2020 Johnson Prize Winner Betsy Olson
April 5, 2021 | Kristen Chavez
Geography Professor Betsy Olson, recipient of the George Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement by an IAH Fellow, discusses her career as a scholar and campus leader.
Transcript
Philip Hollingsworth: Welcome to the Institute, a podcast on the lives and work of Fellows and friends at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I’m Philip Hollingsworth. In this episode, I speak with Professor of Geography and recipient of the George Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement Betsy Olson. In our conversation, Professor Olson speaks on her career as a scholar and leader currently chairing UNC Geography Department. Well, Betsy, thanks so much for joining me today and talking a little bit about what you do at UNC as a geography professor.
Betsy Olson: Yeah, thanks for speaking with me, Philip.
PH: And so part of, I mean we’ve known each other for a few years as I’ve been working at the IAH and you’ve been involved with different programs and fellowships at the IAH. But today we’re talking specifically, well, we’re going to talk about your work, but also because you’re the recipient of the George Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement. So I just want to say, first of all, congratulations on that award.
BO: Thank you so much. I was, you know, genuinely shocked and very humbled. I realized the folks who come before me, as recipients of this award, and also, you know, who it honors and so on is just really, it really is kind of life achievement. So, yeah, very honored.
PH: For those that don’t know — just for those listening that don’t know — the award is kind of like this lifetime achievement award for lack of a better term for UNC professors. So it’s been set up every two years, it’s awarded. And to start out as we do a lot of our interviews, can you just give our listeners a general overview of your research in the scholarship you do?
BO: Yeah, of course. So as you mentioned, Philip, I’m a geographer here at UNC, I’m a professor of geography and global studies. So those are the two kinds of intellectual worlds that I’ve occupied professionally over my career. And I came to UNC in 2012 from the University of Edinburgh, where I’d also been in the Geography Department. And, you know, my trainings from CU Boulder, where I worked with the amazing group of geographers and you know, my work- the beautiful thing about geography that I really love with it is that it’s kind of internally interdisciplinary. So, I’ve had this great opportunity to walk in relationship to the social sciences and the humanities throughout my career. And so, as a geographer, I’ve studied phenomena of religion. And I’ve looked at issues of development and inequality. And I’ve especially been interested in young people and the ways in which young people kind of create and make the space in the world around them. So as my career progressed, I became increasingly interested in the ways that young people experience the material inequalities that are so marked in a lot of the places where I’ve lived and worked. And through that work, I began to pay a closer attention to the ways in which young people engage in care and caregiving. So that’s kind of marked my last couple of years of scholarship. And increasingly, I’ve turned to questions that surround, theoretically, the ethics of care. And then practically an empirically, the ways in which young people do provide care for families. So my work has kind of progressed from working predominantly in Latin America. I was having an interest in themes of reproduction- how do we reproduce our societies? And now kind of really focused in on this issue of care and caregiving with young people.
PH: Great, thank you. And so if, like you said, geography is really interdisciplinary- there’s a lot of different angles just from my experience, seeing the different UNC professors that have studied and what they study out of that department. So how do you see, like, your work in terms of caregiving and child caregivers? How does that relate to geography? Aside from just concentrating on that particular region.
BO: Yeah, of course. I mean, what doesn’t relate to geography of course [laughs]. My kind of intellectual background is in feminist theory, in addition to being interested in these themes of political economy, work in labor and also kind of the histories of how we create our households. So, you know, within geography, we pay attention all the way from themes of the geo humanities. These are kind of more of the ways in which we experience things like landscape, straight through to kind of trying to explain those landscapes using biophysical science and modeling and tree ring science and so on. So for me, my inspirations have always come from areas where people are trying to explain our kind of normative and moral lives. How do we make sense of the world around us? And how do we determine priorities for ourselves, our communities, our societies, our higher education institutions and so on? And both how we make meaning out of our lives, but also how we assess the ways and the directions in which we want to move. Like, what is a better life? what is a flourishing life? and so on. You know, I’ve been especially inspired by folks who work within the broad field of ethics of care of critical disability studies. Areas in which I think these pressing questions of, you know, what makes a good life become both personal and political. And that’s, you know, really kind of a way in which feminist theorists approach the world is thinking about the personal as a political.
PH: Great, thank you. One thing that was mentioned in the little write up when you were awarded this in November of 2020, mentions your work as a leader at the university and you’ve been part of the Academic Leadership Program at the Institute for Arts and Humanities, but you’re also the chair of the Geography Department. And so I guess, what I’d like to ask is just, what is your approach or philosophy to being a leader in a department, interdisciplinary department with managing all that, those personalities and duties and all that stuff?
