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Themaskedferret


I'm many former things.

More Blog Posts179

Jan
29th
2017

So, uh · 8:17pm Jan 29th, 2017

Glaciers, Gender, and Science

Abstract: (Emphasis mine)

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

Where's Pineta? I need an explanation of how this got funded.

Edit: Here's a beautiful teardown of the insanity of this paper and the fact it got a grant of 413,00 somehow. Also included are more excerpts.

Comments ( 28 )

...

I'm honestly not sure whether or not I'm allowed to make jokes about this without seeming horribly insensitive.

Human-ice interactions!

Admit it, everyone, you imagined the jokes yourself. :pinkiehappy:

I remember this. I laughed a lot, it was one of the most entertaining things I got my mittens on in a long time.

Another marvelous comment on it can be found here, complete with citations from the publication itself.

4401469
I kinda feel a moral obligation to joke about this. I jest and make fun of stuff I like and which I agree with, this thus deserves no mercy or protection from sarcasm and jokes.

Edit: also, making fun of this is not "punching down", which is my personal rule of thumb about what can be a target for a joke and what not.

I have perused the paper as much as my health will allow. I think I managed to skim 2/3 of the way through before giving up.

I, uh, don't know what to say yet, aside from that it seemed to be exactly what I expected and hoped it wasn't based on the abstract.

I, too, am deeply confused and unsettled by this study's existence. :rainbowhuh:

4401483 Just added that, thankee. n_n

4401469 Please, mock the snot out of it. It's bad science and utterly insane.

4401483
Wow. Wow. I'm sorry, I like Ursula K. Le Guin just fine, but any allegedly scientific paper that tries to use her work as support has no right to see the light of day.

Also, I'm shocked and appalled that it makes no consideration of glaciers that self-identify as sand dunes.

4401504
You forgot one zero in that grant size.

4401505 Or that are simply trying to show they're different than their ocean parents, I mean jeez.

I can't help feeling like they applied for the grant for some real study, then realized the weekend before it was due that they forgot to do the study and they needed something to publish.

Without identifying M. Jackson, it sounds like based on names that at least two of the authors of this "feminist alternative reading on glaciology" are men, possibly three. Only one female name in the group. That shouldn't mean anything, but it might. And I'm still not sure they're trolling. What field is this actually a study in? The abstract sounds closer to anthropology or sociology than it does to climatology/glaciology, which makes me wonder if this isn't a case of people uniquely unqualified to talk about climate science were trying to jump cross-discipline.

Also, I'm shocked and appalled that it makes no consideration of glaciers that self-identify as sand dunes.

I wish I found that easier to laugh at, but given "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" is a thing people actually say to mock people with unconventional gender identities I sort of have to give it a slow "ha" and an uncertain clap.

Along with three co-authors, Mark Carey, a dean and professor of history at Robert D. Clark Honors college at the University of Oregon, recently published a dreadful postmodernist paper in Progress in Human Geography, “Glaciers, gender and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.” (reference and link below). I wrote about it on this site last week, and have since read the whole thing twice. I still haven’t recovered.

...This makes so, so much more sense. Oh god. It's Those People. The ones who inevitably show up if you volunteer to be part of a mobilize-the-base effort for your local branch of the democratic party. The people who you're having a nice, pleasant conversation about equal rights with right up until the mention we'd be better off as a tribal society and/or direct matriarchy as a result of some book they read about collectivist cultures which conveniently failed to mention how to disassemble modern urban life without displacing/harming millions of people, or how the massive agricultural system we have in the modern world improves lives and palates. The ones who think "organic" means something on label and overpay at whole foods. Those People.

It doesn’t stop with glaciology, you know.

This two-part paper is about the possibility of analyzing the content of chemistry from a gender perspective. The first part provides an example of what such an analysis would look like. The second part is an outline of the theoretical perspective that makes the analysis possible. The example is the model of the ideal gas, the cornerstone of the theory of matter in chemical thermodynamics. I argue that this model is built on fundamental philosophical assumptions (Platonic idealism, hierarchy among states of matter, atomism/individualism, and the negligence of interrelationships among parts and of their embodiment) that have been problematized by feminist scholarship. The same patterns are evident in the treatment of ideal and real solutions in chemical thermodynamics. I argue that it is possible to imagine a theory that utilizes different philosophical ideas and which therefore would be more compatible with feminist values.

http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/18-2/kovacs1.pdf

Feminist science criticism has mostly focused on the theories of the life sciences, while the few studies about gender and the physical sciences locate gender in the practice, and not in the theories, of these fields. Arguably, the reason for this asymmetry is that the conceptual and methodological tools developed by (feminist) science studies are not suited to analyze the hard sciences for gender-related values in their content. My central claim is that a conceptual, rather than an empirical, analysis is needed; one should be looking for general metaphysical principles which serve as the conceptual foundation for the scientific theory, and which, in other contexts, constitute the philosophical foundations of a worldview that legitimates social inequalities. This position is not being advocated anywhere in the philosophy of science, but its elements are to be found in Helen Longino’s theory of science, and in the social epistemology and ontology of Georg Lukács.

http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/18-2/kovacs2.pdf

Uuh... it's getting late over here, so my brain doesn't exactly feel ship-shape at the moment, but the body of the text... does it actually mean anything?

