ConMunity Engagement: Bringing science to the con

Science outreach is an important part of all cons, whether convention or a conference. There should be different goals at each but both should have it represented somewhere. Outreach is a common part of science and in many cases there are ‘tried and true’ methods for outreach, such as the public lecture or the museum demonstration day. Unfortunately, these events involve the same thing as teaching a class, with the academic deciding the agenda and the pupils, or public, looking at them in awe. With the plethora of platforms for scientists to take advantage of now and the attacks on science at the Federal level, these are not enough for sciences to stay engaged with the public.

Therefore, I encourage scientific conferences, or meetings, to have outreach as an regular,n ongoing, topic of discussion. At professional meetings, I suggest scientists discuss new methods for outreach, what ideas or topics should be the focus of outreach, and identify the importance and/or value of outreach to the academic and to the field. These are important to explore amongst other academics because it allows whole disciplines to consider what aspects are the most important to convey to the public. It also allows us to explore the pros and cons of different outreach methods as well as tailor certain platforms to particular types of outreach.

I’m pursuing this through a forum I organized that will be held at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in April. Another group that is doing something is the newly established and first #AnthropologyCon that will happen at the American Anthropological Association meeting this year. Forums and events like these provide platforms to explore innovative methods for other academics to figure out what methods will work for them and their work. These interactions between academics also allow us to create networks of professionals that, after the conference or meeting, will be able to help navigate bumps down the road with particular methods and help to provide a group to workshop ideas with at a distance.

Of course, the goal of meetings, forums, and events such as those mentioned previously would be to do the actual outreach. One place that I highly recommend doing this is at conventions, comics or just “geek” ones in general. These are places where you can have panels of scientists or scientists and creators open to the public; hands on activities relating to your science (or the rest of the TEAM); and demonstrate new teaching materials like board games or other outreach platforms like video game visualizations.

Come see me moderate @geniusbeee @backthatelfup @syrrann @sarahmiyoko @GeekGirlCon In fifteen in Furiosa talking about mixed race characters

— Paulina the PhD Candidate (now w/ more character) (@punuckish) October 1, 2017

This is something I have already started doing. While anthropology makes this pretty easy, because conventions are cultural events, blending the expertise of creators and scientists of all types hold great potential for outreach. At comics or science fiction conventions, panels can be organized by anyone and can include scientists, creators, critics, and anyone else who is interested in putting people together to talk about a topic. Conventions represent a unique place to bring scientific topics to a willing audience and we can do our best academic public outreach by involving a wide range of stakeholders. Additionally, almost all panels have a dedicated time set up for questions and answers so dialogue with the public is more open, rather than just having one person lecture. While the topic is often up to the organizer, that person is not always the scientist and panels allow for more discourse to flow between the panelists who may be from different backgrounds.

It is important to have dialogue about science outreach at both conventions and conferences because often as academics and as professionals we’re put on pedestals. Primarily, our work happens “under the hood” or behind a curtain because of academic publishing paywalls. So, unless people enroll in college classes or buy much to expensive access to academic databases, the dissemination of scientific knowledge is rather limited. Conventions allow us to go beyond the classroom to bring our knowledge to a wider audience because it brings us to the public and puts them, to a degree, in control over what gets discussed. It is important also for us to develop better teaching methods to cater to new generations and take advantage of many ways of learning and as temporary events, they allow us to see if certain methods work and which ones don't.

Lastly, it’s important in these discussions to be aware of the representation that your group is portraying. This means remembering diversity in regards to age, gender, race, and regional knowledge when organizing forums, meetings, or panels. This is because when it comes to outreach at public events that those we are trying to inspire physically see themselves represented. For example, it may be hard to convince the public that you are “de-colonizing” an issue if all of your presenters come from colonizing backgrounds or on cultural appropriation if a majority of you participants are white. Keeping this in mind will help to promote diversity in whatever field is being discussed and help make sense more accessible to all.

Me and 1 Million BC (AKA Marvel, that's not how this works)

It might not be super clear in this blog but I’m an archaeologist. This means that at the most basic level I’m interested in what people did in the past and I try to access that by looking at the things that they left behind. (My specific research toes that line but that's another story). If you can stand some strange hours and a lot of learning, it’s a really cool gig. Special note: WE DO NOT INTENTIONALLY LOOK FOR DINOSAURS. If that’s your gig, look into paleontology. Archaeology digs people stuff.

So here’s my beef with Marvel’s 1,000,000 BC, it is on the very edge of making sense but is just one order of magnitude off. You say 100,000 and I’m there. But at 1 million you are in the territory of "do we call what we evolved from people” or "are they still not quite similar enough to us for that".

Yes. I. know. it. is. fiction.