BO: Wow. What a good question [laughs]. When we were first starting this interview, I kind of tried to mime a cat, like holding on to some kind of wall and climbing up it. I think that’s probably how we all feel during pandemic. And so, you know, and part of my philosophy for leadership is to kind of hold on to that and pay attention to it and share that I recognize and understand the incredibly hard work that everyone at UNC does in order to, you know, ensure that their students keep learning to create, you know, innovative programs that help to support their colleagues. And, you know, at the same time to try and help clarify the importance of vision. And, you know, for me, I’m always kind of struggling between how do we sort of keep things running from the day to day, being attentive and mindful of how I work with my colleagues. And you mentioned the Academic Leadership Program, you know, this program that’s run by the IAH that’s just absolutely, you know, it’s life-changing, really, I think for those of us who go through it. Because it allows us to sort of understand and explore these dimensions of leadership and how important they are in higher education. And it also allows us to, I think, try out a little bit what, you know, what is our personality as a leader? And how do we effectively keep those things that are most important to us at the forefront? So for me, as a leader, my philosophy really does draw quite a lot from the ethics of care. It acknowledges that we have this really deep interdependency with each other. And so, it’s impossible for me to talk about my own success without understanding the ways in which my students both rely on me as a successful academic and scholar and teacher and so on, but also how I rely on them. And so, as I began to recognize kind of that web of interdependency, it makes leadership a lot more complex, granted. But I think that, for me, it’s been indispensable because it allows me also to always be mindful of those interdependencies. I never assumed that my success, you know, is because of something necessarily that I’m doing. I understand and recognize the importance of the work of everyone around me. And I think about students that way as well. And, you know, I’ve been grateful to my department, to the Geography Department. Because I think they’ve embraced that same ethos in their practice. So, you know, we have these amazing award-winning professors and so on, and incredible, phenomenal researchers and people who work diligently in and with their communities. And so I tried to hold a space for that kind of work and allow disagreements to take place without necessarily shutting us all down, and understand where those come from, and still help to envision, you know, for the purpose of geography — a discipline that achieves excellence through diversity — and continues to push forward some of these things that that we value here. It does, you know, when you put sort of ethics at the front of your leadership, it can make things hard, because, you know, you become, I think, aware of discrepancies in decision making, and so on. But, I always said that I would only do this job, if I could do it in the way, you know, in the way that I wanted to. That if I would continue being an academic as long as I could be myself.
PH: Yeah, yeah.
BO: You know, there’s a lot of people that allow me to do that – the IAH is one space in particular, that’s allowed me to kind of preserve, you know, my own personality, my own values, and understand how those can benefit the university and really North Carolina, you know, the communities that I work with.
PH: I’m gonna do a hypothetical situation here to say I am a professor who has been tapped to be a chair of a department — we’ll just say Humanities Department — is there, given from your experiences, you know, doing it your way, or doing it your style, or being an academic the way you want to be an academic or be yourself. What’s something that you could advise me as a new chair, that maybe I wouldn’t get from, you know, boilerplate, this is what you got to do as a new leader of a department?
BO: There’s a couple of things, I think that when you take on a position of leadership, you need to learn to authentically listen and to release the ego a little bit. So, as academics, we like to be right. In fact, we’re trained to be correct. We have to be right. If we’re not right, our articles don’t get accepted for publications, our research funded and so on. I think that, you know, there’s this combination of learning to listen in a new way. When you become a chair or leader, you have to be able to hear what people are telling you, even if maybe they’re not telling you exactly what they want to say. So, sometimes you have to open up space to go back, to return to the questions, to return to the conversations. And, you know, never send the first email that you write [laughs] would be my recommendation. So we have again in academics, always wanting to be right. I think that we also, you know, we’re human. We can be hurt by indications that things that we think we’re fighting for very hard are not actually being interpreted as such. Or maybe we make a decision and we’ve actually made the wrong decision. And we’ve not consulted the right people, that we have to be able to understand that we will do things wrong as chairs, and especially as a new chair. And it’s not that wrong decision that will cause you trouble. I mean, it will. But I think the most important thing is again, to understand that fallibility and to know what your next response is. And that’s been invaluable. For me, I think that’s something that I learned actually, from the Academic Leadership Program, was just the ability to pause, to accept where I’ve been an error, to allow my colleagues also to be wrong in their first assessment and then, you know, for all of us to kind of work together to understand really what is most important to us and move forward with those ideas. And then also, I mean, always, always, always shout, proclaim and advertise the value of the arts and humanities, you know, for our campus, for our communities in North Carolina. You know, I think that the IAH provides such an important venue for doing that. And we have to do it at the level of our departments as well. People don’t understand oftentimes how important these things are for them until they began to see their absence.
