Day: August 11, 2017

Are you a rooster or a hen?

santorumsoakedpikachu:

bukbot:

butwithlaserbeams:

bukbot:

torakoneko:

bukbot:

Rooster or a cow who eats dogs.

wow i hope it’s the first one!

Cow who eats dogs.

uh oh, it’s the second one.

Cow who eats dogs.

There are only three genders: rooster, hen, and cow who eats dogs.

Decolonising Science Reading List – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein – Medium

asshole-academic:

October 2016 Introduction

In April, 2015, one of the most visible topics of discussion in the Astronomy community was the planned Thirty Meter Telescope and protests against it from Native Hawaiians who didn’t want it built on Mauna Kea. I wrote a lot about this on social media, spending some significant time trying to contextualize the debate. This reading list was originally created in response to requests for where I was getting some of the information from. A lot of people asked me about what I’d been reading as reference points for my commentary on the relationship between colonialism and what we usually call “modern science.”

In August 2016 I updated to announce: I’m happy to report that Sarah Tuttleand I will be contributing to this list in future thanks to this FQXi grant that we are co-I/PI on: Epistemological Schemata of Astro|Physics: A Reconstruction of Observers. The grant proposal was based on a written adaptation of a speech I gave at the Inclusive Astronomy conference, Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building.

As part of this work, I’ve continued to expand the reading list, which seems to have become a global resource for people interested in science and colonialism. As I originally said, I make no claims about completeness, about updating it regularly, or even ever coming up with a system for organizing it that I find to be satisfactory. You’ll find texts that range from personal testimony to Indigenous cosmology to anthropology, to history to sociology to education research. All are key to the process of decolonising science, which is a pedagogical, cultural, and intellectual set of interlocking structures, ideas, and practices. This reading list functions on the premise that there is value in considering the ways in which science and society co-construct. It is stuff that I have read all or part of and saw some value in sharing with others.

I am especially indebted to the #WeAreMaunaKea movement for educating me and spurring me to educate myself.

Original April 2015 Commentary

There are two different angles at play in the discussion about colonialism and science. First is what constitutes scientific epistemology and what its origins are. As a physicist, I was taught that physics began with the Greeks and later Europeans inherited their ideas and expanded on them. In this narrative, people of African descent and others are now relative newcomers to science, and questions of inclusion and diversity in science are related back to “bringing science to underrepresented minority and people of color communities.” The problem with this narrative is that it isn’t true. For example, many of those “Greeks” were actually Egyptians and Mesopotamians under Greek rule. So, even though for the last 500 years or so science has largely been developed by Europeans, the roots of its methodology and epistemology are not European. Science, as scientists understand it, is not fundamentally European in origin. This complicates both racist narratives about people of color and innovation as well as discourse around whether science is fundamentally wedded to Euro-American operating principles of colonialism, imperialism and domination for the purpose of resource extraction.

This leads me to the second angle at play: Europeans have engaged what is called “internalist” science very seriously over the last 500 years and often in service and tandem with colonialism and white supremacy. For example, Huygens and Cassini facilitated and directed astronomical observation missions in order to help the French better determine the location of St. Domingue, the island that houses the modern nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Why? Because this would help make the delivery of slaves and export of the products of their labor more efficient. That is just one example, which stuck out to me because I am a descendant of the Caribbean part of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and I also have two degrees in astronomy (and two in physics).

There is a lot that has been hidden from mainstream narratives about the history of astronomy, including 20th century history. Where has the colonial legacy of astronomy taken us? From Europe to Haiti to now Hawai’i. Hawai’i is the flash point for this conversation now, even though the story goes beyond Hawai’i. If we are going to understand the context of what is happening in Hawai’i with the Thirty Meter Telescope, we must understand that Hawai’i is not the first or only place where astronomers used and benefited from colonialism. And in connection, we have to understand Hawai’ian history. Thus, my reading list also includes important materials about Hawai’i’s history.

tl;dr: science has roots outside of the Eurasian peninsula known as Europe, it likely has its limitations as one of multiple ontologies of the world, it has been used in really grotesque ways, and we must understand all of these threads to truly contextualize the discourse in Hawai’i around science, Hawaiian epistemologies and who gets to determine what constitutes “truth” and “fact” when it comes to Mauna a Wakea.

Finally, I believe science need not be inextricably tied to commodification and colonialism. The discourse around “diversity, equity and inclusion” in science, technology, engineering and mathematics must be viewed as a reclamation project for people of color. Euro-American imperialism and colonialism has had its (often unfortunate) moment with science, and it’s time for the rest of us to reclaim our heritage for the sake of ourselves and the next seven generations.

Note: this reading list is woefully low on materials about science in the pre-European contact Americas, Southeast Asia and parts of Australasia. I’m probably missing some stuff, but I think it signals a problem with research in the history of science too. Also I make no claims about completeness or a commitment to regularly updating it with my newest finds. Also see A U.S./Canadian Race & Racism Reading List.

