Who the Hell Are You, Dr. bird?

This is a bonus audio introduction of "Who the Hell Dr. bird Is" for potential guests / listeners to learn who their host is and decide if they want to have a conversation with them on "What the F**k?" about what their lived experiences have revealed to them has/is going well and what needs to fundamentally change.

For more read this.

For the fullest story, you can read both of their memoirs.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to "Who the hell are you, [Dr. bird]? My name is Dr. Bernadette "bird" Bowen or Dr. bird for short. I go by any pronouns, and this is my introduction of who I am. Because at the beginning of all of our episodes, we'll be talking to guests and finding out who they are, and instead of describing it to every single guest, I figured I would just record this introduction of myself that provides a really in-depth description of who the fuck I am. So without further ado, my name is Dr. bird I was born and raised in Chicagoland for 28 years. I'm now 35. I'm a white, millennial born middle class into a predominantly white town in Northwest Indiana and was privileged to receive a great education there because my dad worked at a BP Amoco refinery, one of his country's notorious environmental devastators. In my early life, I was a very awkward emo and punk kid who was taught to be ashamed of my depth, directness and naivete. And this is because I'm a lifelong survivor of emotional and verbal abuse as well as sexual violence. I spent many nights of my teens and twenties sleeping on other people's couches and beds to seek some reprieve from my intergenerational traumatic home life, as well as because the summer before starting my PhD, I realized I'm a late in life realize autistic person like the millions, if not billions of us in what's been referred to as the "lost generations" due to the colossal failure of traditional diagnosticians education and as a result, their diagnostic criteria. Like countless other autists who didn't know, this caused me decades of confusion, suffering, mirroring others and substance abuse to numb and fit in, which led me down rather unsavory vice filled paths. In my early life, I took part in every type of discrimination our u.s. society normalizes. And so the last ten to fifteen years I've painstakingly worked and continue working to unlearn them. I have both benefited from and lived firsthand negative consequences of environmental activisms, injustices and racisms that inform and inspire my work. I am also a non-binary queer person who is exceptionally closeted for many decades, both because of my own ignorance of the sociohistorical facts of gender and biological sex not being binaries, as well as the taken for granted cisheterosexist hate I was surrounded by for most of my early life. What saved me is I went on to receive a bachelor's in sociology, a master's in communication, and a PhD in communication because I learned how language builds our worlds, and that allowed me to change my entire self-concept and understanding of why we're like this and what we can do about it. The year COVID-19 started, I was halfway through my Media and Communication PhD program, and then my mom died of lung cancer because, as research shows, corporations are able to poison our loved ones to death for profit. My research specialties are identities, relationships, technologies, and systems of power. I published an award winning, peer reviewed academic article about love book memes as a media of sociopolitical identity formation, and my findings about burgeoning class consciousness they've inclined have continued on into platforms like TikTok and RedNote, despite concerted censorship efforts. I've also published other academic articles and books about internet and algorithmic age, sex and sexual violences, the global loneliness epidemic, health, mis and disinformation, infrastructural racisms and my framework. I debuted in my dissertation project called Critical Media Ecology. This embodied new research perspective reveals what I've called the limited intelligence of our environmental, relational, algorithmic environment and artificial intelligences for going on six years now. I've stayed up to date on COVID-19 research, never stopped wearing high quality face masks, and have lived almost entirely online because most everyone ignores the ongoing sickening, disabling, and deadly consequences of this era that I've coined the envirusment, aka the era. The virus revealed foundational eugenics flaws in our colonial, capitalist, globalized environment that most folks ignored and ignore, while it catalyzes numerous intersecting micro and macro devastations. Alongside that work. I was a college professor off and on for about a decade, and then decided to leave academia after becoming disillusioned with it. From watching most every one of my mentors, friends and colleagues ignore COVID-19 and the overwhelming research of its ongoing full body damage, which shows it causes unaccounted for disabilities and deaths. Within the last few years, I've been interviewed in major news outlets like Good Morning America and The Washington Post about my personal experiences of all of the above and for my research expertise, illuminating ways that eugenics biases of traditional authority figures have and are failing us. On a brighter note, my work documents how TikTok, the largest platform to ever exist, has fundamentally altered millions of users understandings of how we know ourselves, relate to others, and view systems of power, for better and for worse. And how that can't be changed even if the billionaire owned government ruins it. The last two years, I worked as a mentor for a non-traditional online university, where I talked to hundreds upon hundreds of students of all ages and experience levels about what they've done and what they hope to do with their desired education. But then this September, I went viral across TikTok, Twitter Threads, and Facebook because I documented my experiences of being fired for telling the truth about Charlie Kirk dedicating his life to spreading neo-nazi rhetoric. Now, I'm proud to say I just recently learned I have over one hundred thousand followers across all my platforms. I also have a Substack where I update folks about what I'm working on, including my new series called The Context, where I'm providing a scathing overview of Charlie Kirk's legacy of hatred. And last but not least, I recently reinvigorated my Medium (blog) where I talk about nerdy sex shit. As a result of all of these lived experiences and more, I am now an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti eugenic and anti-fascist author, poet, content creator and podcaster who shares information freely with the most connected humanity to ever exist in human history. Because I know that we all deserve better than what I've lived and live, and what I know others have and continue to live. I have seen lived both the benefits and failures of our traditional ideas of authority, intelligence and knowledge. And I know that it's time we expand them in pursuit of liberation for all. This is why my three critical media ecological tenants are. We only know what we know. Everything becomes normal in repetition and everything is connected. And why I started this random guest podcast so that I can have conversations with everyday people about our lived experiences, showcasing them as forms of knowledge when understood in tandem or contrast with my lived experiences and timely and timeless research expertise. I talked about all of this at length in my newest book, We Are F**king Machines: Why We are Like This and What We Can Do About It. And at the end of that, I listed a series of probing questions that I also provided the complete list of within the preview episode of this podcast. Anyway, thanks for listening to who the fuck I am. If this sounds like a person you're trying to have a conversation with, and you don't just see people as a caricature of an enemy that you've been sold, I look forward to chatting with you or having you as a listener, as I record or have posted this to whatever platform.