Katherine Pandora

This site is a companion to "scipop", my webfolio on science and popular culture (just beginning to come online -- I'll link to it soon) . . . and both of these were born out of the ongoing experiment of my freshman-level class on "Science and Popular Culture" that I teach each spring.

Science in culture happens all the time and everywhere, and its been hard to find a way to highlight what passes into view outside the official class syllabus without bombarding my students with smudgy articles cut out of the newspaper to pass around, or sending out emails that disappear into their overflowing inboxes, or scribbling out hundreds of sticky notes on the fly about things I want to share and then never being able to find them when I need them. It seemed that maybe I had been trying to blog in 3-D rather than via computer, with predictably messy results :-) And that's how "petri dish" was born.

I earned my Ph.D. in History and Science Studies from UC San Diego in 1993, and I currently teach the history of science and technology at the University of Oklahoma, where I am an associate professor with one book published and two more in the research and writing stage. Publishing in print is part of the normal work practices for professors; publishing on the internet falls into a hazy area that mostly means it is supposed to fit somewhere into my "free time". But I believe that public history is as important as professional history, and that one way or another I'll figure out how to become a digital historian even as I figured out how to become a print historian. So if you're reading this, you're part of the experiment along with me!

I am a longshoreman's daughter (and granddaughter) who grew up in the southern California port town of San Pedro, where some of my most profound experiences about science in culture came when I was scrambling around the tidepools off of Point Fermin, or visiting "Bubbles" the whale down the road at Marineland of the Pacific (now gone, but it was then the world's largest oceanarium of its time), or staying up late past bedtime to watch the grunion shimmer up onto Cabrillo Beach on a springtime night. My interest in science and popular culture has very deep roots, and I've never stopped being curious about it and wanting to understand it better. Sometimes people think that the history of science is simply the history of scientists, but it is much more than that. It is also the history of what "science" and "nature" means to every member of a culture . . . it is the history of each one of us.

How did a longshoreman's daughter end up as a professor at a research university? (There aren't many professors at research universities who come from working class backgrounds -- and those who do are usually men, not women.) I'm often surprised by this myself, usually on a weekly basis when I'm bemused by the oddities (from my view, to be sure) of white-collar professional life! But with this blog there is at least one tangible connection, because for a number of years a generation ago -- back in the era of printing presses -- my father put together his own newsletter on union issues, called "One Member's Opinion." Which is probably not a bad alternate name for this site when you get right down to it :-)

-- Katherine Pandora

image source: the postcard is from my hometown of San Pedro, showing a view of the Harbor and City Hall, circa 1923. It is posted at sanpedro.com /
http://www.sanpedro.com/spcom/postcar5.htm

so, what do those san pedro tidepools look like? for a beautiful photo gallery of the ones at point fermin, see:
http://trailhiker.smugmug.com/gallery/107046/1

for a challenging essay on how colleges misunderstand the experiences of students with working-class backgrounds despite the rhetoric of diversity, see Janet Galligani Casey's article, "Diversity, Discourse, and the Working Class Student" from the July/August 2005 issue of Academe:
http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05ja/05jacase.htm

-- or for a general overview of the topic, see Alfred Lubrano's 2003 book, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams.