Adam Levy 00:00
Hello, I’m Adam Levy, and this is Off limits: academia’s taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers. In this episode: excluded bodies.
Often, academia is portrayed as a purely cerebral field, one where the best and brightest brains rise to the top, no matter what.
But this neglects the significant role our bodies play too, from painstaking experiments for hours in the lab to conducting gruelling field work. And the way academia is set up is not irrespective of our bodies.
For some, academia can feel alienating, even impossible as a career path, because research isn’t adapted to their needs.
This can be, as we’ll find out later in the episode, due to physical disability, but it can also be down to size.
Discrimination based on size is often so taken for granted that it goes entirely undiscussed. But back in 2022 Nature published a careers feature titled The sting of sizeism in the scientific workplace.
Theo Newbold is a PhD student in plant pathology at the Pennsylvania State University in the US who was interviewed for that piece.
I was keen to speak to them further about the challenges of being fat in academia, as well as the response they’d witnessed to this Nature feature.
I started out by asking: moving through academia, do you ever get the sense that colleagues see or treat you differently because you are a scientist of size?
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