Staff Spotlight: Steve Elliot
This month we are taking a moment to highlight one of our Postdoctoral scholars that has been with CGEST for years (since 2017), Dr. Steve Elliot. Steve has worked on so many different grants during his time at the center and has worked with almost every single graduate assistant that has come through our doors.
Steve describes his job and research interest as mainly studying other researchers and scientists, especially how they reason, work in research groups, and secure money to do their work. By studying these things he learns how scientific knowledge is socially adjudicated and evolving over time. At CGEST he has studied education researchers, funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation, who build K-12 STEM learning environments that attempt to be more equitable for those historically excluded from STEM. He studies how these researchers characterize their successes and obstacles and shows how they build collaborative networks. The results inform future research funding policies.
Steve is by far one of the most intellectually-rounded and social justice-minded folks we have come across in the history of our center and he has done so much to make our programs flourish these past few years. He has recently contributed a lot of his time and efforts on writing and submitting grant proposals so that our STEM programming for girls of color will continue to be funded for years to come.
Steve has a PhD in Biology, a MA and BA in Philosophy, and a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication, all from Arizona State University. A Sun Devil Alumni indeed!
Thank you Steve for taking the time to tell us a little more about you!
Home state
Arizona
Top Three Life Highlights:
Marrying well.
Being raised by supportive parents.
Getting public education.
What inspires you?
Learning daily from my friends, their wide-ranging life experiences, and their ideas for the future.
Suggested Reading
My colleagues will tell you that I incessantly talk about the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction in the U.S. (1865 to 1877ish). White supremacists in that period developed a range of practices and theories for pursuing and pseudo-justifying their economic and social aims. I think this collection of practices and theories provided the overarching framework for systemic racial domination that was eventually adopted most everywhere throughout the U.S. with minor variations in the 19th and 20th centuries. This framework continues to structure contemporary U.S. politics and culture, and it has been incredibly resilient to attempts to weaken and dismantle it.
For this reason, I argue that those who wish to understand and combat contemporary systems of oppression in the U.S. should learn from and work with historians, especially legal and economic historians. These historians increasingly describe clear systems of oppression and the mechanisms by which those systems produce socially stable effects despite many and varied alterations to their particular implementations. Here are five suggestions to help anyone, not just academics, learn more.
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, by Eric Foner (2019). As a kid I was frustrated that none of my U.S. history classes could answer what I thought was a straightforward question: If the Confederates lost the Civil War, and the resulting constitutional amendments abolished slavery, defined national citizenship, and extended the franchise; why were the Civil Rights Movements of the mid-20th century necessary at all? Eric Foner is the foremost expert on Reconstruction, and his latest book addresses just that question. He shows how Congress negotiated for weak language in the 13th-15th amendments, and how the Supreme Court effectively nullified those amendments and other civil rights laws between 1865 and 1900.
Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics, by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen (2018). If slavery officially ended in the U.S. in 1865, why does its still matter today? In addressing that question, Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen’s book overflows with virtues. The book traces demographic, migration, and voting trends across the counties in the South from the Civil War to the present. They show that folks mostly stay in or near the counties in which they were born and that they largely pass their cultural norms and practices down to their children and neighbors. Up to the Civil War, the growers in some counties relied much more heavily on slavery than did those in others, and they developed cultural norms to support it. After the Civil War, and up to today, whites in those counties have inherited those norms, and compared to whites in counties less historically reliant on slavery, they have continued to vote more for social conservatives and to report more opposition to the well-being and interests of blacks. The institution of slavery may seem like a long time ago from the perspective of an individual’s lifespan, but it is bracingly current from the perspective of cultural evolution.
The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein (2017). American’s popularly define themselves as sharing in the pursuit of increased generational wealth and security for their families. The foundation of this pursuit is for people to own their own homes and pass them on to their children. Rothstein’s book details how governments at federal, state, and municipal levels imposed a slew of policies that reinforced each other and prevented blacks from owning homes or building widespread cross-generational wealth. Many of these policies originated in the New Deal, revealing that progressives too compromised the well-being and interests of blacks to further the interests of whites.
How the South Won the Civil War, Heather Cox Richardson (2020). If you examine the historical pattern of electoral college votes for U.S. President, you learn that with few exceptions the Southern states voted for Democrats until 1964, when they alone voted Republican, and with few exceptions they have voted that way ever since. What happened in 1964? The only other state to vote with the South was Arizona, which had produced Republican nominee Barry Goldwater. Cox shows that by 1964, the Republican Party had forged a nationally viable ideology, personified by Goldwater, that merged white supremacy, “frontier” individuality, and the idea that capitalism trumps democracy. While Goldwater lost, people increasingly switched party loyalties, Southern and interior West states and whites formed coalitions, and Republicans won sweeping Presidential victories in the 1970s and 1980s, and Congressional and widespread state legislative victories in the 1990s and 2000s. The policies they enacted have shaped U.S. political discourse and agendas ever since. The South lost the contests of armies in the Civil War, but over time the nation largely developed the culture and social stratification the South had fought for. The West made it happen.
We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, by Tommie Shelby (2005). While the four books above detail the historical evolution of the framework for contemporary racial domination and the mechanisms by which it works, this book provides foundational concepts to use that historical knowledge to dismantle and replace the framework. How can social groups, such as those in which people share an ethnicity, effectively combat systems that oppress them? To answer that question, we often begin by determining who belongs in the relevant group or ethnicity, and who doesn’t. Shelby argues that given huge variations in cultural identities, such a beginning can lead us too often to focus more on policing cultural boundaries within groups and ethnicities, and less on changing politics and policy to enervate oppression. He proposes that we build political coalitions based on solidarity due to shared experiences of oppression--regardless of degree--and on commitments to dismantle systems of oppression. The historical knowledge gleaned from the books above informs coalitions as they identify and dismantle systems from the cores--the mechanisms by which they produce socially stable effects despite alterations to their underlying implementations. While Shelby focuses on black solidarity, his proposals apply generally.
What is something that you learned recently?
All told, there were probably 2.5 billion adult T.-rexs that ever lived. That number is much higher than I initially would have guessed but maybe isn’t that big considering that the species existed for 2.4 million years. Compare that number to the estimated 109+ billion H. sapiens who have lived in 200 thousand or so years.
What is the best thing about your job?
The people you work with can make any job great or not, and the folks at CGEST are the best.
What has been one of your proudest moments at CGEST?
It happens anew every semester when our student researchers graduate and springboard to new adventures.
What has been the most impactful tech innovation you use in your everyday life?:
The historian in me says indoor plumbing, although I spend most of my time on laptop computers.
I am committed to advancing equity for women of color in STEM because...
fairness and justice are desirable social goals in all human endeavors.
Steve will be leaving CGEST at the end of this month for another wonderful opportunity that he certainly deserves (we couldn't hold on to him forever) and he will certainly be missed. Even though he won't be in the office every day with our team he will still be an affiliate faculty collaborating with the center on various projects. We are blessed to have been able to work with Steve directly for this long and wish him the very best on his future endeavors and roles. We know he will go on to continue doing wonderful work.