May 2017 edit: I also just learned that there is a Reading List on Modern and Colonial Science in the Middle East.

The List

Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Women in Astronomy: Ain’t I a woman? Living at the intersection of gender, race, and sexuality by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

African Cultural Astronomy: Current Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Research in Africa eds. Jarita C. Holbrook, Johnson O. Urama, and R. Thebe Medupe

Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries by Vivian May

Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell

The Crest of the Peacock: The Non-European Roots of Mathematics by George Gheverghese Joseph; Many thanks to Archishman Raju for sending me the following significant caveat about this book: I just wanted to bring to your attention that there is a strong charge on G. Joseph for appropriating information amounting to plagiarism (I think). (See http://ckraju.net/Joseph/Complaint-about-Joseph-to-Manchester.pdf , and attachments http://ckraju.net/Joseph/Annexures-Manchester.pdf ). It is particularly ironic in this context that someone from University of Manchester would take credit for ideas developed in India. Addendum from Chanda: the link in the letter to the advertised PhD position is available on the Wayback Machine.

Science, Colonialism and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge by Laurelyn Whitt

Beyond Banneker: Black Mathematicians and the Paths to Excellence by Erica N. Walker

Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor

Epistemic Injustice by Miranda Fricker

Has Feminism Changed Physics? by Amy Grave (neé Bug)

(Baby Steps) Toward a Feminist Physics by Barbara Whitten

Has Feminism Changed Science? by Londa Schiebinger

Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding by Alexis Shotwell

Cognitive Repression in Contemporary Physics by Evelyn Fox Keller

Academic Articles on race and genetics by A.A. M’charek

Language, Identity, and Ideology: High-Achieving Scholarship Women(South African context) by Y. Dominguez-Whitehead, S. Liccardo, and H. Botsis

Conceptualising transformation and interrogating elitism: The Bale scholarship programme (South African context) by H. Botsis, Y. Dominguez-Whitehead, and S. Liccardo

Beyond South Africa’s ‘indigenous knowledge — science’ wars by Lesley J.F. Green

Decolonizing Science and Science Education in a Postcolonial Space (Trinidad, a Developing Caribbean Nation, Illustrates) by Laila Boisselle caveat from Chanda: I *hate* the use of “developing nation” here. It’s a colonialist term.

Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies eds. Mary Wyer, Mary Barbercheck, Donna Cookmeyer, Hatice Ozturk, and Marta Wayne

Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversityby Banu Subramaniam

The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation by John M. Hobson

Interrogating Whiteness and Relinquishing Power: White Faculty’s Commitment to Racial Consciousness in STEM Classrooms eds. Nicole Joseph, Chayla Haynes, Floyd Cobb

On the possibility of a feminist philosophy of physics by Maralee Harrell

Multicultural settler colonialism and indigenous struggle in Hawai’i: The politics of astronomy on Mauna a Wakea a dissertation by Joseph Salazar (available on ProQuest)

Challenging epistemologies: Exploring knowledge practices in Palikur astronomy by Lesley J.F. Green

‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity by Lesley J.F. Green

The Rain Stars, the World’s River, the Horizon and the Sun ’s Path: Astronomy along the Rio Urucauá, Amapá, Brazil by Lesley Green and David Green

Colonialism & Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime by James E. McClellan III

Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies by Sandra Harding

Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives by Sandra Harding

The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future ed. by Sandra Harding

Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technologyed. Sandra Harding with Robert Figueroa

Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues by Sandra Harding

Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities by Sandra Harding

The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader ed. by Sandra Harding

Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism by Sunil M. Agnani

Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna J. Haraway

Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics by Sharon Traweek

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks by Clifford D. Connor

Why I Am Not A Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Science by Jonathan M. Marks

Notes on Dialectics by C.L.R. James (available scanned here.)

Science and Technology in Korea: Traditional Instruments and Techniques by Sang-woon Jeon

The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map

Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Italy by Meredith K. Ray

People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier by Ruha Benjamin

The World and Africa: An inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history by W.E. Burghardt Du Bois

The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genomeby Alondra Nelson

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

Wikipedia entry on Alhazen

Wikipedia entry on History of Scientific Method

Wikipedia entry on Physics in the medieval Islamic World

Tribal peoples have crucial role to play in global conservation Guardian Op-Ed

We Live In the Future. Come Join Us. by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

Protecting Mauna A Wakea: The Space Between Science and Spirituality by Keolu Fox

Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism by Noenoe K. Silva

A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty, Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright, editors

voices of fire: reweaving the literary lei of pele and hi’iaka by ku’ualohoa ho’omanawanui

Decolonising Science Reading List – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein – Medium

tort-time:

(via The Hocking Hills Animal Clinic Facebook Page)

Wildlife rehabbers and vets don’t generally get follow up reports and most will tell you they prefer it that way. That makes the discovery by a vet at The Hocking Hills Animal Clinic in Ohio that much more amazing.  