The problem is that in many other ways comics do things that undercut what we know about the human past (Kree involvement to make the inhumans etc.) that this extremely close but not quite right event becomes the last straw and I can't suspend my disbelief. Besides the Inhuman influence, the implications of the 1 million BC arc are so far reaching that in some ways I seriously question if the “regular” humans in the Marvel Universe would even be recognizable to us as regular earth people. On top of that I hate that this timeline actually undercuts human achievement because we came up with the cool shit they are doing/wearing much more recently than 1 million years ago. AKA in less time we came up with the same complex stuff. For me errors like 1 million BC are closer to Ancient Aliens than something I would want people being inspired to do archaeology from because it takes all the cool shit away from people and makes them supernatural. If they had just removed a couple of zeros, let say 10,000 BC, I would have been fine but 1 million (so exactly 1,002,017 years ago), nope cool story Marvel, you're drunk please go home.

What is going with the Earth and our ancestors at 1 million years ago? Well we’re chilling as Homo Erectus, with some possible variation into maybe a few other species maybe just some cousins who are from a distant relative, and making some of the first stone tools, not the first but more advanced stuff. We probably make fire and it’s an ice age. There is nothing like Homo Sapiens for like another 800,000 years give or take. There is no such thing as symbolic culture at least that we have evidence for. Being white doesn’t exist yet and actually is a phenomenon that outside of Neanderthals may not have been common in Homo Sapien Sapien until the last 12,000-8,000 years. Related to this, there probably were not the ethnic separations that would produce the type of “avengers” Marvel is selling as of 1 million BC and also red hair didn't exist yet. So who were these "Avengers"?

Starbrand – The concept of a “Brand” doesn’t exist in the sense of signifying similarity or ownership

Agamotto – Fine basically except for there not being Ethnically Asian people yet

Iron Fist – We have not developed metallurgy enough to smelt iron

Black Panther – Possible except the human evolution hang up explained above

Ghost Rider – Not clear that we had the symbolic capacity to understand an afterlife and hence “ghosts” or if the concept of “riding” something had been invented

Phoenix – We just got around to fire and Phoenixes are associated with Ancient Greece which does not exist yet

Odin – Not human, so of all the Avengers he is actually the only that makes sense in this context because he did not evolve on Earth so doesn’t fall under my critique. The irony abounds.

My annoyance with settings like this are that we know a lot about what happened in the past. We spend a lot of time excavating sites and reconstructing climate and behavior by examining material culture. So to not take those as facts or even consider that as an avenue for consideration is really frustrating. While this is probably something that other scientists regularly get annoyed with, many of those technologies and sciences exist to some degree in the “future” of humanity. They are things that we are moving toward, in some cases, going from science fiction to science fact on the back of scientists interested in creating what was envisioned as part of our future. Unfortunately, that is not the case with historical sciences like archaeology. By remaking the history of the earth, and of human evolution, you are going from science fact to science fiction.

We can’t increase the pace of human evolution just because we wanted to have extra zeros to make our event look more existing. On top of the pace needed to sustain that, there’s also the problem that all of the characters come from what would essentially be complex civilizations that would need to have come about extremely quickly to support the symbolic behaviors, particularly with the mantle-like traditions of Iron Fist and Black Panther. We didn't even farm until 10,000 years ago during something called the Neolithic Revolution.

I also have to address the possible existence of people with the x-gene in 1 million BC. We would all have the x-gene by now, most likely, if people with it started popping up a million years ago. Especially if those were children of, or they were, the people who were smartest, most powerful, and had good reproductive power (all helpful for making sure your descendants continue to live). Most likely, in the absence of too many supervillains, such new “powers” would be highly adaptive and fitting for the unpredictability of the early Pleistocene so those with the X-gene would have definitely taken over the world by now. No Doubt. Also I’m very confused by the weird Starbrand/Hulk thing that is going on. Is It supposed to be Gigantopithecus (which is what Sasquatch might be based off of)?

So why do I even care so much as to write this? Well right now, as the March for Science demonstrated, science is being regularly attacked and under funded. Particularly, anthropological sciences, such as archaeology and paleoanthropology, that teach things like evolution are under attack and are presented as “one of many possible explanations”. And because of that it matters a fucking lot that comics espouse an evolutionary agenda more akin to creationism than evolution, especially when people like to think of comics as science fiction rather than just fiction or fantasy. From a storytelling point of view, it is a disservice to feed the public a thinner fictional world when we have a wealth of knowledge about the realities of prehistory. Particularly when prehistoric life rarely gets the sort of publicity that a Marvel event brings. This could have been a great chance to collaborate and use archaeological knowledge to color a fictional world using the comics art to illustrate a complex prehistory. A chance to do something fun but also use what we have learned about the past to give it a depth that goes beyond prehistoric “cavemen” stereotypes. In the same way I think that comics should be doing better with culture, they should be doing better with science. We know more about science and culture than we did in the 1960s, it's time we did something about it.