PH: Yeah, yeah, I’m just thinking of like, all the mess that’s going on like right now and has been going on for months. And then just like recently, with like that shooting in Atlanta. And you’re just thinking, like all these little- is just a compounding of misunderstandings and like, you know, just of like stereotypes of things that have been like persistence since, you know, 100-150 years ago. Like, understandings of like Asians and Asian women and all that, you know, all that stuff compounds and then you see things like this. And it’s like, well, if people have the proper education to like, critically unpack all that stuff, it doesn’t become hardwired into your own brain, you know? Does that make sense?
BO: Yeah, I mean we know- the amazing thing about arts and humanities is that it gives us different ways of thinking about things that maybe we have, you know — like, in your every day you go through your life and you do your very best, everyone does, right? Like, you get up in the morning and you figure out what you got to do next, and you’re, you know, you might be taking care of people who are far away, and you might be struggling yourself, or you’re watching your kids struggle, or you’re worried about your parents. And so we’ve come very consumed with these very proximate things. And I think, you know, when students come to UNC, it’s a real privilege to be able to help them understand, you know, both their own situation — like their own context, how they, they sit within these relationships, these bigger processes — but also to help them see things in a different way. I teach a class on cultural landscapes and it’s one of my favorite things to do as Chair, I don’t get to teach it as frequently as I normally do. But you know, the first thing that I do is I just ask students, what do you see? And they don’t even really know how to answer that question. They don’t trust me. They’re like, What do you mean? I’m like, no, look around, what do you see? And as soon as they begin to describe things, all of a sudden, they begin to see the world really differently. And the most exciting thing for them is this very first assignment where I say, Okay, the next time you’re walking from point A to point B, I want you to look for something that you’ve never seen before. And they’re amazed, you know, they’re like, well, there’s this passageway that goes through this building that I’ve never seen before I walk by it every day, multiple times. And, you know, I think that that’s the beauty of the arts and humanities — whether we’re talking about philosophy, whether we’re talking about art, performance art — is that it gives us that moment to sort of step back and see the world in a different way. And, you know, for my interest — because I’m, you know, dedicated to the development of better normative philosophy, better ways of thinking about how can we flourish — that stepping back in that moment to kind of coalesce what we care about, you know, I do think that that’s something that’s afforded by the arts and humanities that we don’t always get in other places. So, it allows us to feel strongly about the things that we care about as well.
PH: Right, thank you. I’ve got one more question. And this is something I ask almost all our guests, what’s a book that changed your life?
BO: Well, I’m trying to think, you know, like, I can actually, I can probably mark my life by different books. And interestingly, the book that changed my life is a book that I’ve never discovered the title of. I was really young child — and here’s a shout-out to our public libraries — I used to go and visit my grandma and grandpa in San Diego, California. That’s how we spent our summers. And my very favorite thing to do was on our second or third day, to go to their public library and we would, you know, it was the whole summer ahead of you. And that experience of going to the library and being able to take anything off the shelf and being assured that you would have the time to read it. You know, that was perhaps my favorite moment. So, you know, I recall this one summer, and I pulled a book off the shelf. And — again, I’ve never been able to figure out the title, or the author — but it was this fantasy and it was a young woman who went into kind of a fairyland and mind you, you know, this is pre Harry Potter. This is before things were so commonly written. And the description of the place was the most vivid landscape I think that I’ve ever read in a book. She had created this phenomenal world and I can still remember these pages when the girl is kind of traveling down past these roots and mushrooms and so on to kind of access this entry point. And it was even you know, more vivid than some of the, you know, Lion, With, and the Wardrobe and these other books that I’d been reading at the time. I could almost smell, you know, the ground around her. And so that book changed my life because it heightened my sensitivity to that kind of thing. And I just mentioned to you that I teach a course on cultural landscapes.
PH: Yeah, yeah.
BO: And yeah, I don’t even write as much about that kind of work. It’s kind of the, it’s almost like my everyday hobby, to be this intense observer of the most obvious things around me. So sense, smell, feel. How the ground feels beneath my feet is something that I am attentive to. Every time I take a walk, I can tell you regionally, how the ground feels underneath my feet from around different landscapes in Europe to Chapel Hill, to the SouthWest where, you know, where I grew up, and it has those different kinds of characteristics. So, that book changed my life. It told me that paying attention to these kinds of mundane details of our everyday life can be as exciting and evocative as other kinds of things that we experience. I wish I knew the name of it. Yeah. I’d love to read it again [laughs].
PH: A little mystery [laughs]. Well, Betsy, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and yeah, thanks so much.
BO: Yeah, of course, you’re so welcome. Thanks for speaking with me Philip.
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