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Reason Excoriates Paper On "Glaciers, Gender, and Science" (reason.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Reason.com's Robby Soave criticizes an article published in the journal Progress in Human Geography, for being "utterly incomprehensible," and "the least essential paper ever written." Entitled Glaciers, Gender, and Science--A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental climate change, the article is authored by researchers at the University of Oregon and funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Despite being filled with "buzzwords -- colonialism, marginalization, masculinist discourses, etc. -- with such frequency that the entire thing comes off like a joke," the article is accompanied by an enthusiastic press release from the University of Oregon, stating that "glacier research has been intertwined with gender relations, masculine cultures of exploration, geopolitics, and individual and institutional power. That, in turn, led to glacier-related academic and governmental jobs being predominantly filled by men. ... Melting glaciers are today considered a national security risk for numerous countries,' [one of the researchers] said. 'Power and colonialism have shaped the science.' That message is detailed extensively in the paper."
Here's an ugly truth:
Democracy must pander to the majority, which happens to be women.
And there's not much you can do about it.
SJW agitprop masquerading as science.
They don't call it cultural marxism for nothing!
Human geography is economic geography (contrast with economics which excludes spatial interactions) and population dynamics.
Actually Human Geography is how humans create and maintain spacial interactions and how those interactions may form space. It is just a way of dividing geography into different branches (human geography and physical geography). And since I both studied and lectured geography (specializing in human geography and regional econometrics) - I haven't dug through the whole article, but it seems rather legit albeit more about how glaciological knowledge is created and how this knowledge is influenced by gender and how some of the presentation of that knowledge to the public has a strong gender bias.
This is the PI. I'm afraid it looks "legit". https://honors.uoregon.edu/fac...
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See, there's this telephone, and it connects one place (Iceland) with another place (a glacier in Europe). That way, people in Iceland can hear the glacier in Europe! And they don't even have to be in the same place!
Technology. It does WONDERS.
It builds on the ideas set forth in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. It's a social science paper, not a climate science paper, so that's why there's some confusion.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Have you not been paying attention, man. The whole point of identity politics is to be able to more easily inform people that they are out of line, out of step with their "peers" and to be able to denigrate those that don't fit the stereotype as "identify haters".
There is no "identities all the way down" because those at the top decide which identities are valid, who fits the identity and which opinion the identity will have.
For those of us who work as government contractors, that kind of bidding and spending would be gross malfeasance, and could send people to jail. Is it different for research grants?
Have you read anything on this except Reason.com's takedown? Literally anything? Because this is Social Science, and they're reaction to Social Sciences tends to be heavily colored by the fact that most Scientists studying society do not actually find that Libertarianism is the One True Gospel. They're also much closer to the climate-skeptics camp then they like to admit, arguing the global-warmiong-pause,/a> is real and excoriating Di Caprio for using his Oscar Acceptance speech on the topic. Their stands on both subjects tend to be dominated by a steadfast refusal to care what their opponents are saying when they use words differently.
Pretty much the entire article that we are talking about can be summarized by the phrase "Ayn Rand didn't use the words 'gendered,' 'postcolonial,' or 'political ecology' in her books; therefore I don't know what they mean; therefore this paper's abstract is meaningless gibberish."
FYI, the abstract means she was doing some very basic research into how science emphasizes (for lack of a term a reason.com reader would understand) man shit at the expense of woman shit, and how that specifically impacts papers on glaciers and climate change. If I had access to the article I suspect the man shit would be stuff like military science implications of climate change such as terrorism, environmental effects on local livestock, other large-scale economic dislocation, etc. Whereas the woman shit would be much smaller-scale.
For example, most of Central Asian cultures near glaciers are gonna be burning stuff for heat. Maybe it's actual shit, maybe it's local plant-life. Will the local plant-life change? If they're using sheep dung, and the plants change, will post-climate-change still burn the same? How can they adapt? That's pretty fucking important in that region, and a) I'd be stunned if anyone had bothered to gather the data necessary for the paper, and b) I'd be even more stunned if it got published. The Imperialism bits are included because groups that Empress Victoria of India disliked are likely still on the bad-list of important people in the region, and thus if they use some unique heating strategy that will be screwed by climate change it's likely nobody will notice until the poor bastards start freezing to death.
Doubt it.
If you actually understand the terms she's using, the paper sounds fine. Or at least well within the normal traditions of feminism in the social sciences.
Men tend to be into very specific areas of interest. Which means they'll research those areas. That's not bad, and none of the individual men involved are doing anything wrong, and women tend to do the same thing. As a personal example, when I talk military history women tend to completely tune me out. When they're talking about things that are objectively speaking pretty important (ie: my immortal soul) that don't fit into my "dudes should be into this" box I tune them out. This also happens in the sciences, but in many sciences (particularly hard sciences with no human element) it's completely irrelevant.
This paper is about glacier-climate change research. And research into climate change frequently involves human elements because you're trying to figure out what can humans do to a) fix, b) mitigate, and/or c) respond to the problem. In those papers, half of what you're talking about is women doing women stuff. And a largely-male researcher base is likely to ignore some things that a female researcher-base would make the main headline of their paper.
Which is pretty much what feminists have been doing in social sciences ever since there have been feminists to be in the social sciences.
Yeah, pretty much exactly this. The paper (which I have not read in its entirety, only in part) seems like a reasonable, though not exactly profound, piece of research.
Knowing how fast the glaciers will melt is important. Knowing what it will do to people and societies who will be affected by glacial melt is also important. If the research into that so far has only really looked at men, then the research is lacking, and it's right to publish a paper saying so.
Just because you didn't understand it or it doesn't fit with your preconceived prejudices doesn't mean it's worthless. But I wouldn't expect Reason Magazine to understand that.
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