Presentation to the BIWoC in STEM Support Collective
Career transitions in and out of engineering and technology
Today I would like to (1) give you a rapid overview of my weird career trajectory, including some life events that changed me, and (2) share some reflections from my 13-year working life to date.
My career has been similar to my dating life. There has been quite a few different people and quite a few different organisations 😊 I started off my career as a hydrologist (after studying civil engineering and arts) working on rainfall runoff models and dam break analyses within the surface water team at SKM (now Jacobs). After engaging mainly with spreadsheets rather than people for a couple of years, I started looking around the company for work I might be more suited to. I moved into the climate change and sustainability team soon after and worked on climate change adaptation strategies for local government. Sadly the Federal Government cut climate change adaptation funding drastically, so I ended up leaving the country and heading to Fiji to work for a UN agency focused on pacific-wide disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation policy. Here (when I was around 27 years old), I had an experience that would change my life forever. I was on the way to India from Fiji for a holiday, and I somehow managed to get an infection called MRSA. Very long story short, the infection I caught in Fiji had become so serious that by the time my plane landed in Seoul for a stopover, I passed out at the airport. I had to have surgery in South Korea and go home to Australia to recover (for months). In fact, the doctors told me I may never fully recover. At this stage I was basically bed-ridden and unable to work so I signed up for a yoga teacher training course. With the help of yoga, and particularly meditation, I was able to make a full recovery (over the course of about a year). At the same time, I broke up with my long-term boyfriend of 6 years (I was definitely confused about my sexuality at this point but had not quite figured out that I was queer). After a short phase of full-time yoga teaching and a bit more consulting, I got offered a role as the Director of a new start-up called YLab. I spent three and a half years building an organisation from scratch that sat within a larger non-profit. YLab’s goal was to employ young experts with relevant lived experiences to work on complex policy challenges such as climate change, homelessness, and unemployment. I was heartened by the rapid growth of YLab, excited to be applying complexity theory and systems thinking, as well as working alongside an incredible group of people. Sadly, I experienced quite traumatizing racism from staff at the non-profit so I ended up quitting that job (you could call it “rage quitting”) in a very public way (you can read parts of my resignation letter here). This brings me to the current phase of my career which has been centred around the intersection of social justice, regulation, and emerging technology (yes, I have circled back to algorithms — I started my career writing them as a hydrologist and now I analyse their impact!). This work has mostly been campaigning and research (through a PhD program), including (1) a project holding listed companies to account for their involvement in abusive border policing regimes, particularly technology enabled surveillance, and also (2) starting a project exposing mis/disinformation in relation to the upcoming election.
When I look back over my life and career, there are some themes and patterns that emerge that I want to share with you.
I recently realized that many of the challenges I have had (apart from the near-death experience in South Korea), have stemmed from the fact that I have ever been fully visible to the institutions I’ve worked for, or many of the colleagues I have worked alongside. And now I finally understand the long histories that explain why this is the case.
European colonizers (during the 14th to 19th century) used classification systems to simplify land and bodies, for the purpose of value extraction and control. Scientific racism, for instance, was used to construct racial hierarchies based upon false beliefs that there were actual biological differences between races. We all know intimately how this was used to justify massacres, dispossession of land, forced labour, and erasure of language and culture. This system not only deeply ingrained the inferiority of the racialized “other”, but also the inferiority of the “woman” to the “man”, the “poor” to the “rich”, and “disabled” to the “able-bodied” etc. A lesser acknowledged aspect of settler colonialism and slavery though, is its role in spreading linear binary thinking (sometimes called “classical analytic thinking”), and making it so pervasive that is it seen as the norm.
Of course, as engineers and technologists, we understand and value this type of thinking. But we also understand and value an infinite range of other ways of knowing and being that come from our cultures and ancestral lineages.
It is this linear binary thinking that says you must be a either a man or a woman, you must be either technical or creative, you must be either an activist (who wants to smash the system) or an entrepreneur (who wants to build systems). But the truth is we can be both.
It is difficult to accept that some of the institutions and people we engage with personally and professionally may not be able to see us, or grasp our expansiveness. This should not stop us from holding and being multiple personal and professional identities.
We all have a certain level of comfort with complexity, which comes from living in and navigating different worlds. I truly believe we see more of the world than our white, cis, male and more elite counterparts do. This is a struggle, but also a huge gift. We have to do the work of seeing each other and our inherent value, so that we don’t forget. We all know how easy it is to forget our worth.
Another dimension of linear binary thinking is the concept of linear time and progress. This has zero utility in helping us navigate life and work. As you can see my career and my life have not in any way been a straight line. They have ebbed and flowed in cycles. There have been seasons of abundance and seasons of drought; seasons of illness, seasons of health. Especially for those paving a new path that no one has walked before, it is not going to be easy compared to those traveling paths that are well-worn. Challenging the status quo in any way always brings with it opposition. I wish I had known earlier that people and institutions do not try to bring you down because you are weak or incompetent, but exactly the opposite. It is because of your power and your potential.
I have had to leave several organisations because of discrimination and abuse. I have spent years abdicated my personal power, because I felt so under threat by systems of oppression and domination (of whiteness, of heteropatriarchy, of class oppression). But recently I realized that this only serves my oppressors, and not myself, nor my ancestors. My ancestors survived colonization and genocide (which is ongoing in Illangai (Sri Lanka)), and never ceased to imagine a world where I would be freer than them. And I am.
We often think about the social order as something that is fixed and static. I recently came across a quote that said “social structure is not a noun but a verb” (Law 1992). We sometimes forget that structures of oppression were not just produced once, but are being reproduced, day by day, minute by minute. Which opens up the possibility that they can be contested, day-by-day, minute-by-minute. It opens up the possibility to form new structures and to produce different worlds.
We have everything we need at our disposal to build the worlds we want to live in right now. We are already doing this. We are creating and practicing “pockets of Black, Brown, and queer joy” (Gorrie & Gorrie 2021). I often think of the James Baldwin quote , “the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it”. We have been tasked with creating these places together.
References
Gorrie, N and Gorrie, W. (2021) Late Night Literature: Imagining Abolitionist Futures — Emerging Writers’ Festival. Available at: http://emergingwritersfestival.org.au/event/late-night-literature-abolitionist-futures/ (accessed 27 June 2021)
Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems Practice 5, 379–393. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01059830
