The oceans are healing. Long contaminated by far-right ideology, whiteness, and colonialism, the water is finally being purified. “Ocean equity and justice” are emerging scientific themes in exciting new forms of BIPOC and LQBTQIA+ scholarship. With courage, we can develop a transgender indigenous hydrology.
Here, take a moment to examine a chart from a recent peer-reviewed article that shows how we’re making progress and what work we have left to do to reorient the field of ocean science.
As the pandemic taught us, it’s important to obey science without question, and by the most remarkable coincidence, science is a distinctly left-facing field of human ambition that aligns neatly with the coordinated power of governments and their client corporations. David Burge taught us to identify this maneuver:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
Science is you have to do what I say because I own a lab coat. Science is leftist politics, and you can’t argue with highly credentialed experts. An American Lysenkoism is rising, and you probably have no idea how advanced that ideological disease has become.
Physics, for example, is now a discourse of social justice, with a deep and wide menu of culturally correct answers. Gravity is, like, a variety of things that depend on your gender and ethnic starting points.
The National Science Foundation is pouring cash into left-facing science with a metastasizing list of DEI funding programs.
Here’s a list of articles you can browse on the new pedagogy in physical science, organized around two questions: “1. What does it mean to think beyond just physics, specifically, to think about physics and physics education in the context of the social and political realities of the world? 2. What constitutes just physics, i.e., what does physics for justice look like?”
Objects at rest or in motion remain at rest or in motion unless acted upon by white supremacy. We were blind to the social realities of physics for a long time, but we know that now.
Or here’s some of the abstract from recent research in the important field of environmental science:
Grounded in Kaupapa Māori Theory, Pūtaiao is envisioned as a Kaupapa Māori way of doing science in which Indigenous leadership is imperative. It incorporates Māori ways of knowing, being, and doing when undertaking scientific research. An essential element of Pūtaiao is setting a decolonising agenda, drawing from both Kaupapa Māori Theory and Indigenous methodologies. Accordingly, this centres the epistemology, ontology, axiology and positionality of researchers in all research, which informs their research standpoint.
If you haven’t been centering the axiology of indigenous researchers in the study of physical environments, it’s time to get with the program.
And so on, and so on, and so on. Are you decolonizing your paleobiology? Are you practicing a feminist glaciology? Have you considered a model of multivariate animal sex that allows for gender fluidity among potentially intersex giraffes and trans gazelles, or are you still using a cisnormative colonialist gender language that assumes the sexual identity of our friend the badger without even opening a space for inquiry?
Predictably, the federal government is leading the way into this brave new science. Politics is making science into politics. The National Science Foundation is pouring cash into left-facing science with a metastasizing list of DEI funding programs.
Browse that long list yourself, and you’ll find science funding programs like “BIO-LEAPS: Leading Culture Change Through Professional Societies of Biology”:
NSF BIO will support awards that leverage the work of professional societies towards facilitating necessary culture change in the biological sciences to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion at scale — In other words, at the broad and deep scales that are required to address this systemic issue.
Politicized science funding turns out — brace yourself for a surprise — to promote political outcomes. The NSF’s Convergence Accelerator program, for example, has funded a bunch of data scientists who have worked on finding ways to defeat conspiracy theories and restore trust in authority. Science says to stop voting for Trump, you troglodytes!
If you click on the link to that program page, look at the 2021 cohort of federally funded research projects — like the team that “assists online communities with building trust around controversial topics such as vaccine efficacy” or the team that “enables community, fact-checking, and academic organizations to collaborate and respond effectively to emerging misinformation narratives that stoke social conflict and distrust,” or the team that “empowers journalists to identify misinformation networks, correct misinformation within the affected networks, and test the effectiveness of corrections.”
No politics there, right? Just pure federally funded science, helping society to stop asking questions and learn to obey.
We’re building a discourse of obedience based on the supposedly disinterested approach we see in scientific inquiry. But the new science has a steering wheel, and politics is in the driver’s seat.
Trust the experts and believe in science. Don’t worry about the details.