GLACIERS, GENDER AND SCIENCE :
AUGUST 2019 |
Mark Carey, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers... remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework ...
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.
a growing body of literature... grapples with... the ways in which science and knowledge have historically been linked to imperial and hegemonic capitalist agendas.
Feminist glaciology participates in this broader movement by... highlighting the disempowering and forestalling qualities of an unexamined and totalizing science.
if the intersecting forces of colonialism, neoliberalism, and patriarchy have historically silenced and marginalized certain ways of knowing…then feminist glaciology - drawing from feminist political ecology and feminist postcolonial science studies - seeks to expose those more-than-science voices and offer a diversity of representations of cryoscapes.
Technoscientific control is a dominant trope in climate change discourse... Much geographical fieldwork involves this masculinist reflexivity generating supposed objectivity through distance from and disinterest in the subject. These conclusions transcend gendered dimensions of knowledge by acknowledging broader trends in Western sciences that have sought to place science at a god-like vantage from nowhere, ignoring both situated knowledges and the geography of science (Haraway, 1988)… and underscores the disconnect between local women’s knowledge and Western scientific conclusions expressed in the IPCC and elsewhere.
Additionally… indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered in a stereotypically masculinist sense.
‘The glaciers these women speak of’, explains Cruikshank (2005: 51–3), ‘ are willful, capricious, easily excited by human intemperance, but equally placated by quick-witted human responses. Proper behavior is deferential. I was warned, for instance, about firm taboos against ‘‘cooking with grease’’ near glaciers that are offended by such smells. . . . Cooked food, especially fat, might grow into a glacier overnight if improperly handled.’