Now Space Is Racist! Woke Colorado Astrophysics Professor Moans Her Field Is Riddled With 'White Supremacy' and Sexism, With Colleagues Using 'Hypermasculine' and 'Violent' Language to Describe the Cosmos

A Colorado astrophysicist has claimed her field is steeped in white supremacy and sexism because ‘hypermasculine’ and ‘violent’ language is used to describe stars.

Natalie Gosnell, an assistant professor at Colorado College, takes an unconventional approach to physics by comparing stars with humans to turn science into an art.

In an interview with the college newspaper she claimed she has struggled to overcome a division between art and science that is rooted in ‘systemic racism.’

Her work aims ‘to cross typical disciplinary boundaries to create art-science pieces that re-inscribe outer space as feminist space,’ she said on her website.

‘Both artists and scientists are just observing things about the world, interpreting those observations, and then sharing their interpretation,’ Gosnell told Colorado College News.

‘As an astrophysicist, I am a product of institutions steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,’ she said.

Suggestions that academic fields like science and engineering are male-dominated are common and generally accepted but Gosnell goes further by arguing that the language used to describe scientific phenomena is sexist and racist.

The way in which stars burn through their fuel and die is viewed through a ‘hypermasculine’ lens and the metaphors used are often ‘very violent,’ she claimed.

An example she gave was that stars which take mass from other stars are labeled ‘bad boys,’ though this does not seem to be a widely used scientific term.

She may have been referring to an article written by popular science journalist Nancy Atkinson in 2009, in which Atkinson wrote that ‘blue stragglers [which] steal mass from companion stars by crashing into their neighbors’ are ‘stellar bad-boys.’

Much of Gosnell’s research is dedicated to understanding blue straggler binary star systems – which often involve one star burning out and merging with another.

Gosnell, who studies binary star systems using telescopes and imaging, has said she tries to combine art and science because the two fields are more similar than people think.

‘I think because science and art were so separate, and that’s how it is […] systemic questions within science, the often chosen metaphors [to discuss science] are very violent and hypermasculine,’ she said.

‘The tenets of white supremacy emerging [in physics] of individualism and exceptionalism and perfectionism… it’s an either-or thinking and there’s no subtlety, there’s no gray area. All of this is manifested in the way we think about our research and what counts as good research, what counts as important research,’ she said.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11642707/Colorado-astrophysicist-moans-field-riddled-white-supremacy-sexism.html

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