Feministische glaciologie

Foto: Bernice Notenboom op haar tocht naar de Noordpool, die volgens de klimaatpropaganda weldra ijsvrij zou zijn. Bernice wilde dat aantonen. Maar dat bleek een vergissing. Haar ijskoude helletocht moest voortijdig worden afgebroken wegens levensgevaar. Het onderscheid tussen moedig en onverantwoord is flinterdun.

Maar nu iets anders over vrouwen en ijs. Het kon natuurlijk niet uitblijven. De postmoderne wetenschap schrijdt voort. Interessante voorbeelden daarvan zijn de pogingen van de beoefenaren van  ‘gender’ studies om te infiltreren in de reguliere wetenschap … met soms komische resultaten.

Onder de titel, ‘A Feminist Glaciology’, schreef Paul Matthews op ‘Climate Scepticism’:

Many readers will be familiar with the famous Sokal hoax paper, in which physicist Alan Sokal wrote a nonsensical article on the “hermeneutics of quantum gravity” and got it published in a sociology journal. ….

Now it seems that climate science has fallen for a similar joke paper. The journal Progress in Human Geography (impact factor 5, which is quite high) has published an article ‘Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.’

Excerpts below are taken from just the first 3 pages of this 24-page masterpiece, plus a final quote from the conclusions. …

“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.”

“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 critical but overlooked aspect of the human dimensions of glaciers and global change research is the relationship between gender and glaciers.”

“Through a review and synthesis of a multi-disciplinary and wide-ranging literature on human-ice relations, this paper proposes a feminist glaciology framework to analyze human-glacier dynamics, glacier narratives and discourse, and claims to credibility and authority of glaciological knowledge through the lens of feminist studies.”

“A combination of feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology provide the intellectual foundation for feminist glaciology.”

“Feminist glaciology is rooted in, and combines, both feminist science studies and postcolonial science studies to meaningfully shift present-day glacier and ice sciences.”

“The response to simplistic ‘ice is just ice’ discourse is not merely to foreground or single out women and their experiences – that would simply perpetuate binaries and boundaries and ignore deeper foundations. Rather, it is a larger integration of human approaches and sensibilities with the existing dominant physical sciences. Global environmental change research must pluralize its ontologies, epistemologies, and sensibilities.”

Lees verder hier en hier.

Het blijkt toch altijd weer nóg gekker te kunnen.

Voor mijn eerdere bijdragen over klimaat en aanverwante zaken zie hier, hier, hier, hier en hier.