that makes them open to listen and see it? And this led to me getting really interested in new formats of storytelling. That’s how I started to experiment with virtual reality for example. How to reach the people is a big discussion here in Germany, too – especially since we’re seeing, during the pandemic, a growing science skepticism in the public. So when the organizers of SilberSalz approached me last year to see if I could be a moderator for a part of the SilberSalz conference, I was so excited to do it. And this year, I was involved in organizing and curating the whole SilberSalz conference, where scientists and filmmakers pitched ideas for documentaries and received feedback from other storytellers in the audience. It was great. It was a ton of work, but it was really nice.

KSJ: How has SilberSalz influenced your work as a science journalist?

EW: So far, I’ve mostly been a science writer, except for some radio pieces. But I have never produced a documentary. So when I was at the festival last year and I did some interviews with documentary filmmakers, I realized that this is really another way to reach people, parallel to writing or producing radio pieces. What I think is truly unique about these documentaries is that they try to reach people from an emotional side using this creative perspective. They’re not really a new format — a classical one actually. But, at SilberSalz, we’re talking about how we can make these documentaries an interactive experience using AR and VR or experimenting with sounds. So I was deeply inspired to do a radio piece myself and to explore creative ways of using sound, because sound can be really immersive too. The piece was about the difference between dreaming and thinking and the state of our mind and brain during the onset of sleep.

I interviewed Adam Horowitz for this piece, who is at the MIT Media Lab, and he had made a device that could influence your dreams. That brought me to many other scientists who are working on dreams, and finally I participated in an experiment at University of Tübingen in Germany: I had to sleep in an MRI machine with an EEG headset on and listen to an audio book during sleeping. As I lay there, I was thinking about pieces of the audio book, but also had my own thoughts. And, of course, I started dreaming about the content of the book. For the radio piece I experimented with all those sounds from this situation to make it as immersive as possible for the audience.

KSJ: What are your hopes for SilberSalz moving forward?

EW: At the center of it, the festival is about new formats and experiences in science storytelling, and virtual reality and other immersive media are now a big part of that, too. The pandemic showed us the need for that as well as the limitations. We had to try hard to make an in-person event happen and I’m so grateful that it worked because it was so important for everyone who was joining us to be able to interact with each other in the real world.

So far, I’ve seen so much potential in the people who have joined us and I’m hoping that this festival becomes even more of a place for innovation when it comes to formats [for communicating science]. I really hope that we can make this virtual reality and augmented reality journalism bigger — and have a diversity of other new formats and media that can make science communication better.

Shafaq Zia is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Shafaq Zia / December 9th 2021 / Fellowship Life

For Filmmaker Asha Stuart, Journalism Is a Means for Social Justice

Growing up around her grandparents in Old Fourth Ward — a historic Atlanta neighborhood with deep ties to the civil rights movement — Asha Stuart found herself drawn to issues of race and equity at a young age. Her family, she says, was the embodiment of social justice.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that, today, Stuart’s work as a freelance documentary filmmaker and photographer is driven by the same passion: shedding light on the lives of people who are living in marginalized communities and facing racial, economic, and gender inequality, social exclusion, or environmental racism.

This year, as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, Stuart is producing a documentary film that will investigate environmental injustice faced by African American communities in the deep south. This project is rooted in the same values that have guided Stuart throughout her career: Whether she’s covering climate migration in Bangladesh or gender based violence in southern Africa, she has a deep commitment to understanding the nuances around complex issues and a desire to report them empathetically.

It is a style that Stuart credits largely to her time as a cultural anthropology major at the University of Cincinnati. “It gave me the ability to be with people longer, investigate deeper, and break outside the practices of parachute journalism,” she said. In a 2015 internship with CNN’s documentary film unit, she learned to pitch a story, develop the vision for a video journalism project, and even bounce back from rejection. A couple years later, she received a grant from National Geographic Explorers, a program that offers training and support to young science storytellers, and that’s when she got her “big break.”

On her first international reporting trip as an Explorer, Stuart traveled to India to cover the Siddi tribe, a group whose heritage can be traced back to the Bantu tribes of East Africa. The Siddis have historically been marginalized because of their darker skin. Stuart felt she could relate to the community’s struggle, and she was compelled to capture their history and cultural diversity in a video documentary for National Geographic.

“I know what it feels like to be Black in America — consistently feeling like you’re out of place,” said Stuart. “In India, Black people feel the same way. It’s like that connection of being from the African diaspora.”

Asha Stuart and Gullah native Kenneth Hodges look at a map to locate Gullah communities in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Stuart’s documentary, “Inside a Lost African Tribe Living in India Today,” has over 2 million views on YouTube and was selected to be a part of the National Geographic Short Film Showcase, which highlights exceptional short video pieces from around the world. Following the success of this documentary, Stuart has gone on to cover both national and international stories for Time, Politico, PBS, and CIRCA, among other outlets.

