Alondra Nelson. Photo courtesy Dan Komoda.
Lead with Your Heart: A Q&A with Dr. Alondra Nelson
The Contexts team is happy to welcome the esteemed Dr. Alondra Nelson. The Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab, and a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Nelson served from 2021-2023 as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is also a member of the United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence. Widely known for her scholarship at the intersection of science, technology, and society, Nelson is the author of several award-winning books including, most recently, The Social Life of DNA. Her essays, reviews, and commentary have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Wired, and Science. Nelson took time out of her busy schedule to join Contexts co-editor Amin Ghaziani for a chat about her applied sociology work within and beyond the academy—and her advice for those who want to follow in her footsteps.
Amin Ghaziani (AG): You served as Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden. Our readers would love to know how a sociologist found their way to the White House. Can you retrace your steps for us?
Alondra Nelson (AN): In 2016, I began writing a book about science and technology policy in the Obama administration. I had become intrigued by this administration’s ambitious science and technology policy initiatives. For example, it started a large-scale health and research project, now called All of Us, which aspires to place one million Americans’ DNA in a database for clinical and biomedical research. Some of the framing of this initiative, which foregrounded ethical practices for research, suggested public health officials and science policymakers had been reading what sociologists, historians, and other social scientists had been writing about the social implications of science and technology. That was the bridge from my earlier research to this new book project.
Beginning in 2016, as part of my research, I interviewed people who had worked in the Obama administration. Over the course of three years, I came to know a social network of science and technology policymakers. In 2020, some of the people I’d interviewed were working on the presidential campaign. When it was established that the Democratic ticket was going to be Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, some of those people reached out to me and invited me to join the campaign’s science policy committee, which was part of the larger domestic policy committee. this large committee was 5,000 people. I don’t want readers to get the impression that it was, like, me, three people, and Joe Biden. These were large committees. As part of this committee work, I co-chaired the Subcommittee on Social and Behavioral Sciences, with fellow sociologist Rashawn Ray. In November 2020, after the election had concluded with Biden as the President-elect, someone reached out from the transition team and asked if I would consider being interviewed for a deputy director position at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
I’m also an ethnographer. So, I said “Sure,” in part because I thought, “Wow, what a bonanza of fieldnotes!” I was excited to have the opportunity to shift my book project from being primarily based on interviews and archives to being in the space of how science policy is made including in personnel selection. I remember mentioning this proposition to my partner. I said to him, “Oh, this is hilarious. They don’t put sociologists in the Office of Science and Technology Policy!” As I completed a series of interviews for this deputy director role and was about to do another, when I got a call that said, “We want you to do this job.” That’s how it happened—I didn’t apply for the job in a traditional sense. It all came together in ways that still surprise me.
The more sociological answer to your question is this: the Biden administration was coming into office during the height of a pandemic. It was the end of 2020. A lot of the challenges that we were having as a society were exacerbated and brought to the fore: profound health inequality, the profound mistrust of vaccines, medicine, clinical research, and government. We had [and now have] a national and international crisis punctuated by that fact that people don’t trust science, and we need[ed] broader expertise in science and technology policy to help us begin to understand why this was the case. So that opened a window of possibility for having social scientists appointed to the Biden administration.
The more short-and-sweet sociological analysis is that it was both social networks—the networks I had built doing interviews for the Obama book—and political opportunity structures, that this was an historical moment at which someone with my professional profile and experience seemed like an obvious choice.AG: Can you describe one or two moments when our disciplinary style of thinking and perceiving the world mattered for the work that you were doing on the ground?
AN: I was appointed as the first-ever Deputy Director of Science and Society at OSTP. Traditionally, that role had been titled Deputy Director of Science. So, the job itself had been remade as a job that was about society as well as science. That meant I was able to bring my full sociological self to policy meetings and conversations. At meetings, people would turn to me and say, “You’re the society person, you’re the sociologist. What do you think?” This moment was one in which there was an appreciation for sociological perspectives and methods in a way that there had not been before. That’s the larger framing of the work.
My team did some work around “equity and excellence” in STEM. This took something of a a sociological perspective: If you want more people to work in certain fields, what can government, civil society and business do together to enable that? How can we reimagine fellowship programs to be responsive, or at least sensitive, to the fact that self-identified women researchers often have caretaking responsibilities that constrain their ability to use fellowship resources in the same way that other colleagues might be able to? How can we ensure that people who feel vulnerable in public spaces can do fieldwork? Those are broader, sociological questions that arise when one considers the full spectrum of what researchers do and in what contexts.
AG: Writing is one of the main ways that academics share knowledge, but it takes a special kind of intellectual courage to participate in the high-profile public forums that you do. How do you prepare for such platforms?
AN: Well, that’s nice of you to say. I don’t know that it takes courage; I think it just takes what a lot of academics have, which is ego, like, we think we’re right. [laughs] Like, I know I am right.
How to prepare? I think so much of it is really about our role as teachers, believe it or not. I think some would approach that question with, “Practice!” and stand in front of the mirror—you know, the performance piece of it. But for me, it’s always fundamentally about, “Am I clearly conveying to whoever is listening what it is I’m trying to say?” It always takes me back to teaching—not in a didactic way, like, “I have things to convey to you who needs to be enlightened” kind of way, but in a sense of clarity and [a] lack of expectation that people should be where you are, on the same page.
As academics, we’re trained to be condensers of information and make all sorts of assumptions and connections. Someone says, “Simmel,” and it’s shorthand for all these things. But speaking to the public is more like teaching. The point is to travel together, to learn together. I know public speaking can be scary. In this moment, it is particularly scary for women and for people of color. I think [my approach to] preparation really comes from reminders I always get from my mother: “What are you trying to say to people?” “Lead with your heart.” And not, what are you trying to pontificate?AG: I am moved by the notion of leading with your heart. Thank you for sharing that. Your mom sounds like a wonderful person.
AN: Yes. And very wise.
AG: You are located at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, which provides a unique model for exchanging ideas. How do you think about the interplay between disciplinary voice and interdisciplinary exchange?
AN: I’ve often described myself as an interdisciplinary sociologist. But I’d never been in close quarters, regularly, with people trained in different disciplines until recently. It’s an interesting thing to be in a department (or a “school” as we call it at (IAS) with people who have not only other disciplinary perspectives and trajectories, but who are from other countries and, therefore, often have intellectual assumptions and experiences quite different from my own. I think we underappreciate how similar it is to be a U.S. political scientist and a U.S. sociologist versus a political scientist trained in Belgium, or something. There are national norms that are underappreciated. (Marion Fourcade’s work on French and American economists is helpful for seeing this). So, it has been a wonderful, real deep dive into interdisciplinarity.
I think part of the extreme privilege of being at the Institute for Advanced Study is an opportunity for intellectual experiments…It’s been a wonderful home base from which to hatch and convene lots of rich interdisciplinary collaborations. And then the other piece about the Institute for Advanced Study is that the faculty here at full freight is about 28 people. It’s a very small permanent faculty—but we bring anywhere from 230 to 250 fellows [each] year. Every year our School of Social Science [hosts] 19 to 23 new people, sometimes people who are thinking about the same things you are, but from a different intellectual tradition or disciplinary tradition. And you get to spend slow time with colleagues in the same space. That’s wonderful as well.
AG: Contexts runs a policy brief in each issue. Recently, these have included pieces on psychedelics, college access after incarceration, and drug or reparations. If you were going to give one quick policy recommendation today, what might you suggest?
AN: We’ve got to think about our work in different sorts of lanes and with different types of pacing. So, certainly, we need deep, rigorous research. But often what the policy space and policymakers need is not our marginal advances on a particular methodology or a particular theory. They need more foundational, cumulative knowledge. So, I would say we often know enough about educational inequality, about gender segregation in employment, or about the housing crisis to be able to make smart policy about it. And doing that doesn’t require another ethnography or quantitative study, necessarily.
One lane is the standard way we do research. The other lane is, when a policy issue arises, to be able go to that storehouse of information that every academic has in abundance. We don’t think we ever know enough—and it’s part of what makes scholars great, that continual searching for answers—but we also do know a whole lot. And the whole lot that we know can be quickly turned into a one-page memo [or] an op-ed, something that can really benefit people if we’re willing to be a bit braver and a bit quicker with our work. The urgency I am talking about is not [about] being rash or indiscriminate with the research. If we really think the issues around, for example, economic inequality or in the criminal legal system, et cetera, are urgent, then we need to respond with that kind of urgency. So, the second lane is about pacing.
In the medical sciences, there are experts who are not basic researchers—but who are also not PR people—who translate [basic research] into more applied forms where it can be used by policymakers. I think any serious commitment to public sociology has to be committed to this translation piece. And translation is not just, “I did three years of research, and then I put it up on a website.” It is asking questions like, “What does it mean for the broader world?” None of us are trained to do that, and there are people who are better at it than us, who are expert at it. Maybe we should partner with them.AG: Given that sociologists are not trained to do this kind of translation work, how can we learn how to do it—and not just how to do it, but to do it well?
AN: I don’t think most scholars have to learn how to do it! This is what I mean about developing a translational research ecosystem. What the life sciences or the biomedical sciences have done is say, “It’s not an individual problem, it’s an infrastructure problem.”
I think it’s been right to create spaces for humanists and social sciences who want to do more outward facing work, things like the Op-ed Project and venues like The Conversation. I think all of those are fantastic, and more of that should be done. But we have taken a kind of neoliberal approach to it. It’s like, “You do it.” You alone are supposed to somehow fix public communication and understanding—as opposed to doing as they have done in the sciences, creating offices and centers to do this work in collaboration with basic researchers.
Amin Ghaziani is in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. The co-editor of Contexts, he is the author of Long Live Queer Nightlife.
