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: religion.
Research and religion are often pitted against each other, discussed as if they’re inherently incompatible.
But, as we’ll learn later in the episode, religious faith is a fundamental part of many academics’ identities,
And denying this complexity can negatively impact not just the researchers themselves, but also wider society.
And the challenges can be especially severe when a researcher is from a religion.
This is the case for Maisha Islam. Maisha is a research culture lead for equality, diversity and inclusion at the University of Southampton in the UK, and she’s also a British-Bangladeshi Muslim woman.
In her work, she’s investigated the experience of others who, like her, have been made to feel like outsiders as they navigate academia.
So I talked to Maisha to find out the impacts this has had on her. She told me that even having a career in academia was at one point unthinkable to her.
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