Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein – The Disordered Cosmos

Busy Being Black

Can we look at the stars queerly? And if so, how might queer star-gazing help orient us towards earthly liberation? To help me answer these questions is Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein – a theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist. Her book, The Disordered Cosmos, presents a Black queer feminist challenge to the dominant understanding of physics and calls for a more robust and intersectional approach to ensuring the sciences and the night sky are available to all.

Three lessons in particular stand out to me from this conversation: The first is that science is queer. If we understand queerness as a refusal to aspire to the norm, then the insatiable curiosity that queerness demands is well-suited to a science like physics. Indeed physics – perhaps the most difficult and ever-changing of the sciences – could be the queerest science of all. Physics is for us. The second lesson is personal. Ahead of my conversation with Chanda, I told her I was feeling nervous because I’m not a scientist: do I have what it takes to hold space for her enchantment with something I don’t fully understand? Chanda assured me that I don’t have to pass a physics test to understand what lights her up or to read her book, and so I was reminded of something Mary Oliver wrote: “the touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together”. The third lesson is that physics is the science concerned with how the universe behaves; and whether through scientific inquiry, poetry or lived experience, is that not also the work we’re engaged in together here?

Our conversation explores how Star Trek upholds and challenges ideas about who is representative of the human race, how queer Black feminisms have taught Chanda to look to the stars in more generative ways and why dreaming of a future where every Black child has access to the dark night sky requires robust interventions across culture and society right now.

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Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.

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