Raven the Science Maven’s communication haven

When Raven Baxter shared her first foray into hip hop science communication online, she wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Baxter, who is better known to her fans as Raven the Science Maven, released Big Ole Geeks in July 2019.

‘I wanted to shatter the ceiling and just leave it shattered,’ she explains. The track is now the centrepiece of Baxter’s PhD, but at the time of posting she thought she might be putting her career at risk.

‘Hitting that upload button was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done in my life,’ she says. ‘I had no idea how people were going to react to it … but ultimately I felt like it was something that needed to be done. So, I followed through with it and I’m really glad I did.’

Baxter is in the final stages of writing her doctoral dissertation at the University of Buffalo, New York, where she is using Black feminist theory to explore the impacts of her own science communication. Originally her plan had been to embark on a more traditional science education project, but the reactions to Big Ole Geeks caused her to reframe her research question.

‘It was just shocking to me that after all of this time that we’ve had science, and all of this time that there have been Black people doing science, that in 2019, still nobody had ever actually seen a Black woman communicating science in the way that I had,’ she explains.