Environment + Genre with Shannon Davies Mancus

Explicit content warning

09/14/21 • 71 min

Shannon Davies Mancus’s (she/her) undergraduate and first degree was in musical theatre, and she has maintained a performance praxis through her second career as an academic. She is currently an Associate Teaching Professor and coordinator of the Nature and Human Values program at the Colorado School of Mines. Her work can be found in publications such as Performing Ethos, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-first Century Feminist Theory. Her work focuses on the political performativity of environmentalist media in visual and popular culture. She loves traveling, community, and sharing exciting ideas.

Her obsession with pop culture runs deep, but mostly focuses influences the narratives that tell us there’s only one “right” way to be an environmentalist, and how we can move beyond that script to reach new and better stories. Not just so we can “appear” a new way, but so that we might actually relate to one other more and begin to truly shift our environmental future.

That’s part of what she and Brandi talk about on this official first interview episode of the show, on the intersections of Environment + Genre, plus:

What scripts and genres have to do with the media we consume and how we behave in the world.
The power of stories and something called “the information deficit model,” an idea from science communication.
Shanon’s story of living through 9/11 and the film that helped her see movies as a form of artwork that can create a public sphere for difficult dialogue.
Why she loves studying popular imagination around witches and how they connect to our sense of environmental doom.
How she’s weaved together all of the seemingly disparate things in her career into where she is now, but how that only became clear in hindsight.
And, why she loves teaching unexpected things to math and engineering students.

Listeners can find Shannon Davies Mancus on Twitter @shannonmancus and on Instagram @shannonmancus.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

That’s part of what she and Brandi talk about on this official first interview episode of the show, on the intersections of Environment + Genre, plus:

What scripts and genres have to do with the media we consume and how we behave in the world.
The power of stories and something called “the information deficit model,” an idea from science communication.
Shanon’s story of living through 9/11 and the film that helped her see movies as a form of artwork that can create a public sphere for difficult dialogue.
Why she loves studying popular imagination around witches and how they connect to our sense of environmental doom.
How she’s weaved together all of the seemingly disparate things in her career into where she is now, but how that only became clear in hindsight.
And, why she loves teaching unexpected things to math and engineering students.

Listeners can find Shannon Davies Mancus on Twitter @shannonmancus and on Instagram @shannonmancus.

Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

Previous Episode

Why This Matters to Me

The description of “This Plus That” is “a show about connecting the seemingly un-connectable and why it matters.” Most episodes will center on the combination of two seemingly unrelated things, where I'll interview guests about how they've built lives at the center of all their wild interests, but I wanted to start out with why this matters to me. It’s deeply personal.

So personal that a lot of the audio for this first episode was recorded in private messages I sent to friends, never expecting to make them public to the world. The rest happened knowing I'd be "in conversation" with you. But it's all uncut, entirely unscripted, and recorded in moments of clarity and excitement.

Some of what I discuss:

A run-down of my last couple of years and how I wound up here, including wanting to become an astronaut at age 36.
My love paradox in others, but not as much in myself.
A running family story that told me I didn’t “belong in the sciences.”
What quantum physics started to teach me about holding my own complexities.
Our struggle to hold conflict in the midst of queer and organizing communities.
The way we build new “religions” after leaving the dogma of oppressive environments.
And, how contradictions are the nature of the universe.

If even a little bit of it resonates with you, I'm so glad you're here.

Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

Next Episode

Neuroscience + Dance with Devika Nair

Devika Nair (she/her) manages a large translational brain tumor project at UCSF. Their goal is to better predict tumor transformation to higher grades and differentiate between tumor and treatment effects in primary gliomas using advanced MR imaging techniques. Outside of research, she helps direct a science podcast group called Carry the One Radio whose mission is to ignite scientific curiosity. She also takes classes in and performs Indian classical dance, which has informed her understanding of her field of study—neuroscience.

As a clinical researcher, she finds herself operating between brilliant colleagues with specialized training in high-level physics who run the MRI machines at a tumor research facility and the clinicians who make important decisions based on the lab’s findings. One day, though, an unexpected health scare took her out from behind the glass to inside of the very MRI machines she asks patients to enter every day. Suddenly, what was simply a professional passion—using story to communicate science to the general public—became a personal mission. She wasn’t sure how to explain the way MRIs work that might actually be interesting to other people, until she realized that the movement of hydrogen protons, which is how images wind up on film, look just like the movements of the Indian classical dance she learned as a child.

In this episode, Devika and Brandi talk about the intersections of Neuroscience + Dance, including:

The amazing story of how we met.
Her health scare and how she applied her research skills to lend herself a sense of control in the midst of a scary situation.
Growing up with an artistic mom that inspired her early dance training and who continues to teach today.
And, her fascination for what art and science have in common, and how they can be used to encourage curiosity and seeing different perspectives outside of your own.