Lab Hopping Science Media Forum (aka TheLifeofScience.com) is a not-for-profit organisation focused on telling kickass and honest stories about science. The project began as a blog site by two science writers, Aashima Firedog and Nandita Jayaraj, as they journaled biographies of women scientists they met while hopping across laboratories and research institutions in India. This passion project, which has since pooled in many more voices asking for diversity and inclusivity in science, seeks to uncover stories from Indian science that remain hidden, and has evolved into a collective comprising a core team and a broadening network of freelancers that includes science communicators, scientists, graduate students, journalists, artists, and multimedia content creators.

The content on the platform has been cross-posted  and sometimes syndicated on several media partners including The Wire, FirstPost, and The Hindu. Lab Hopping is also a content partner for LabXChange.org, a free science education digital platform from Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

What: Fantastic science stories

As mentioned earlier, our focus is on telling kickass and honest stories about science. The boundaries that mark what ‘science’ is have always been blurry and Lab Hopping content has always been, and will continue to be, mindful and appreciative of this. After all, science can be artsy and art can be sciencey; maths can be as abstract as philosophy; and sociology is as real as atoms are (we can go on!). Being flexible with our boundaries has enabled us to tell stories that most other science communication channels miss out on — stories that go beyond the fantastic ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of scientific results. Lab Hopping stories put those oohs and aahs within context. Who did this science? Under what conditions? Why was this science done? What does it mean to you and me? Whether it’s a profile or a journalistic reportage or a comic or a podcast, what matters the most to us is that the story is told well and accessibly.

How: Through the lens of equity, diversity and inclusion

When Lab Hopping started in 2016, it had a simple mandate — interview women in science. Over the years, we realised that this alone doesn’t make Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Cisgender women in science, while they may be woefully low in proportion, are not the only — or the most — marginalised group. Most are from upper castes and/or highly privileged backgrounds, as is the case with the cisgender men in science. Men, women, transgender and non-binary persons from systemically marginalised backgrounds of caste, class, ability, and geography are largely missing from science. 

They become a bit more visible once we look beyond Principal Investigators (PIs) and start including those who were trained in the sciences but didn’t make it as a PI. Some of them became teachers or technicians instead because those were the only science jobs that were more accessible to them. For most of them, education itself was out of reach, so was science, naturally. Lakhs of people from marginalised backgrounds spend at least as much time in scientific institutions as a PI does. Only, the jobs they do — building, maintenance, gardening, cooking, etc — are seen as non-scientific. But can any scientific ecosystem function without these contributions? Could the fact that we do not see a role for science in these jobs explain our failure to be sustainable in our construction, waste management, and agriculture? Is there a way for science communication to engage with these complexities? We obviously don’t have all the answers, but we are learning, and we believe that as long as Lab Hopping remains a product of diverse collaborations, we will continue to push the boundaries of what an equitable and fun AF science media platform can look like.