Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias, Professor Pragya Agarwal

For the first time, behavioural and data scientist, activist and writer Professor Pragya Agarwal unravels the way our implicit or ‘unintentional’ biases affect the way we communicate and perceive the world, how they affect our decision-making, and how they reinforce and perpetuate systemic and structural inequalities.

Sway is a thoroughly researched and comprehensive look at unconscious bias and how it impacts day-to-day life, from job interviews to romantic relationships to saving for retirement. It covers a huge number of sensitive topics – sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, colourism – with tact, and combines statistics with stories to paint a fuller picture and enhance understanding. Throughout, Agarwal clearly delineates theories with a solid grounding in science, answering questions such as: do our roots for prejudice lie in our evolutionary past? What happens in our brains when we are biased? How has bias affected technology? If we don’t know about it, are we really responsible for it?

At a time when partisan political ideologies are taking centre stage, and we struggle to make sense of who we are and who we want to be, it is crucial that we understand why we act the way we do. This book will enables us to open our eyes to our own biases in a scientific and non-judgmental way.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

About the Author

Professor Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural scientist, with expertise in cognition, HCI and User-centred Design, focused especially on diversity and inclusivity. She was a senior academic for over 12 years at universities in the UK and USA, and held the prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship, following a PhD from the University of Nottingham. Agarwal has published numerous scientific articles and books, some of which are on the reading list for leading courses around the world.

As a freelance writer, she regularly writes thought pieces on racial and gender bias for The Guardian, Times Higher Education, The Independent, and various other publications. Agarwal is a two-time TEDx speaker, and has been invited to give keynote talks and workshops around the world, appearing on several international podcasts, radio and television channels, such as BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC Breakfast, and Radio 5 Live. Her next book Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions is out later this year.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @DrPragyaAgarwal
Instagram: @drpragyaagarwal
Facebook: facebook.com/DrPragyaAgarwal
Website: drpragyaagarwal.co.uk

Superior: The Return of Race Science, Angela Saini

After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races.

If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists.

At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different. 

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

About the Author

Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist and author based in New York. She presents radio and television programmes, and her writing has appeared in National Geographic, New Scientist, The Sunday Times and Wired. She is a spring 2022 Logan Nonfiction Program Fellow and was in Berlin in summer 2022 as part of the Humboldt Residency Programme on social cohesion. As the founder and chair of the ‘Challenging Pseudoscience’ group at the Royal Institution, Angela researches and campaigns around issues of misinformation and disinformation. 

Her previous book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong has been translated into fourteen languages. Both are on university reading lists across the world. Angela’s two-part television series for the BBC about the history and science of eugenics aired in 2019. She is currently finishing her fourth book The Patriarchs: In Search of the Origins of Male Domination, which will be published by 4th Estate and Beacon Press in early 2023.

You can follow her work here:

Instagram: @angeladsaini
Website: angelasaini.co.uk

Looking Glass: Climate Solutions, Gemma Milne

Looking Glass is a podcast from the Institute of Physics which looks at some of the most pressing challenges we face as a society and explores the ways in which physics can help address them. Now in its third series, it is focused on the crucial role physics must play if we are to navigate the climate crisis. Science journalist, podcaster and author Gemma Milne speaks with physicists and other scientists to discuss what hope science has to offer as we face the prospect of a rapidly warming planet.

Recent episodes covered: 

• How can physics help us to make our air cleaner?
• Can the physics of how fire spreads help us stop wildfires? And can we use fire to our advantage?
• How can physics help protect our soil, enable farmers to continue farming and allow communities to survive?
• How can physics help keep water where we want it, and in a form we can access?
• How is climate activism changing, and what role should physics and organisations such as the IOP play?

You can:

Listen on Spotify
Follow on Twitter: @PhysicsNews @gemmamilne
Visit their website: iop.org/lookingglass

The Matter of Everything: Twelve Experiments that Changed Our World, Dr Suzie Sheehy

Asking questions has always been at the heart of physics, our unending quest to understand the Universe and how everything in it behaves. How do we know all that we know about the world today? It’s not simply because we have the maths – it’s because we have done the experiments.

