Toward Anticolonial Futures in the Sciences at Swarthmore

Editors’ note: This is the first of two parts of a larger article. The next part will be published in the April 3 issue of The Phoenix. 

As college students, one of our main identity markers is our major. From classroom ice-breakers to that all too familiarly awkward Swattie small talk, “I’m a ___ major” can start conversations or stop them in their tracks. I’m a physics major.

Physics, to me, is a demonstration of the beauty in our different ways of understanding the universe. But in representing the beauty of science par excellence, all of the ways in which science can be ugly are also particularly applicable to physics. By and large, these blemishes are discussed less frequently in science classrooms than in the humanities and social sciences at Swarthmore. I am fortunate to have been in Professor Giovanna Di Chiro’s classroom last semester, in an environmental justice course which encouraged me to think about anticolonialism in the academy.

For scholars such as Swarthmore professor of astronomy David Cohen, a way to extricate himself from the “ethically compromised” (in his words) nature of a field driven by weapons funding was to divorce himself from physics and dedicate himself to astronomy. In a conversation with me, Cohen also made his opinion clear that “people who are a little more snobbish tend to go into physics, and I think people who are a little more into talking to regular people tend to go into astronomy.” Perhaps I am a case in point!

However, at the origin of this perception of physicists as the stereotypical, “hardcore” nerds who do not mix with the rest of society lies the idea that science itself and society do not mix. It is precisely this feeling of scientific knowledge being separate and inaccessible that sometimes surfaces in conversations about my major. Furthermore, the general perception of scientists as “snobbish” is due not only to the barriers erected between scientific disciplines and the rest of the academy but also to the hierarchization of scientific knowledge over other knowledge systems. In the same breath, the historic dominance of the sciences in the US has been upended under the current administration, and this new precarity simultaneously underscores the fragility and value of the scientific community. So, as a scientist and as someone who appreciates the vibrant and supportive quality of my community, it is hard to shed light on its many faults. Nevertheless, doing so is none other than an expression of love for a community that I hope to change for the better.

At Swarthmore, Cohen’s study of X-ray observations of stellar winds is derived in part from his desire to avoid doing harm to society by pursuing a science that is maximally detached from it — lightyears away from it, even. My own desire to pursue numerical modeling of climate processes arises from a similarly intentioned yet opposite will to engage in positive relationships with the environment despite the inevitable harmful relationships science involves. Of course, Cohen, as an anticolonial critical thinker, has found over the course of his 30 years as an observational X-ray astronomer that “there is no clean, pure sector of science where you can do your work and feel like you’re not participating in the machine,” and that astronomy is no exception. I, too, have found that even the ways in which we ask and answer seemingly harmless questions about climate change can be extremely problematic. 

Why is it so hard to practice ethical science, and how should we start to do so at Swarthmore?

Under traditional frameworks, the sciences are an exercise in extracting truth from the world. Traditional scientists wield this singular truth in a crusade against other (“false”) worldviews. For perhaps the same reason that steers some away from these disciplines, others are drawn to the dominant scientific notion of “one right answer.” But this way of thinking about scholarship — the worship of a single-minded and authoritative theory of science — is colonial. More precisely, it abuses the power of science by imperialistically and indiscriminately foisting reductionist theories onto land, institutions, and people.

These ideas are introduced and elaborated by Max Liboiron (science and technology studies scholar, anticolonial activist, and Indigenous Canadian Métis/Michif) in their book “Pollution is Colonialism.” Liboiron studies plastics in marine environments and leads the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), an anticolonial and feminist research group. They refer to the “ugly” science perpetuated by institutions of modernity as “dominant science” (as opposed to Western science), and where I have written “traditional” science above, “dominant” would be a more apt descriptor. The antithesis to dominant science, anticolonial science is “an ‘experimental otherwise’ that uses science against scientific values of universalism, separation, domination, and colonization.”

Anticolonial science emphasizes and honors the interconnectedness among particular scientists, their questions, and their immediate surroundings. Liboiron refers to this principle as “a deep specificity based in place and in the relations to which we are accountable.” In addition to the material relationalities which accompany scientific research, interpersonal relationality engenders a need for compassionate scientists. Swarthmore professor of physics Ben Geller concluded his final Physics 003L: General Physics lecture last fall with a plea for interdisciplinarity, for empathy, and for compassion, projecting a quote from Maimonides: “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it.” Geller’s and Maimonides’s appeal to the specific, human dimensions of medicine rather than to a universal framework for how to handle any instance of a given disease is an excellent example of encouraging students to practice anticolonial science. On the other hand, teaching students that there is one correct way to handle a disease or reducing treatment decisions to a select few premeditated actions constitutes a “metaphysical flattening” which ignores complex relationality and separates science from specific contexts. This form of knowledge production is referred to by Liboiron as “a militant universalism” in which a worldview obtained with dominant scientific methods is applied willy-nilly and eclipses all other ways of knowing. Cohen related that his graduate advisor “had been talking to a radical feminist historian of science, and the next day, he said, ‘She called Newton’s Principia a rape manual.’” Indeed, the hierarchical power dynamic in the subject-object framing of Newtonian mechanics is a violent and militantly universal worldview. But such a scathing critique of Newton’s “F = ma,” a seemingly innocuous mainstay of the classical mechanics classroom, may be received by some as unwarranted and overly abstract.

In addition to recognizing harm in universalist theories, anticolonial thinkers also shed light on how dominant ways of viewing climate science can feed harmful politics. In his book “Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement,” Michael Méndez introduces the concepts of climate reductionism and embodied knowledge in a multiscalar analysis of California and the climate crisis. Carbon reductionism is somewhat of a play on words: paralleling Liboiron’s militant universalism in the climate domain, it refers to the reductionist thinking of many climate actors in believing that a select few mitigation strategies are sufficient and globally applicable. One of these reductionist strategies is the outsized focus on reducing CO2 emissions over putting an end to other harmful processes. Méndez cites Jason Corburn, who sees legitimizing universal scientific knowledge as opposed to particular, local ways of knowing (embodied knowledge) as anti-democratic, and I agree that purely positivist approaches, which delegitimize local actors, are inequitable and unproductive. Although carbon reductionism is a form of perverse “green moralism” which casts homogenous global reforms as effective blanket solutions, the embodied knowledge which forms the basis of “climate change from the streets” cannot act in isolation to affect multiscalar change. With threads of responsible and multiscalar scientific research, communities can interweave disparate local knowledge sources and find ways to bring their “situated knowledge” to traditional arenas of power. Elizabeth Hoover, in her ethnography The River Is In Us, also emphasizes the role of science as a “language of power.” In short, science that attends to complex relationalities can endow grassroots local movements with the power “to travel across space and time.”