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"How to write mathematics badly" by Jean Pierre Serre (noise removed)

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Why and how shall we popularize mathematics?

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MATRIX x IMAGINARY 2022 - Day 1 - 3/4 - Keynote: Some people just want to watch the world learn

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Sometimes I think that what makes me successful in math makes me kind of terrible in some aspects of "real life." A few years ago, I wrote a post for PhD+epsilon about how close I came to having a car accident for putting off car maintenance from being "too busy." In a way, my "success" (which we all have to admit, is an obnoxious word that just means "success as the successful people have defined it") was related to my dedication to my job, and could have led to a terrible (or at least scary) accident. More recently, I discovered a new, more insidious problem: I was dealing with depression.

Unlike screeching brakes, depression is not something that you can easily identify, at least not at first. It is funny now, after a few years of dealing with it (by no means am I "fine" or "cured," just better), how long it took me to realize I was depressed. It seems so obvious in hindsight. And again, I think certain aspects of my personality, which work well within the expectations of mathematics, were probably the reason I was so unaware of my own mental health. In particular, I am a person who tries to "figure things out," and I don't care how long it takes me to do so. I deal very well with failure and frustration. So what happens when you don't want to get out of bed in the morning, you eat crap food, avoid phone calls and social obligations, and stop showering regularly and taking care of yourself? When you have panic attacks for what seem like the silliest reasons?

First, you pretend nothing is going on. You're just tired, or very busy, so it all makes sense. Also, there's no reason to be sad, I have a good job, great colleagues, a good life, friends, a family who loves and supports me, so what am I complaining about? This I'm good at: reasoning. Because I am a logical person, I will try to convince myself that what I feel is illogical and therefore should not be happening.

So you keep doing the things you do: you teach, you work on math, you talk to colleagues, you smile when people say hello, you wear decent clothes, you behave like everything is fine. But it's more work every time you do it, so you stop having energy to do anything else. You figure out you can always just order pizza (online, because you don't even want to talk to the pizza delivery person on the phone), you figure out how long you can go without showering before it shows, you tell your friends and family you're just too busy to talk on the phone or go out, you get home and turn on the TV, sometimes for the whole weekend, and try as hard as you can not to think about how you feel.

This is what my therapist later called "high functioning depression." Amusingly enough, I did start reading a bit about depression, since I was already suspecting that there was more to how I felt than just "being tired." But most of what I read said that, if you're depressed, you're not able to get out of bed, you don't want to do anything, you cry all the time. None of this happened to me, so I thought: well, I can't be depressed, since I don't fit the definition. By the way, this is another thing that's terrible about academics - we are obsessed with definitions.

In short, I could do all the same things, it was just a lot harder. I found the analogy later, when I started talking to people about my depression (I actually eventually told it as a story in the Story Collider podcast, with the same title as this post). In my college years, I did a bit of high altitude mountain climbing. I compare my depression to what it was like walking at high altitudes. You can do it but it's just a lot more work, you're doing things that should be easy but with less oxygen. That's how I felt.

How did I finally get out of that, you may ask? Well, dear readers, it was hard, and for a while, even after I had figured it out, I thought I could just work it out on my own, through sheer willpower. This, my co-writer Piper pointed out, is also the result of ableism - thinking that you are less valuable if you have a disability. So my self-worth was tied to my making myself feel better. Some people have a wake-up call when they start thinking about suicide or self-harm, and sometimes other people notice and try to help. I never got that far. But I did start crying uncontrollably, for several days, right after Robin Williams committed suicide (even though apparently it was not just depression, but a rare form of dementia as well that drove him to it). And I think there was something to his depression that reminded me of mine - here is someone that people describe as "happy," who is doing everything he is "supposed" to be doing, who doesn't seem depressed. (I can't tell you how many people, even after I "came out" as depressed, would respond with "but you're so happy!") And so I saw myself in Robin Williams, and it scared me - I felt like that was my future if I didn't do something. And "doing something" meant getting someone else to help.

Finding a therapist was hard, and taking medication was hard. Because I felt like I was weak for needing someone else, and for needing drugs. Because I was raised to be self-sufficient and tough, which worked well for me academically. Because I am part of an ableist culture.

So, why write about this here, in the inclusion/exclusion blog? Well, I've been wanting to write about this for a while, so there's that. But also, I think there is a systemic problem to which we should pay attention. We need to give space to self-care and mental health. We need to stop judging people who are mentally ill, and we need to support them. If there was not such a big stigma on depression, I probably would have gotten help sooner. Some of my friends might not have been killed by this disease. I'm hoping that, by talking about this more, we can all come to understand and accept mental illness as what it is, an illness, and not a weakness or a personality flaw. And to all of you who may have gone through something like this, I want you to know that you are not alone.

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Sometimes I think that what makes me successful in math makes me kind of terrible in some aspects of "real life." A few years ago, I wrote a post for PhD+epsilon about how close I came to having a car accident for putting off car maintenance from being "too busy."

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Authors

Alison Mountz Wilfrid Laurier University

Anne Bonds Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Becky Mansfield Department of Geography, Ohio State University

Jenna Loyd Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Jennifer Hyndman Departments of Geography and Social Science, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University

Margaret Walton-Roberts Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University

Ranu Basu Department of Geography, York University

Risa Whitson Department of Geography and Women's and Gender Studies Program, Ohio University

Roberta Hawkins Department of Geography, University of Guelph

Trina Hamilton Department of Geography, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

Winifred Curran Department of Geography, DePaul University

Keywords:
slow scholarship, neoliberal university, resistance, collective action, feminism

Abstract

The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow-moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.

Author Biography

Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University

Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Global Migration, Geography & Environmental Studies

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For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University

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Alison Mountz Wilfrid Laurier University Anne Bonds Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Becky Mansfield Department of Geography, Ohio State University Jenna Loyd Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Jennifer Hyndman Departments of Geography and Social Science, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University Margaret Walton-Roberts Department of Geography

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Mrs. Sesan and Mr. Ibiyemi, for an anthology on race and sociocultural inclusion in science communication you wrote an essay on the imperatives for the development of an Indigenous science communication agenda, in Nigeria. What prompted you both to write this book chapter?
Ayodele Ibiyemi: When we talk about Indigenous science communication, I would want us to begin from the semantics of the word itself. So when we say people are Indigenous, what does it mean? Indigeneity is something that is framed as opposed to something else. The term is very popular in a colonial settler society like the United States, but it's not very popular in Nigeria, where colonialism formally ended. Indigeneity is something which is framed against what is considered as standard.
How can attention be refocused on local science communication capacities?
You can't talk about Indigenous science communication without talking about Indigenous knowledge. We use that term deliberately to show that this knowledge existed as a full system that worked perfectly even before and without colonialism. Indigenous science and science communication we explain as something that needs to reclaim its own full extensive power structure that was deliberately erased by colonialism.

Temilade Sesan: I think that some kind of global exchange is desirable. But in our system of global capitalism and science and technology development, the benefits are more apparent in certain parts of the world. In Nigeria and many parts of Africa there is something like an imposition of external knowledge on Indigenous ways of knowing. In our essay, entitled, "Past, Present and Future: Perspectives on the Development of an Indigenous Science Communication Agenda in Nigeria', we try to refocus the attention on what already exists in terms of science and science communication capacity in Nigeria and other African countries.

Sesan: For example, one big area is funding. There is currently a preponderance of science communication initiatives on the African continent that are funded by storied Western institutions, especially those invested in the broader goals of knowledge production and societal application. That is all well and good, but this support - perhaps necessarily - occurs at the fringes and does not get to the core of what is required for a substantive cultural and political shift. This is why we are advocating for a return to more local, national, and Indigenous funding opportunities for science communication. So that we can get back to creating narratives about our own science with our own funding. It's urgent to recognize the knowhow that is embedded in our cultures, in our ways of knowing and being. We want to push that away from the periphery into the mainstream.
What is going wrong with mainstream science communication?
Ibiyemi: Let me give you an example: Before contact with the West, countries like Uganda and Rwanda knew practices of cesarean section to deliver babies. But now the whole world calls our methods the cesarean section. A name that comes from another part of the world. So it's difficult to convince people from these areas that their ancestors have been doing this long before White people came. Globally the system of education frames some of our practices that were functional as ritualistic or chaotic, while the European systems are portrayed as positive. Although many methods that we call modern and Western are actually Indigenous in origin.

Sesan: I would like to add the idea that all science is local. Also much of Western science is local, but there are mechanisms through the global capitalist system to spread it across the globe. What distinguishes somebody who is delivering babies in Uganda from somebody who did it somewhere else? But then one idea gets the upper hand at the expense of the other. Science communication worldwide would benefit from having a look at what different societies have contributed over time.

Sesan: I guess the common finding is that actually in many ways Eurocentric notions of science are perceived and experienced more or less as a cultural misfit. And, this is partly to do with all of these colonial legacies, but also with postcolonial structures.
What is the relationship between Indigenous science and Indigenous science communication on the one hand and Westernized science communication on the other?
Let me use the example of the primary healthcare system. It is supposed to be the closest government contact with people in rural areas. But even in the primary health centers, you find that a lot of people cannot relate. One of the last points we make in our chapter is that we need to address the hubris that is implicit in science communication. In the case of public health communication, the entire system is designed to alienate that person or that group of people just because someone doesn't speak English, didn't go to school, or didn't have a formal education. For example, studies show how poor communication between public health authorities and citizens in rural communities in Nigeria and Uganda is both symptomatic of community alienation and synonymous with ineffective health campaigns in those areas. This state of apathy is a vestige of the colonial era, when, as the Lancet reports, the introduction of Western medicine in Nigeria in particular "resulted in inbuilt inequalities... and a detrimental social distance from users and communities."

The whole Western oriented science communication agenda has actually othered people, even within their own countries. I think this creates a power distance which is also a social, political and cultural distance, which has caused a lot of damage. As long as science communication does not reach the people for whom it is supposedly intended or does not address their needs, it has failed.

Sesan: The answer is that the relationship is very poor. I think it is a collective project even in the so-called Global South to decolonize the minds. There are very few examples that have achieved quite a bit in this regard. Let me come back to the public health system. For a long time in Nigeria it was not acceptable to use traditional birth attendants. The modern healthcare system is what you should go for. But for many Indigenous people, that just doesn't work - at least partly because public health services in many African countries find it difficult to reproduce the high levels of trust that communities have in the traditional systems that have served them for centuries.
What exactly can be done in that respect? Which players do you address with your demands?
So, it's not just about science, it's about the values that go along with the way of life. It's about the element of trust, which is not easily replicable. You can't manufacture that.

Now there is greater integration between the two systems. After decades of work in these places, traditional birth attendants now get an official role in delivering babies. People are more or less free to go to a traditional birth attendant, as long as the person has experience and training. If there are complications that they cannot handle, then they refer the pregnant woman to a primary health center, which will perhaps refer them onto a general hospital. This kind of synergy is a small example, one of very few I can think of.

Sesan: We think that we need a radical overhaul of the education system - as we elaborate in an article coming soon to the Journal of Science Communication. Currently, the reliance on English as the only language of instruction does more harm than good on a national level. It's an interesting dynamic how here in Nigeria English is seen as a language of wisdom or of intelligence and of science. We do not want to attack English, but we strongly support the idea of a bilingual education.

There have been experiments to start the primary education in the local language and then complement it with the official language. Research has shown that students are more engaged and interested in science when science communication is delivered in the local language. Because this way they can identify and it becomes part of their life.

This is not just about paying lip service to some kind of national direction, this is about the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science, the Ministry of Technology, all these players have to come together to take this agenda forward.

Ibiyemi: All of us operate within a system that we cannot escape from. I am Yoruba and that is my language. So the fact that we are speaking English right now is because of colonialism.

I consider the idea of endogenous education as one of the most important steps that has to be taken. It acknowledges the specificities in each culture, responds to the Indigenous systems and also tries to correct some of the legacies of colonialism. Generations of scholars propagated that the history of the world began with colonialism. Now we need to educate people about what their ancestors did and how important their lives were.

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"It's not just about science, it's about the values"

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Why do we need Indigenous science communication? Using Nigeria as an example, Temilade Sesan and Ayodele Ibiyemi explain where Western-style science communication reaches its limits and why it is important to refocus the attention on Indigenous knowledge and traditions. Mrs. Sesan and Mr. Ibiyemi, for an anthology on race and sociocultural inclusion in science communication [...]

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Welcome to our tour of the science factory. Above the entrance, you see our century-old motto: 'publish or perish'. It reminds our knowledge workers to produce a steady stream of least publishable units to meet our key performance indicators. We've doubled the competition for funding and halved the success rates. So, we now destroy research time much more efficiently due to heaps of applications to be reviewed, high levels of bureaucracy, and stellar amounts of e-mail for spamferences. There is only one floor, but we installed an elevator for our researchers to practice their pitches. Now, all they talk about is 'big science', 'breakthroughs', and 'excellence' - much more cheerful than when they kept yammering on about the replication crisis. We used to end our tour at the library, but we had to dismiss our librarians after paying our bill to the academic publishers. Anyway, before you leave, please fill out our survey on the elusive notion of 'work-life balance'. And don't forget to cite your guide!

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The Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of science, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

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Science depends on compelling narratives.