Corina Newsome may be studying the impact of climate on seaside sparrows, but she is also shaking up how we engage people with science.
She’s 28, funny and compelling. But ornithologist Corina Newsome also has a hard-hitting message for the science community: if it doesn’t start engaging with a more diverse audience, there will be major scientific and medical consequences.
And Newsome should know.
Birding while Black
As a child growing up in Philadelphia, Newsome had no idea a career in conservation was possible, until she met a Black zookeeper at Philadelphia Zoo. “She was a reflection of myself, which I had never seen in the conservation field. It was a powerful experience,” Newsome told The Brilliant.
Inspired, Newsome went on to intern at the zoo and study biology, thinking she’d focus on mammals. Then she found herself in an ornithology class with a brilliant teacher. “This was one of my first experiences in how powerful science communication can be,” she says. “Communicating your passion is almost more important than whatever facts you’re saying. And he was really good at that. I caught the bug.”
In May 2021, Newsome completed her masters degree with a focus on avian conservation. During her studies she monitored a saltmarsh sparrow, called a seaside sparrow, on the marshes in the US state of Georgia. “I was out there walking all around the salt marsh and the mud and the grass, finding nests, doing things like that during the summer.”
For many people, it sounds idyllic. But not for Black biologists. “On the marshes, there’s no hiding. You’re just out there,” she explains. “Every time somebody pulls off the highway and parks next to my car and stares at me, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” adding that there have been multiple occasions where she’s been worried there will be some kind of confrontation. It’s not paranoia – in 2020, a young Black man called Ahmaud Aubrey was shot and killed by white men while he was out for a jog, not far from where Newsome was working.
Having to be on guard is not the only challenge. Lack of community is another; the zookeeper Newsome met as a high schooler was the last Black person she met professionally before she began her masters degree.
That changed when she finally got on Twitter. “I met a guy named Jeffrey Ward. His picture was a cartoon version of him with a bird on his shoulder,” she says. Intrigued, Newsome asked if he liked birds. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah’.” Newsome says she was blown away by meeting just one other Black person interested in the subject.
Yet Newsome soon realised there were plenty more.
The benefit and value for me, of Twitter, has just been the community that has been formed that I would not have known about because oftentimes, we are the only Black people.”
That community of Black birders on Twitter has become an extraordinary force for change.
Coming together to change the narrative
In 2020, a white woman in Central Park in New York called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black bird watcher, falsely alleging he’d threatened her. Newsome and around a hundred other Black nature enthusiasts who had all met on Twitter shared the video of the incident. “We were saddened and infuriated. Christian Cooper is the picture of an upstanding citizen. So it was just, like, this literally can happen to anyone,” says Newsome.
One of the group members suggested that they do something to uplift Cooper. Within days they had organised Black Birders Week, an event based on activism, conversation and celebration. Using the #BlackBirdersWeek hashtag, and running from late May to early June on Twitter and Instagram, it was a hit. “It ended up getting a lot more attraction than I imagined that it would,” says Newsome. “I was surprised when organisations like [non-profit environmental organsiation] National Audubon, which has perpetuated these images that it’s a white space, supported and promoted us.” Mainstream media across the globe covered the week.
Black Birders Week is now an annual event and the group has formed BlackAFinSTEM to unite and celebrate all Black scientists. Now, there are other week-long events like #BlackinChem, #BlackinAstro and #BlackinNeuro.
That same year, Newsome became the Community Engagement Manager of bird protection society Georgia Audubon, where she is focused on engaging historically marginalised communities. “Audubon is extremely white and very wealthy and so just naturally, they have continued to cater to that audience. But that’s not what I want to be part of, and that’s not how we should be using those resources. And so a lot of my time is spent designing programming, building relationships,” says Newsome.
Newsome believes not just Audubon, but also science communicators generally, need to overcome a lack of intersectionality, where those communicating do not understand the discrimination and marginalisation faced by the communities they are trying to engage.
I think it’s one of the root causes for why we see the pattern that we do as far as who’s communicating science, who’s hearing that communication, who’s receptive to it,” she says.
Newsome gives vaccine hesitancy as an example. “Simply telling people, ‘You need to get vaccinated because this could happen to you,’ is not enough.” She points to the infamous four-decade long Tuskegee syphilis study begun by the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1930s, where Black men infected with syphilis were left untreated, so researchers could study the course of the disease – despite the fact a cure was available. It’s this kind of medical exploitation, says Newsome, along with the ongoing hurdles that Black patients are often forced to navigate when interacting with medical professionals, that has resulted in rightful hesitancies to engage with the medical system today.
Climate change and conservation are other issues where communicators need to better understand their audience. Newsome says that when she talks about climate change, she often centres people in the conversation, rather than wildlife.
“In communities like mine, ones that are often forced into the margins of society – Black and Indigenous and Brown communities – wildlife impacts are not always the first priority because survival is the first priority,” she says, adding that while they absolutely care about the environment, Black and Indigenous people have also been exploited in the guise of conservation.
“The government will literally strip people of their land. Flood people out to create the habitat for endangered wildlife,” she says. One remedy is for communicators to emphasise the knowledge and expertise of the community, and acknowledge their priorities and needs.
For all these reasons, Newsome says it’s critical that scientists and science communicators are drawn from a range of races, sexes, religions, and socio-economic backgrounds. Otherwise communication becomes “feedback of homogeneity”, where the experts simply talk to people like themselves. The result can “range from just inequitable to deadly,” says Newsome. “We’re seeing this with the pandemic in the US.”
She adds that communicators should not only be diverse, but be armed with passion and skills drawn from other areas, like art and theatre. “I’m a musician,” says Newsome. “I am an expressive communicator.”
She certainly is, and her exceptional skills are already drawing people together. They meet one another, support one another, and remind each other that they are not alone. Together, they celebrate the birds – and they’re just getting started.
Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo Credit: Katherin Arntzen, Georgia Southern University,
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