Years after treating a wild box turtle that had been hit by a car,  repairing its cracked shell with fiberglass and rehabbing it till It was strong enough for release, she encountered a familiar pattern in the leaves while on a hillside walk. 

Looking down she immediately knew it was her old patient! The injured box turtle was alive and well and had grown up quite a bit since their last meeting. She immediately shared the images on the clinics Facebook. Gotta love a happy ending for a dedicated vet and a tough shell friend. 😀

Source: themindcircle.com

Climate change could disrupt tribes’ religious practices

asshole-academic:

The Colorado River, one of the longest rivers in the United States, is gradually shrinking. This is partly a result of overuse by municipalities and seasonal drought. The other reason is global warming.

The decline in the river reservoir will have serious implications for large U.S. cities, such as Los Angeles, that depend on the Colorado River as their water source. In addition, this will also have an impact on the Native American tribes who view the Colorado River as sacred to their religions.

As Ka-Voka Jackson, a member of the Hualapai tribe and a graduate student working to address climate change on the Colorado River and restoring native plant species along its banks, stated, “The Colorado River is so sacred not just to my tribe, but to so many others.”

As a scholar of Native American religions and the environment, I understand how Indigenous people’s religions and sacred places are closely tied to their landscape. For the past 100 years, Indigenous peoples have been forced to adapt to changes in their environments and modify their religious rituals in the United States. The U.S. government made certain Native American religious practices illegal in the 19th and early 20th century. Although these policies have since been rescinded, they led to changes in many Indigenous practices.

Global warming, however, is different. The question is whether Indigenous people will be able to adapt their beliefs all over again due to the impact of global warming on the natural world.

Adapting to change

The Blackfeet tribe in Montana brought changes in their relationship with the natural world as a result of the policies of the U.S. government from the 1880s to the 1930s.

For example, the Blackfeet purposefully moved religious ceremonies from one time on their liturgical calendar to completely different times to avoid the U.S. government penalizing native people for dancing or participating in religious ceremonies.

The Blackfeet moved their annual O’kan, or sundance festival, from late summer (usually held at the end of August) to the Fourth of July celebration. They avoided U.S. government punishment by masking their ceremonies within state-sanctioned public events.

Policies related to the mining of natural resources and damming of rivers on Indigenous lands have also led to changes in Native Americans’ religious practices.

Historian David R. M. Beck interviewed elders and researched how the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin adapted to the loss of their sacred fish, the sturgeon, after a paper mill built a dam across the Wolf River.

The sturgeon disappeared after the dam was built in 1892, because they could no longer swim upstream to spawn. For over 100 years, the Menominee tribal members continued to pray and conduct their annual “returning of the sturgeon” ceremony in the spring – even though there were no more sturgeon in the river. The Menominee ultimately won the right to return the sturgeon to the Wolf River in 1992 and the tribe revitalized the full ceremony and celebration of their sacred fish.

In all these situations, Native American tribes learned to adapt to the challenges placed before them, modify their religious practice and embrace a different relationship with the natural world.

Global warming and religion

When it comes to global climate change, it affects everyone, not just specific groups in specific places. But for many Indigenous peoples, natural resources are closely linked to religious beliefs and practices.

Historically, Indigenous peoples used the natural seasonal cycles of weather, plants and animals as part of their liturgical or religious calendar. The Blackfeet held their annual “beaver bundle ceremony” in the early spring as ice melted off rivers and beavers returned to the open waters. In Blackfeet mythology, a beaver served as a deity who taught humans how to cultivate tobacco, which the tribe used for important religious ceremonies and as a peace offering to their enemies.

There are signs, though, that beavers are now moving north due to global warming. Biologists are currently studying both beavers and the birch and alder shrubs that beavers eat, as both move north into new regions. Scientists worry that as a keystone species, the movement of beavers will change the northern ecosystems as they cut off waterways and build beaver dams. And shrubs will change the local waterways that they grow by. This will affect local animal species.

What will happen when there are no more beaver in Blackfeet territory? Will their religious traditions adapt similar to the Menominee when they faced the loss of their sacred sturgeon?

Religion and resiliency

From the arctic tundra to the American desert Southwest, and places worldwide, Indigenous peoples will be facing the impact of global climate change.

Regarding the shrinking of the Colorado River, researchers Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck have concluded that, “Failing to act on climate change means accepting the very high risk that the Colorado River basin will continue to dry up into the future.”

If this river faces a drier future, it will likely affect the Mojave, a people indigenous to the Colorado River basin, who believe the river was created by their ancient deity Mastamho as part of their sacred landscape.

As the G-20 convenes in Germany this week to discuss global issues including climate change, Indigenous scholars, such as myself, are wondering what the future holds for Indigenous peoples, their environments and their religions.

Indigenous communities can be resilient and adapt their internal religious beliefs to outside challenges, as Native American tribes from the turn of the 20th century have proven. Climate change presents yet another challenge.

Climate change could disrupt tribes’ religious practices