Feminist glaciology – at least it is being talked about!

 

The recent paper in Progress in Human Geography:
Glaciers, gender and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. 

Has caused a great deal of controversy, with the authors being drawn into the ‘culture wars’. The paper is worth a read so that you can form your own opinion, but remember the authors set out to promote discussion so maybe they intended to be controversial (see article).

At roughly the same time as the paper came out I received a paper to review for the Canadian Geographer  on critical thinking in physical geography that I reviewed positively that as part of its introduction distilled the arguments of the Progress in Human Geography paper down to three key points that seemed, at least to me, to be quite reasonable.  The key points were:  knowledge producers, the gendered nature of science and the domination of the scientific viewpoint. Each of these can be presented as a reasonable argument, by which I mean an argument that most physical scientists would not necessarily disagree. At the same time most physical scientists would ask what has this to do with my work? This is the harder part of make clear but one that we need to increasingly address as the difficulties of interdisciplinary research become clear. This is not a trend that will go away so trying to understand the implications of who produces what nolwdge and how are issues that even the hardest of physical geographers will need to grapple with. So what is your view?