The study of the humanities has fallen victim, again, to media fire. This time over ice. Historian Mark Carey and his co-authors at the University of Oregon published an article offering “a feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.” They argued that glaciology had a male and western history with Cold War roots and pointed out that there are many other knowledge traditions involving ice, including indigenous, post-colonial and feminist perspectives. Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, climate change–-denying think tanks and bloggers all had a field day. Wasn’t this evidence of soft, irrational, liberal thinking, proof that climate change is a hoax, and—because Carey acknowledged a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation—yet another example of the waste of tax payers’ money?
It is easy for those of us who are academics in the humanities to smile, or sigh, at such media feeding frenzies and move on. Indeed, in Canada we are...
Graeme Wynn is a professor of geography and a former Brenda and David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Sverker Sörlin is a professor of environmental history at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and a member of the Swedish government’s Science Advisory Board. In the spring of 2016, he was an international visiting research fellow at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia.
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