In her upcoming documentary, Stuart will explore how African American communities in Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana continue to be adversely impacted by policies from the Jim Crow era, including housing policies that led to Black communities disproportionately being situated near refineries, chemical plants, and superfund sites. Today, Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” has some of the highest death rates due to cancer and other respiratory diseases.

To Stuart, environmental injustice is one of the most important stories of our time — an issue that will impact history. Some of the communities that are being documented in Stuart’s work will be displaced in the coming decades, she says. “There’s a whole migration that’s happening in Cancer Alley…. I mean, it’s wiping out the whole community, and it is our duty as journalists to reflect the significance of the current moment.”

Stuart’s documentary project is informed not only by years of reporting on marginalized communities around the world, but by her personal experiences as an African American woman in the U.S. Over the course of her career, she has found herself turning down many opportunities because of the pressure to portray marginalized communities as stereotypically poor, welfare dependent, or criminal.

Today, Stuart is a strong advocate of minority-led projects and is leading by example with her all -Black production team. To her, it’s critical that African Americans have a platform to tell their own stories, with their own unique voice and perspective. “If not us,” she said, “then who?”

by Shafaq Zia / October 15th 2021 / KSJ News & Events

In Latest KSJ Webinar, Journalists Reflect on Science’s Human Side

Ed Yong, the Atlantic staff writer whose Covid-19 coverage earned a Pulitzer Prize this year, knows a thing or two about how science works. He also knows the dangers of placing science on a pedestal. “Science is not just an abstract thing,” Yong said at a September webinar hosted by the Knight Science Journalism Program. “It’s not a march of progress or a series of objective truths; it’s in fact an intensely human endeavor. It’s done by people and is subject to all the frailties and foibles that humans contain.”

Those frailties and foibles, Yong noted, have been magnified during a Covid-19 pandemic that has pushed the scientific enterprise — usually painstakingly slow and methodical — to operate at breakneck pace. It has become difficult, he said, to tell the signal from the noise — to discern reliable, meaningful scientific results from those bound to buckle under scrutiny. And in that way, the pandemic also serves as a potent reminder: Now more than ever, science journalists have a responsibility to understand not just formulas and results, but the human side of how science works.

That message was a recurring theme of “The Fundamentals of Science, from Funding to Publishing,” a webinar featuring Yong, New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, award-winning freelance science journalist Emily Anthes, and moderator Joshua Hatch. The 90-minute session was the sixth in a series of live events held in conjunction with the release of the KSJ Science Editing Handbook. (A full recording of the webinar is available here.)

Anthes kicked off the session by going over the basics of the science publishing process, including the vetting process known as peer review, wherein outside experts review a scientific study, as Anthes put it, to check “that the methods and the experiments are sound, that the results add up, and that the conclusions the scientists draw are justified.”

Although peer-review plays an important gate-keeping role in scientific literature, it is not infallible, Anthes warned. For proof, one need only look back to June of last year, when two Covid-19 research papers published in two of the world’s top peer-reviewed medical journals — The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine — were retracted over concerns that they were based on unreliable data.

Such missteps are sometimes a biproduct of competing incentives, Anthes explained. For scientists, publishing — and publishing prolifically — is not only a means to communicate results but a way to build prestige and advance one’s career. It can be tempting to cut corners, which is one reason Anthes says it is imperative that science journalists continually be on the lookout for “massaged,” manipulated, or otherwise questionable data.

Yong echoed that sentiment. “The competition in academia is absolutely ferocious,” he said. “And, to make matters worse, the metric that most defines an academic success isn’t publishing high-quality, rigorous work that solves societal problems. It’s publishing as many papers as possible in high-profile journals.”

Instead of pushing scientists toward careful work, such skewed incentives in academia drive them towards practices like slicing data from a single research study into multiple smaller “publishable” pieces, as well as “cutting methodological corners, and trying to do work as quickly as possible with smaller sample sizes.”

Although these problems existed before Covid-19, and will likely remain long after, Yong urged reporters to be savvy about them. “When we look at the literature, when we talk to people, we have to really ask hard questions about all of these structures, and the incentives, and the processes that led to the kind of work that we are seeing in front of us.”

Yong also noted that Covid-19 has driven a seismic shift in scientific funding: Scientists have faced enormous pressures from funding bodies — whether academic institutes or government agencies — to put their existing research on hold and “work on this new thing.” As of December, Yong said, the medical research search engine PubMed “had archived more than seventy-four thousand Covid related papers, which is more than twice as many as there have been about diseases like polio, measles, cholera, and dengue.”

According to Mandavilli, the webinar’s final speaker, the pressure to please funders is pervasive in science. There are seemingly countless research proposals and limited money to fund them, so scientists are continually searching for ways to “make their research look attractive” to granting agencies and to make their results look good enough to justify continued grants and publications.”

And although Mandavilli believes that science is self-correcting, she said that process of self-correction takes time. “In a pandemic like this, where things are really fast, we don’t have the luxury to wait for science to correct itself.” It’s up to journalists, she said, to do their part in holding science accountable.

Shafaq Zia is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing.