Alternative Careers
Transcript cleaned by Kaitlyn Gastineau
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Ray Fouché: [00:00:00] So how are you, Janelle? What's, what's going on? 

Janelle Grant: I'm good. Can you hear me okay? 

Ray Fouché: Yeah. 

Janelle Grant: Perfect. Okay. Um, yeah, I'm good. I'm on campus. Uh, not much since we had our last meeting, Ray, my dissertation. What is it called? Dissertation proposal? I should know the name. 

Ray Fouché: You know, they're, they call different things, different places.

So I know where you are. I think it was just a dissertation proposal conversation. I don't know what it was called. 

Janelle Grant: Yeah, it was really, well, I guess it felt a little informal, but I liked, I appreciated that because I was really nervous. Um, and I didn't know what to expect, even though I have a, I have a great committee, obviously.

Um, I trust them, but it was still, it was a little nervous just to not have ever done it before. 

Ray Fouché: So to fill you all in. [00:01:00] So Janelle is ABD, but in her program, they have this, I don't even know what to call it. It's like a dissertation proposal, advisory check in after the ABD moment. 

Janelle Grant: Yeah 

Ray Fouché: And gets all the committee together to talk about the project.

Lisa Nakamura: That's a great thing to have. I mean it's hard to get those people in a room right and so they all have to behave because they're kind of in front of each other. 

Ray Fouché: Yeah.

But actually it's a group of people that like each other. So I think it's not. 

Lisa Nakamura: Yeah. That's the best.

Ray Fouché: I have been in the room to people that don't like each other. And that's a whole different experience. 

Janelle Grant: I bet.

Lisa Nakamura: So if we're recording this, I don't mind [00:02:00] starting because it could be people are just ragged at being the end of the year. Janelle has gotten it together, but I think she's probably an exception. So, um, it may be that people want to just check back on it. Um, and Janelle, if you have any questions, just ask them because this is a small group and we don't care.

We're informal. Um, I was going to start off by asking people to put in the chat what they wanted to use their intellectual and how they want to use their intellectual energies to earn money and build a career. So I'll put that into the chat. It's a different question from what kind of a job you want, because I think the, what kind of a job you want question is very limited by what kinds of jobs, you know, exists.

So if you want to play along, that would be awesome. Just type into the chat. How do you want to use your intellectual energies to earn money and build a career? And I know those are two different things. 

Janelle Grant: I feel like I have to think a little bit. [00:03:00] I've never been asked this. 

Lisa Nakamura: Top of the head, you know, like don't think, just write whatever comes.

Ray Fouché: That's a great question. I'm asking myself that question all the time. 

Lisa Nakamura: You feel free to answer too. Anybody can participate

Janelle Grant: That was just the top of, top of my mind. 

Lisa Nakamura: Well, that's, that's huge, right? I think the question of networking. is underspoken about. I think it's talked about as something that's necessary, but it's not usually attached to examples that actually did anything for anyone. So people understand networking in the past tense.

You know, I got this opportunity because [00:04:00] I made an effort to talk to so and so at this conference. You only know it after it's already worked. You don't know it when it doesn't work, right? So it's always after the fact that we can have the, oh, okay. That's beautiful. Um, so I think the great thing about this exercise is to see how this connects to the things you are driven to do and the things that you have to do.

So earning money and building a career are separate things. And I think, you know, the academic world is very clear about that because we sacrifice money in order to build a career, unlike many people who are our age, say, um, by, being doctoral students by paying tuition as a junior faculty, you're often making less than your peers who got other kinds of degrees.

You know, it's kind of long game of kind of slow roll into making money in some ways, [00:05:00] I feel like it's getting slower all the time because of debt and because of salary compression and so on. So that's on the one side. I think the question about feeling like you are using your energy to build a career is really interesting.

The question here. So I'm going to talk about moving into industry, and I'm going to assume that people are either brand new PhDs who are moving into industry. And by the way, we hired a person, Summer Hamilton, to be our first fellow in the DISCO Hub, and she accepted us. And then she wrote to me, very sad and said, I decided to go into industry.

So I have a really good example of somebody from the University of Minnesota with a degree in American Studies. Who is going into industry, but her research is on Black Twitter, so I can speculate about what industry she's going into, but I assume it's the social media industry, [00:06:00] right? So there's somebody who took a turn and decided they wanted to use their energy.

I think this is fine for me to tell because she didn't say it was a secret in any way. Um, straight out of grad school, but there are certainly people who get the PhD, work on the tenure track or the lecturer or as a visiting assistant professor or as a postdoc and then decide they want to work in industry and their question is often let me paste it in here.

Um, is it possible to move into an industry job and back into academe? I had a colleague who had this happen. She was recruited to be part of TikTok's first content moderation policy organization. They're just putting one together. She had never worked outside of academe and didn't even use TikTok, so she was surprised like why are they contacting me they want to interview me tomorrow they're offering me a lot of money.

Her area of research is transgender Latinx communities and she's an anthropologist. So, platforms sometimes will reach out to people. [00:07:00] who don't seem to have any expertise on what they do because they know they need something different. They need somebody who understands a group of people that they don't understand.

So I think social scientists have often seen that route. I think communication is considered a social science, especially if you're talking about people and the kinds of practices that they do. If you're an ethnographer, um, even if you're a critical scholar, So I see an opening up in the market for people working on specific race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities, because, um, these platforms understand a lot of the problems they have have to do with not getting what their users really want, and they can't study their users because they don't know how to do that.

Right. So who knows how to do that? It's scholars usually, um, it is absolutely possible to move into industry and back into academe. Just like it's absolutely possible to take a postdoc and then get a tenure track job. Um, the difference being you would probably need to find a way to [00:08:00] publish while you were working.

So some companies like Microsoft actively encourage publication. So Mary Gray, great example. She wrote a book called _Ghost Work_ with a colleague at Intel. And it won, she won the MacArthur award for that book. And she was able to do that, but I will tell you. It was not on their dime. She wrote that book on her time.

So that's something that isn't often known. You know, you see somebody at Facebook or somebody, well not Facebook, Facebook's terrible. Don't work there. They do not really like people to publish out of there. And neither does Google, Microsoft, Intel, expect it. And they actually benefit a lot from that. Um, I think Twitch and Snap and these newer companies aren't sure.

About what their position is on that for sure. You can't publish, um, um, NDA able data. So nothing you learn at the company that's private. Can you use for your research? Um, [00:09:00] and if you look at the books that Mary Gray and Nancy Baym and other people in the industry, Melissa Gregg at Intel have written on affect theory and so on.

They don't use anything they learned from their jobs in there. So you do it on your dime. But how different is that in a way from teaching four classes? And then being expected to write a book when your four classes are on. Intro to literature, intro to communication, you know, in some ways I don't see it as being that different.

You know, you have a day job. I think a lot of these industry jobs have flexibility, maybe not quite as much as as, um, academe does. Ray is finding that, you know, even non industry, NGO, public interest, you know, foundation jobs. have some flexibility, which I'm not sure they used to do. But anyway, I'm just talking about industry.

Um, so you can absolutely move out of, um, industry back into academe, but you, you better have published. So finding out [00:10:00] what their policies are around publishing, what you can publish, um, how, so I'll just say as well, it's really easy to move, um, from industry back into academia, super easy, but you probably need to have the same amount of productivity that you would have had if you were on the tenure track.

So we hired this guy, his name was Rich Ling, I think. And he had been working for Telenor, which is a telecom in Sweden. So it's like they're a national telecom and he'd written a couple of books. So you would hire somebody at the rank of full professor because they've done the same work that a full professor would do.

The only difference was they weren't teaching. So it's a more porous space than people think. Um, also there are internships through companies like Microsoft and Data & Society, which I'm not going to say are good or bad individually, right? I've heard good things and I've heard bad things, but those are meant to be [00:11:00] pipeline jobs to kind of seduce you into industry, right?

By giving you a sense of how great it is and there's free pudding and you know, people are nice and you don't have to teach. But really, if you take one of those, take a look around you. Like, look at the people who have been there for a while. Don't look at the people like you, who are brand new and are excited.

Look at the people who've spent their careers there and ask, is this something that would be a use of my time that I would feel good about? Um, some, okay, so let me move into how to connect with industry. I know of three paths that I've seen people use, but if anyone knows of others, in other words, if Ray has seen them, please feel free to add them either in the chat or here.

Um, so I think the best way and the easiest way to do it is to apply for industry internships. But they're very competitive. And so we could have another seminar on how to apply for an industry internship, because it's not the same as applying for a postdoc or any other kind of [00:12:00] academic-y job. Um, but those internships get announced at the same time as our regular jobs.

So they'll be out there, um, just like tenure track jobs, kind of on the same timeline, I think, because they're competing with us. Like they'd really like to scoop our new, you know, people we would like to hire and offer them more money, which they can do. Um, so they're pretty easy to find, I think, but they're competitive.

They'll have like 200, 300 people for each internship. But you are all competitive for it. And I know that because some of you, I know that because when we were hiring our fellows, a lot of them had experience in industry internships. And they looked a lot like you, only three years ago. So, um, I believe industry is much more interested in diversity than they used to be.

I don't think they could go out with a straight face, with an all white crew, but they have done in the past. Let me just say, I think those days are over though. You know, they would get pretty roasted for [00:13:00] doing that. So there's some accountability now that there's, uh, if they say that they're interested in diversity and they're not doing that in their hiring, it will be, it will be noted.

So that's good. Um, I think the two easiest ways, so I think that's the most efficient way. The two easiest ways are this that I know of, and let me paste it into the chat. Sorry, my computer isn't working. Okay. So here's one. Look around you at your university. Is there a faculty member whose research is funded by industry that is of any connect, that has any connection to yours?

So it doesn't have to be in your department. In fact, it may be good if it's not in your department in some ways. It doesn't have to be in your college. Just like start trolling around. Like you can go into Mellon and see who has what grants. You can go or into NSF. It's probably the best, right? But NEH as well.

Um, see who [00:14:00] has. Sorry, that's not industry funding. Nevermind. Um, see who has taken money from Microsoft, Intel, Apple, um, Facebook, any of those Twitter and, uh, write them a cordial email and offer to help with them, with their work. I've had people approach me to work in my lab back when I was not funded by industry.

I am, I have a part of mine that's funded by industry. And even when I didn't have room for that person or I didn't need their specific skills I kept that person in my mind and then when I did have funding from industry, I called those people because I needed people all of a sudden. I needed 10 people and I didn't have 10 people in my lab who could do it because most of them aren't even working on social media.

They're working on other stuff, racism stuff, but not in social media. So even if you get a hearty no, It's good to show that you know what they're doing and that you're willing to be part of it. [00:15:00] So it could be join your lab and work for free. Join your lab and work for free is awesome because eventually that means joining your lab and working for money, right?

So volunteering slash getting paid to work in an academic lab in your research area Um, I wrote volunteering getting paid because often people do get paid after volunteering, right? Like you agree to work just kind of as a volunteer to help out and when funding comes in, because funding comes in in three year cycles, all of, everybody will start to get paid if, as long as they're working on the project, right?

So this isn't a loss of your time. It's actually valuable because this is a skill you'll use over and over. You know, who has what kind of funding is something you should always be having in the back of your mind. So if you see professor so and so got three years of funding from you know Facebook. I used to just read [00:16:00] those and ignore it.

I think read it and make a note of it. So advice when interviewing with or talking to somebody who is either an industry person running a project in industry or an academic running a project with industry money. I think as academics, I have an English degree, right? And so I was very sensitive and self conscious about that because it seems like the most shiftless degree you could possibly have.

Working in a technology industry where money is money and speed really important and innovation. Um, but I learned don't apologize, don't defend, right? They're not looking at my degree anymore. And even then they weren't really looking at my degree as much as I thought. There are a vast number of people in technology who have even less seemingly useful degrees than I do.

So everyone's sensitive about that, right? Like you're not studying, you're not like trying to get into a group of engineers anyway, mostly you [00:17:00] might be getting into a group that's going to work with engineers to translate their ideas or to help them not do the wrong thing. Um, the right thing to do is to lean into what you have that they don't have.

So there are differences between you and them, differences in terms of seniority, in terms of method, in terms of what you've created in your life. But you have published work, right? Dissertations are all going to be published. This is new research and new data that they don't know anything about. So, um, emphasize instead the skill that they need, which might be skills around diversity, it might be skills around qualitative data gathering, it might be skills around critical analysis.

And something that I've seen industry people really seem to need that academics don't need point to specific work examples you've done. So either it's papers you've written or specific projects you've been a team member of, so [00:18:00] Professor X got a big award from, um, I don't know,

the Minderoo Foundation. I keep on trying to think of industry. Alright, got a big award from Google, right? Professor X got a big award from Google. You connected with Professor X and volunteered to help out with that. in the area you know about. Like you said, you're going to work on these populations. I happen to have expertise working with this group of people, women with disabilities, older people, what have you.

Um, you worked on that team. Maybe you didn't get paid. So what? That was your project, right? So you point to that project, find a slide. If you coauthored an article, that's even better. So the only way to coauthor an article with funded research is to be a person who's a member of the lab that will write that article.

Right. So often articles get written in an all fired hurry. That's how I write mine. So we need to write an [00:19:00] article in three months who can come to these three co-writing meetings. Whoever comes is the co-author. So it doesn't matter if I did, if everything they wrote got deleted by other members, because that happens, some of the things I write get deleted by the members.

Maybe you have no words in that article. You are still an author. You showed up. You contributed thinking. You edited people's work. Maybe you're the last author. It does not matter. So I think it's good to make a dossier of funded projects that you have done, no matter how to you tangential those projects were run it by your advisor, if you think that it might be helpful.

You're a little on the line for some things. Um, a lot of us do work with industry and can tell you what we would think if we were going through. Um, some of the industry, uh, fellowships too are vetted by professors anyway. So they'll ask someone like, Ray, hey, can you help us read through the Data & Society apps?

They're all on, [00:20:00] you know, black technology and history. Like we don't know anything about this. Can you tell us the two best out of this lot of 50 right so you're always a little bit in the academic space when you're doing this, in some ways, a lot of the people who work in industry do have PhDs and made the turn.

So, they're socialized into what we do. So if you can show that you've not only thought ahead. about how to make an industry path for yourself before writing your dissertation, ideally, but while writing your dissertation is good. So I'm glad you're here, Janelle, because you're at the right stage, right, to start planning some of this stuff.

Um, it always looks better if it doesn't look like you started thinking about this yesterday. So if you make a dossier and some of the items in there go back a couple years, right, started working in X professor's lab, three months, whatever. Um, back in 2021, and then I found another gig in 2023, and then I co authored this thing.

Um, uh, that's all to the good. So I [00:21:00] think the last piece of advice I'm going to give, people get very kind of ashamed, I feel, when they don't have very many publications or very many examples of grants or awards. So the way the CVs are written is meant to shame and expose you. I will just say that because I had no grants or awards for the first 15 years of my life and, but that's the first field in some of the CV forms.

And so I just put the field in and didn't put anything. I put N/A, I forget what I put. And then I decided I'm just not going to use this field or I'm going to move it because it doesn't advantage me to have the first page of my CV, which is the only page people look at with nothing in it. Right. Um, and the publications CV, you know, the field is also the same where people will put things in that are under process because they don't want to leave it blank.

Well, guess what, you know, almost everybody at your stage is in [00:22:00] the same situation. So all you can do in my thinking, having read many of these is to be honest. You know, always have something in process in one of these areas. You can't do that with awards because you don't get to control those, but if you have a publication that's under review, put that down.

If you have a publication that you just submitted, put that down. If you have a publication that you're still preparing, you can't really call it a publication, you have to call it work in progress. Right. But what people are really looking at in industry, what's the topic? What's the method? Is it hot?

Those are the three things they care about. They don't care about your degree that much. They kind of care about your mentor, but only if they already know them, and if they like or hate them, but otherwise they don't really care. Um, they are hiring you straight out of the box, say in this example, because they're trying to fill a specific need, and they need to fill it soon.

So [00:23:00] their timeline is very different from ours. You know, they would want to hire in a couple of weeks, possibly. They do, um, really fast video interviews and they want to make an offer quickly. And they'll often make offers orally. They won't give you a written offer, which is super annoying. Um, they sometimes want to give the written offer only after you accept.

So we can have a whole conversation about negotiation. Um, but I would say your strength is not how much you published or how famous your advisor is. I think it's the thing you're doing that either they're not doing or nobody else is doing. So lean into that, you know, use the CV to tell that story instead.

So the title of your dissertation, very important, put a couple of lines in about what it's about, what methods you're using, what data you're using. And I think that's all that can be expected of a brand new PhD. And then the conversation is what carries the rest of that. So we can talk more about that.

Anyway, Ray, I'll pass it off to you. Oh, did you have any questions, Janelle? [00:24:00] 

Janelle Grant: Um, I don't have any questions yet. I'm soaking it all in. Um, I guess I do have one question. Are things like NIH and NSF not considered industry because they're still very research focused or are those industry jobs too? 

Lisa Nakamura: I'll hand that over to Ray.

Oh, you're muted. 

Ray Fouché: Sorry, it, it, it's interesting to, to, to understand how, and people, the way people understand industry. Because, so I can speak more directly about NSF. And NSF sees itself as a place that's trying to create fundamental research, fundamental knowledge. And so the NSF sees itself as very traditional, but at the same time, NSF doesn't do research.

They provide money to others to [00:25:00] do research. So, and what NSF is seen as doing, as being the most effective arbitrator of skill, talent, opportunity, ability. So people come to the NSF and say, we believe that you have a great process for determining what is meaningful and useful by bringing in people from a specific research community.

And that research community determines that that is valuable research, and then it gives money to you, Lisa, or others and ask them to do that spectacular research and share it with your community. And I think NIH work is very similarly. So, in many ways. Once you enter the same NSF, you're not a research in the traditional way.

You end up meeting a lot of people, learning a lot about communities, but you spend more time [00:26:00] giving money than in a sense doing research in the traditional way. So I would, I'm not saying that they're not traditional industries, and I think probably their benefits of working for a governing funding agency that would make you quite attractive to a corporate industry that's looking for research dollars to support it.

It's agenda. And simply the fact that you understand the working of those institutions, which are tremendously can be tremendously complicated and convoluted. Uh, I mean, it's, I would say it's no different than. Right. Getting a PhD. Uh, you, you have a very strong sense of what is required, what it takes to get to the PhD process.

But if you talk to someone who's say a sophomore in college, you know, the machinations of what it takes to get there. Just doesn't add up to [00:27:00] anything. So like, wait, you have to take this exam and wait, you're done, not done. AVD, there are all these acronyms that just don't add up to anything really meaningful.

So, so I think it's the question about industry and where you like to be. So I think I would like to ask you the question, Janelle, where, where, where are you hoping to end up? 

Janelle Grant: That's a great question. So I think I always thought I would want to do tenure track job. Um, but maybe that's just because that's what I know.

Like in undergrad, I was really impressed by one of my advisors and I worked on her lab. It was a psychology lab and it was funded by the NIH. And I just remember being like, how do you get to do all this research? And like, what is research? And she told me and she was like, you can get a PhD and do research.

I was like, okay, I'll do that. But like, I didn't really know what that meant. I was just like, I'll figure out how to do that. So I think I always was like, I would want to take a [00:28:00] career path similar to hers. Um, but then. I think I am interested in what jobs like NIH, NSF have, Ford Foundation, Spencer. I think it sounds interesting to look at all these different types of research and work that's going on.

So yeah. That's my long winded answer. 

Lisa Nakamura: Would you work for TikTok? 

Janelle Grant: I would. 

I don't have TikTok, but yeah. 

Ray Fouché: Well, I mean, it's interesting because let me drop this example in the chat about people who, social science people who are living in the world of the academic world, but are not in the traditional tenure year track stream.

So, right. Margaret Levenstein [00:29:00] 

just received last year, 38 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to continue this project on large scale. We'll just call it large scale social science research. And if you click her link this professor has followed a trajectory of the research professor, which is another complicated interesting pathway.

Where it allows you to live in the economic world, I mean, in the academic world, but in a sense, earn your money, earn your salary as you work through the academic world, which gives you a little limited, a lot, potentially a lot of flexibility. But not the kind of traditional [00:30:00] sense and structure of, uh, the university.

So again, they're, they're these people, and that's via places like Michigan, other large research one institutions that allow, you know, People to function in this way at large universities. 

Lisa Nakamura: That's such a good topic. You know, when I was thinking about being a professor, Janelle was the same reason as you, you know, my professors were nice to me and I thought I want to do that.

And they say I can, so I'm going to do that. But you know, I went to a small liberal arts college and no one ever left or did anything different, but at a big R1, you can have four or five careers at the same place. Um, because they have lots of projects for you to do. You could, you know, run a unit, I think, or start a unit, uh, which is something I did with Digital Studies, and Levenstein did with [00:31:00] ICPSR, which is the political something.

You know, it's a big research group, so she became an administrator, you know, and then wasn't probably teaching or doing research. It's more like running a little company. 

Janelle Grant: Yeah. I also went to a small liberal arts school, so this is like my first time at . an R1, if they're still called that school. So I, I realized that there's a lot of possibilities that I didn't know about.

Um, and then even like Ray, when you were like, oh, so I'm, um, you know, working with the NSF, I was like, does that mean you have to leave Purdue? Like, what does that mean? So, um, I guess I'm just realizing that there's so much you can do. And I, I am happy to know that there are different things you can do.

And I'm, I'm just, I'm listening to all my options, I guess.

Lisa Nakamura: I have a question for you, Ray. I honestly don't know. [00:32:00] I have to give this advice all the time, but I would like to ask it of you. Um, do you think for a new PhD with a, with a great dissertation on say like gender discrimination in Snapchat or something with data, right? Like qualitative, it would be better for them to work for Snap or to take a tenure track job and say, I don't know, any normal kind of Big 10 university.

Communication department. 

Ray Fouché: Well, I think this is what I was going to say is like what? What is most important to you? And right. There are a lot of people that making as much money as possible. That's the most important thing. And if making money is most important thing that there are certain pathways that are probably more lucrative than others.

So I think that's the The piece about it. But then the question is [00:33:00] what do you want to happen to your ideas? So the research you do, if you have the project you mentioned, Lisa, is that if you would like that to be part of an academic ecology and continue to move an intellectual field further along, that probably won't happen on the corporate side.

Is that right? Janelle, if you get hired by TikTok or Google or Amazon, they're not hiring you to say you're doing this interesting work on race, we're going to change our perspective on race and identity. No they're hiring you to figure out how to package your research to probably appeal to a certain community, [00:34:00] extract more money from them.

So and some companies are, I would say more sinister than others, but, uh,

Lisa Nakamura: True. 

Ray Fouché: It's not. It's not. It's not balance. It's not equal. Uh, 

Janelle Grant: that's a really good point. I didn't think about. So thanks for bringing that up. 

Ray Fouché: So I think it's the question of right now. I mean, I think it's a big complicated conversation.

It's like, how do you want to live your life? Uh, so I think that's the part when I'm advising students about what, what direction they want to go. I say, how do you want to live your life? What do you want to do on a daily basis? How do you want to experience your world?

Lisa Nakamura: Wow that's deep. 

Ray Fouché: And and picture because I think this thing is like I would say I won't talk for you.

I'll talk for both of us is that, 

Lisa Nakamura: Sure 

Ray Fouché: we were we were both both graduate students at one point. And now we're at [00:35:00] a place right now where we are definitely very far away from being broke graduate students and the economics of like, how am I going to pay my rent that that's kind of out the door. So once you kind of clear the financial precarity question off the table.

What do you want to do? And yeah, and I mean, it's partially like, It's part of that, like, what do you want to, and I think this is the part of like, you're thinking about the long scale trajectory of an ideal situation, right? Yes, you would like to make a contribution to an intellectual field domain. Once you do that, great.

Uh, once you name, made a name for yourself, once you become an endowed professor, once you have all the kind of accoutrements of what people think of as a success, what do you want to do? And some people want to retire. Some people want to completely change what they want to do. [00:36:00] Other people want to continue to work in that same intellectual space.

But I think like the questions about what you want to do and how you want to live, I think change over place, space, and time, right? It also is connected to how you live your life in existence, right? So whether you're going to have a family or not have a family, where are you going to live? So all of those, those dynamics, I think shape the experience.

And I don't, I don't know if it's so, so lockstep. So I think oftentimes And I have these conversations, it ends up being, what, what kind of job can I get? And I feel like turning and saying, what kind of life do you want to live? 

Lisa Nakamura: Yeah. I think that impact question is really important because part of what makes work meaningful is the feeling that you've been listened to and that the work is actually changing something in the world.

So, you know, I'm going to flip it around and say, [00:37:00] I've given many talks to audiences of two. You know, the first talk I saw at, um, the, at ASA was Anna Everett and some people we know, right? There were ten people on the panel and two people in the audience, and I was one of them. So I could not leave because I was one of two people in the audience, and we just made a circle and we talked about it.

That's how small that field was. And I think we felt like, this is of no interest, this is going nowhere, no one cares about race and digital media. They don't care about digital media, first of all, they don't care about race. And then, you know, 15 years later, it, those are the really packed conference, you know, packed panels and stuff.

So I think if you write a policy document that helps Snapchat filter out like 2 percent of all the really racist comments that end up in their feed, that's thousands more people than went to any of the talks that I have given in my whole life. So, that's one way to think about it in terms of impact.

You know, that in academia, [00:38:00] we tend to think an audience of 100 is big. And it is pretty big. Um, but if you make small changes in what platforms do, your name may not be out there as that person, but you know that you did something which made life better. for lots and lots and lots and lots of people, right?

It might be around the privacy issue, might be around the surveillance issue, might be around discrimination, um, but the way credit is given is very different, I feel. So, um, and also I want to speak to the money thing. Industry pays really well, but you're going to have to live someplace that's going to be expensive.

So you kind of have to get out your calculator when you look at two operas that look like one's a lot better than the other, because sometimes that's not necessarily true. On the other hand, I feel like industry is more flexible about remote work than academe is. 

Ray Fouché: But I think this 

is a question, right? I mean, the other thing on [00:39:00] the kind of academic, academic research side, the magic of it is, No one ever tells you what to do.

No one's ever going to say, No, you can't do that research. They may look at you and go, I don't know how that's going to turn out. But no one will say, No, that you cannot do that. And that's a power that is very rare. I think in this world, unless you're high enough in the food chain where you can move, do what you want to do, but industry, there will be someone telling you what to do.

Uh, and let's not say that the academic world is not, does not have limits, right? You have to produce certain work and has to be accepted in these certain venues, but the questions you ask about the world, no one's going to ever say, I forbid you to ask that question. 

Lisa Nakamura: Yeah. What they will say is you can't do that with me.

You can do it, but you have to find a thought [00:40:00] partner. I mean, that's a kind of cheesy industry term, but all that means is someone who's willing to be on that journey with you. And if you can't find that person, then you have to switch, switch it up. Right? And that's why I think people get external committee members sometimes.

Is no one's going to tell them, no, you can't do that topic, but they will say, I can't really tell you how to do that topic. You know, I'm not going to say you can't, but I can't guarantee that the feedback I'm going to give you is going to be what you need.

Janelle Grant: So you mean to say, Ray, NSF doesn't tell people you can't do that.

Ray Fouché: No. It just not on them. . I think dentist has definitely tells people that, I don't wanna say that they, I don't wanna say, like they say, would say you can't do that. They're saying, they'll probably say, uh, this is not, the community doesn't say that they want to support that kind of research. 

Janelle Grant: Mm-Hmm.

Ray Fouché: But I mean, [00:41:00] the bigger question about impact is Right. Uh, and I think, I think about some of the things I've done recently. So, you know, about two years ago, um, I had. Was on, uh, StarTalk Radio, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson's kind of, yeah, contemporary technology podcast. And, right, there's roughly like 5500 ish, give or take, universities and colleges in the United States.

So, right, if each one of them had purchased one copy of my book and put it on the shelf, right, that's 5, 500 books on shelves where people have opportunity to do that, right, the YouTube clip of the hour long conversation I had with Neil, uh, Chuck [00:42:00] Nice, and Gary, the other part of the community, has over 50, 000 views.

So that's asking the question of 

where do I need to be or think about wanting to be if I would like to have the largest impact? And no, the conversation was not a clearly focused argument that my book represents. However, in, you know, 50 minutes of conversation, what I'm trying to do reached way more people than probably anything I've ever done in the shortest amount of time.

So I think it's asking the question about how can you have impact? And I think this is why we, you know, the digital world is so [00:43:00] important, why you can't dismiss TikTok, Twitter, that landscape, because 

I 

mean, it's not only producing memes, dances, funny things, but it also is a powerful way of spreading interesting intellectual work.

Lisa Nakamura: I completely agree. And that was the idea behind the lightning talk that all of the Grad Fellows are going to give, is you connect yourself to someone who has a platform and an audience. That would be Ray and André. So we're having an event where they're going to be responding to your work. You are in the spotlight.

You know, when people think to invite speakers, they will literally audition you on YouTube. So I've given talks where I've said, you know, I think I'm going to do this. Like, we've seen your talks. We know what you're going to do. I'm like, huh? Of course, this is your money. You don't want to waste on somebody who's a really bad speaker because money's not cheap and [00:44:00] you have an audience and has expectations.

I mean, they will do that, but also employers will do that. Because they're getting to know you, right? It's not quite an interview, but they're getting to know you, how you talk, what you look like, for better or worse. Um, it's not always fair, but I think as Ray is saying, you know, find ways to connect yourself to someone who has a platform.

Even a two minute talk, a lightning talk, or really short response, or being the chair or the moderator gets you seen, and those things are really important.

Ray Fouché: Well, and I guess the last thing to say is that I think we're For me, I think we're I hope and believe we're about to move into a different space where the relationships that we're talking about, like race, gender difference in the social and cultural implications of technology and [00:45:00] how it shapes our world is no longer a secondary or tertiary conversation.

It's entering the center discussion. And so, NSF just started a new directorate. The first new directive that started since 1991 and it's called technology and innovation partnerships and the director of NSF announced this new director at South by Southwest.

So when the director of NSF shows up at South by Southwest, which is like artists, media, I mean, you know, that, you know, that space, it's not, he didn't announce it at Congress. He didn't announce it at, you know, a AAAS national Academy of the science meeting. He announced it at South by Southwest, and you do that because you understand that [00:46:00] there's some questions and ideas that people are interested in that the social and cultural impact of technology can no longer be denied or avoided.

And,

yeah, so I think it can be interesting and messy but I think there are a lot of opportunities. I think research wise is that the people that are studying race and all forms of difference are there as well. But the question is, you know, it's back to my, I like to use the metaphor all the time. Is that, so how do you bake, how do you put race, gender, and difference into the batter instead of just making it little sprinkles on the cupcake?

Lisa Nakamura: Oh, well, this is a whole other conversation, but I think they're trying to hire a lot of our grads as diversity offers officers and tech firms. So is that a job? If they were going to pay you 300k right out the gate, is [00:47:00] that a job that's worth it? And there's a lot of reasons why that job is maybe impossible, but that is a lot of money.

So I'm not going to say absolutely no, I 

Jessica Hill Riggs: definitely have thoughts on this. Lisa and I have talked about this a little bit, but just like to be successful in a job like that, you also need like conflict and negotiation skillsets. You also have to have like be really versed in the language and the programming of what 

engineers and programmers are doing, right? And so there's a whole lot of other skill sets, I feel like, that would make you successful in that job, that one would have to make space to build a language in.

I have another question. This could be for some other time, but like, I would just be more curious about your NDA non disclosure agreements that you sign when you take on projects like this and what that entails and like the expectations of that, because those are like [00:48:00] the behind the scenes things that you don't really know unless you're in the thick of it.

Lisa Nakamura: Sure. Um, well, because I signed one, there's not a lot I can say about it. 

Jessica Hill Riggs: There you go.

Ray Fouché: I mean, it brings a big question about ethics. 

Lisa Nakamura: Yeah, that's it. 

Ray Fouché: And And what, where are you willing to be? And where, what are you willing to, to collectively hide for, uh, specific things and reasons? So, can we, can we just pause the, the recording for a second? Yeah.