GLACIERS, GENDER and SCIENCE:
A FEMINIST GLACIOLOGY FRAMEWORK FOR GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE RESEARCH
Mark Carey, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change… indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive… science and knowledge have historically been linked to imperial and hegemonic capitalist agendas…
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.
‘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."
--Cruikshank J Do Glaciers Listen?
Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2005
Cruikshank J Are glaciers ‘good to think with’?
Recognising indigenous environmental knowledge. Anthropological Forum 22: 239–250. 2012