In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the ground-breaking experiments of the twentieth century that changed the course of history. From the serendipitous discovery of X-rays in a German laboratory, to the scientists trying to prove Einstein wrong (and inadvertently proving him right), to the race to split open the atom, Sheehy shows how our most brilliant, practical physicists have shaped innumerable aspects of how we live today. Radio, TV, the chips in our smartphones, MRI scanners, radar equipment and microwaves, to name a few: these were all made possible by their determination to understand, and control, the microscopic.

Pulling physics down from the theoretical and putting it in the hands of the people, The Matter of Everything is a fascinating expedition through the surprising, and occasionally accidental, experiments that transformed our world, and a celebration of the creative and curious people behind them.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

About the Author

Dr Suzie Sheehy is a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time between her research groups at the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne. Her research addresses both curiosity-driven and applied areas and is currently focused on developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine. She was awarded a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 fellowship and was a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

An award-winning public speaker, presenter and science communicator, Suzie is dedicated to sharing science beyond the academic community. Her 2018 TED talk has been viewed over 1.8M times and she has been an expert TV presenter for a number of Discovery Channel shows including four seasons of Impossible Engineering. In her talks and shows, Sheehy loves to bring real-life demonstrations and experiments, and has shared these with hundreds of thousands of audience members. She also designed Accelerate! a particle physics showed aimed at children, which ran in the UK and Germany.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @suziesheehy
Instagram: @drsuziesheehy
Website: suziesheehy.com

Professor V Narry Kim

V Narry Kim, born in South Korea in 1969, is a biochemist and microbiologist at Seoul National University (SNU) working primarily with microRNA biogenesis.

She first became interested in science as a high school student and, in an interview, said she chose it as a lifelong career because of her fascination with “the simplicity of the principles underlying the complexity of life”. She completed an undergraduate degree in microbiology and a master’s degree in microbiology at SNU. She then graduated from the University of Oxford with a PhD in biochemistry on retroviral proteins.

After her PhD, Kim took a research assistant position at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Pennsylvania studying messenger RNA surveillance, the mechanism by which cells double-check the quality of their messenger RNA molecules. On completing her postdoctoral research, she returned to SNU in 2001 where she started working as a research assistant professor, eventually becoming a distinguished professor.

Kim founded the Centre for RNA Research at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), where her research focuses on RNA-mediated gene regulation. Her lab has made significant contributions to the understanding of how microRNAs – small single-stranded non-coding RNA molecules that play a key part in regulating gene expression – are created and processed in animal cells. She and her colleagues developed a new technology to eliminate specific microRNAs which when applied to cancer cells led to a drop in their proliferation rate. This may result in new gene therapies.

Kim has received several awards including the L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science, Ho-Am Prize in Medicine, Korean S&T Award, and was named Woman Scientist of the Year by South Korea’s Ministry of Science and Technology. She also has several patents for her work, such as an HIV-based gene delivery vector. She was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 2021.

Further Reading

• V. Narry Kim, Wikipedia
• Narry Kim Lab | RNA biology, NarryKim.org
• Kim, V. Narry, Biological Science, Seoul National University
• V. Narry Kim: Embracing the Challenge of Science, Quest, 2005
• SNU Professor Wins LOreal-UNESCO Award, Korea Times, 12 December 2007
• More prizewinners of 2008, Ashley Yeager, Nature, 17 December 2008
• 17 Women in STEAM from Around the World to Inspire You on International Women’s Day 2017, Rachel Murray, She Geeks Out, 8 March 2017
• The History and Challenges of Women in Genetics: A Focus on Non-Western Women, Hadeel Elbardisy and Malak Abedalthagafi, Frontiers in Genetics, 2021
• V. Narry Kim, Royal Society, 2021