Wait. Is it a joke? Like, those a news-story that reads and/or sounds like it's about something, but it's actually not?

4401538
This will be a delightful reading, thank you. I can't guarantee I'll finish them or that I'll be sober in case I manage to read it all, but still, thanks.

4401549
My poor summer child. No, it isn't a joke.

4401553 Oh. I'm gonna try and reading this some other time. The words, they confuse me.

4401559
I fear that has nothing to do with your current state of wakefulness and all with a muddled and hermetic prose.

Okay, so far as I can tell, the tear-down is pretty much exactly right. In a nutshell, having read most of the paper now, all that comes to mind to describe it succinctly is this: "A subjective case for subjective science featuring feminism."

I guess this paper is what scientific articles would start to look like if the proposed methods and values actually caught on.

4401526

I wish I found that easier to laugh at, but given "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" is a thing people actually say to mock people with unconventional gender identities I sort of have to give it a slow "ha" and an uncertain clap.

Yeah, that's exactly why I hesitated to make that joke. :facehoof:

4401570 Welcome to "people who think they understand how feminism works, the scientific paper".

Like. I am easily one of the people most likely accused of being a Social Justice Warrior. And this is literally the paper that I swear people think that's about. And it's like, oh dear god. It's one thing to write about, say, systemic gender barriers preventing more women from being encouraged to enter STEM fields. That's good advocacy and y'know, something worth fighting about.

But this is taking once-useful words and doing one's utmost best to render them completely without meaning. This is stupid. So stupid.

4401624
4401570

There is a wing on the far left far edges of every part of the political spectrum, now that I think about it, that seems to think that valuing objectivity is itself an act of oppression. I think in this case it's an extremist extension of the drive to promote and give value to the subjective experiences of marginalized groups. Those experiences have been previously excluded from places where subjective experiences are appropriate, so when you attempt to exclude them from places where subjective experiences are inappropriate, it's perceived as more of the same oppression.

It comes from a bad education in philosophy, I think. These people seem to have a problem differentiating between subjective and objective and how they shade into each other and how one can turn into the other with the correct context, so they can't tell the difference in motivation between the two different kinds of exclusion.

4401624
One of my brother's girlfriends took a course in "eco-feminism" at college. It was about as coherent. And yes, it was taught by a woman.

This isn't really a unique phenomenon, I'm afraid. It is characteristic of post-modern thought.

4401526
I found the "attack helicopter" thing funny the first time I heard it, but I think unfunny people have beaten it into the ground.

I will admit I smiled at FOME's sand dunes reference, though.

I sexually identify with the Hatredcopter:

And if you do not accept that I WILL TAKE OFF THE FRONT OF YOUR FACE ETC.

4401822 How many angels fit on the head of a pin?


4401792 In my experience it's more prevalent on the left insofar as "objective truth doesn't matter". The right tends to play it less in the "objective truth doesn't matter, man" direction and more in the "It's all a big CONSPIRACY, man" direction- which generally has the same results, but it gets there by saying "you can't trust anyone but breitbart/hannity/whoever the current conservative shouting voices are, the rest of them are out to destroy our american values/legalize baby murder/something something FEELINGS ARE GROSS". Though there's no one right way in this case to be stupid. You see the conspiracy thing on the left as well, but it's usually in movements that have fringe crossover with the right like the oh-god-the-GMOs-are-going-to-kill-us debacle. Or the misguided attitudes of the Eat Local movement, which I support in theory and in practice find is often spearheaded by dumb people and has no real goals of attempting to make locally eating affordable and competitive as an option.

I found the "attack helicopter" thing funny the first time I heard it, but I think unfunny people have beaten it into the ground.

It gets a lot less funny the first time you hear an agendered/nonbinary buddy get it thrown at them. And as a joke, it's already barely funny. In the context of trying to assign gender identity to an icecap, though, the humor actually seems to return.

Seems like good social and scientific progress to me.

Now replace the word 'gender' with 'religion', and 'feminism' with 'buddhism' and bam! We have one additional study in the bank.

I imagine the study room for the project looked much like this:

4401792 Definitely on both wings. I mean Trump is busy constructing an alternative reality right now of 'alternative facts', and well, this paper showcases the crazy left.

4401906 Also this, re: gender identity stuff. It gets tiresome having one's base identity constantly mocked all over. Were the culture war over, sure, but yea, it gets weary hearing it for the 500th time and never knowing if its a joke or a jab.

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