Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein delivered the 37th annual Sojourner Truth Lecture on Friday, March 7, at Claremont McKenna College’s Pickford Auditorium. Her lecture, “The Cosmos is a Black Aesthetic,” explored Black cosmological storytelling and underscored the notion that Black science and Black scientists have always existed.
Organized by the faculty of the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies (IDAS) and sponsored by the 5Cs and Claremont Graduate University, the Sojourner Truth Lecture Series was founded in 1983 to “honor the achievements and contributions of outstanding African American women in the U.S. and the African Diaspora,” according to the IDAS website.
Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist and theorist of Black feminist science studies, is an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire. She is one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics.
Her interdisciplinary lecture celebrated diverse science-related phenomena and stressed the place of Africana Studies in academia and beyond. Throughout her talk, she repeatedly turned to the night sky to illustrate its staying power in the lives of marginalized peoples throughout space and time.
“Those of us who are descended from slaves, enslaved people, our ancestors coming off the ships from the Middle Passage and trying to figure out this alien abduction that they have just experienced — how do they know that they are still in the cosmology that they have known their whole lives?” she asked. “The sky is the one part of our ecosystem that is globally constant.”
Prescod-Weinstein encouraged her audience to expand who they consider producers of science.
“When you think about what it took to run a plantation, you realize that you’re talking about enslaved engineers, midwives, agriculturalists, plant biologists,” she said.
Prescod-Weinstein encouraged her audience to expand who they consider producers of science.
She emphasized the extent to which “people across the continent of Africa understood ideas that we would today label as science.” This foregrounded the work of African and African diasporic individuals at the forefront of scientific discovery both recently and throughout history, whether or not their work was recognized as science at the time.
Onesiums, for example, was an enslaved man who taught his enslavers how to inoculate against smallpox and, in doing so, allowed for the spread of that life-saving technology. More recently, Elmer Imes, the second African American man to earn a PhD in physics, provided early verification for the theory of quantum mechanics and founded the Fisk University physics department.
“This is an important piece of when we’re thinking about what we should be doing in Africana Studies and in Black Studies,” Prescod-Weinstein said. “Re-centering our relationship with the cosmos and not thinking about it as ‘That’s a thing that Europeans did. That’s a thing that white people do.’”
Eric Hurley, chair of the IDAS and professor of psychological science at Pomona, said that the hope for the talk was to “render visible the relevance of Africana Studies in the science/STEM fields.”
In addition to illuminating the contributions of Black scientists, Prescod-Weinstein explored the development of technoscientific thought in Black aesthetics by weaving together diverse cultural artifacts. She referenced a 1967 cover of Ebony Magazine featuring Michelle Nichols — who played Uhura in Star Trek — and excerpts from Big K.R.I.T’s 2014 album Cadillactica.
Prescod-Weinstein also reflected on the technoscientific dimensions of Sojourner Truth’s oft-cited 1864 self-portrait photograph, captioned “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”
“She’s thinking through and referring to the image as a shadow,” Prescod-Weinstein said. “She’s thinking through what this scientific phenomenon is to her and in her story. And she’s also making a comment about what it is aesthetically and what her relationship to that aesthetic is.”
Throughout the talk, Prescod-Weinstein stressed the politics inherent to the production of science.
“[Science] is a political phenomenon and a social phenomenon … There’s no such thing as simply a technical phenomenon,” she said.
To illustrate her point, Prescod-Weinstein presented a photo of an astronomy classroom full of students at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza before 2023 and one of the same university afterward, noting that Israeli strikes have destroyed Al-Aqsa University and that academic environment.
“When we talk about government waste and government inefficiency, I think we have to talk about the waste of destroying a university where people were sitting around talking about what do galaxies look like, how do galaxies evolve, what’s inside of a galaxy,” she said.
After the discussion, questions posed during a Q&A explored the fraught political relationship between science and society. Alex Pedroza HM ’25, for example, asked Prescod-Weinstein about finding opportunities to do science that genuinely improves people’s lives.
“You just figure out where you make your stand,” Prescod-Weinstein answered.
For attendee Werner Zorman, Walter and Leonore Annenberg chair in leadership at Harvey Mudd College, Prescod-Weinstein’s insights opened new possibilities for conceiving of science.
“She kept making me think … there’s different ways of how you can describe science,” he said. “We were moving between art, and … poetry and language.”
Science, as Prescod-Weinstein showed, cannot be singularly defined.
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