The effort to ‘decolonize light’ is representative of a growing trend: subjecting hard sciences to the woke piety previously afflicting only the humanities.
The effort to ‘decolonize light’ is representative of a growing trend: subjecting hard sciences to the woke piety previously afflicting only the humanities.
C anada’s government granted a group of academics almost $164,000 for a research project called “Decolonizing Light: Tracing and countering colonialism in contemporary physics,” a search of grant records confirmed.
Disturbingly, the academics involved admit that they have zero interest in performing science or seeking truth but are instead interested in spreading woke ideology. “The purpose of our project is not to find new or better explanations of light; we are not seeking to improve scientific ‘truth,’” scholars involved in the project wrote in one of their few published works. “Rather, our project initiatives are motivated by the marginalization of women, Black people, and Indigenous peoples particularly in physics.”
In 2018, the “Decolonizing Light” project received a grant for $163,567 directly from the Canadian government via the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF). The NFRF’s website claims that the fund is dedicated to ensuring “Best Practices in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Research.”
“To narrow down our research, the project will focus on light in general and on large-scale research facilities (‘synchrotron’ light sources) in particular, which employ light for physical research,” the project’s grant application reads. “We regard the synchrotron as prototypical paradigm for contemporary physics research, physical knowledge, and the professional culture of physics, the decolonization of which is aspired in the proposed project. For the proposed exploration, we will follow complementary approaches: engaging Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies as well as empowering Indigenous students to engage in contemporary science to attain Indigenous sovereignty.”
It gets stranger. The academics also plan to decolonize light itself by “de-centering” Western astronomy and science in favor of developing courses with indigenous scholars and “Knowledge Keepers” via “Two-Eyed Seeing.” The researchers claim that “the Two-Eyed Seeing approach allows for intercultural collaboration and multiple perspectives. . . . It encourages the realization that beneficial outcomes are much more likely in any given situation when we are willing to bring two or more perspectives into play.”
This word salad presumably means that the project intends to promote the pre-colonial-era astronomical understanding of the indigenous populations of North America, and substitute this for modern knowledge in university curricula. “To date, no examples of successfully established decolonized physics courses and curricula exist at Canadian universities,” according to the “Decolonizing Light” project’s grant application. The researchers hope to change that by replacing astronomical science with “indigenous star stories,” so that one might obtain a degree in astronomy presumably simply by learning indigenous legends about constellations.
The project is headed by a Dr. Tanja Tajmel, a special adviser to the dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Concordia University in Montréal, whose research interests include “investigating ‘othering’ in STEM, exploring decolonizing approaches in STEM, and developing further the meaning and understanding of equity in the STEM fields.” Of the 18 academic investigators listed on the project’s website, only one has a doctorate in astronomy. (Tajmel is trained in “physics didactics.”) Everyone else’s expertise is in unrelated, often identity-focused fields such as “First Peoples’ Studies.”
The “Decolonizing Light” project’s interdisciplinary team of scholars have only published one, six-page article, regarding their intentions, in the journal Physics in Canada in 2021, despite having been active since 2018, and produced a single program on Indigenous star stories. The program included a lengthy land acknowledgment and the playing of a traditional indigenous water drum. The main presenter, Wilfred Buck, was introduced as, among other things, an astrologer and “the foremost authority on indigenous astronomy in the world.”
Buck told a university audience a tale about a Cree constellation called “Grandmother Spider” that overlaps with the constellation of Cassiopeia (the Greek name by which the International Astronomical Union refers to the constellation). In this origin story, before humans existed, Grandmother Spider helped a “star woman” made of pure energy travel through another constellation, the Hole in the Sky (the Pleiades), to Earth. Learning about native mythology can be valuable, but problems arise when mythology is taught as fact. For example, mention of a horse constellation acted as segue for the speaker to inaccurately claim that indigenous people had and used horses before European contact. Throughout the talk, the presenter stressed the importance of receiving guidance from dreams and visions, instead of experiments or data. He suggested that dreams could help to recover lost pre-colonial indigenous knowledge, and even “sync with another reality” within the multiverse.
“For our purpose, it is important to understand physics as a social field rather than as ‘pure knowledge’ independent from social values and decisions,” the researchers write in their Physics in Canada article. “Physics is more than the laws that describe and predict natural phenomena: it is the overarching field of work with its societal dimension, its history, and the circumstances and purposes of physical knowledge production. The opportunity to participate in producing such scientific knowledge as well as the purposes and benefits of this knowledge are framed by social power relations, by politics, and also by colonialism.”
The U.S. government has funded similarly ideological (though not as overtly woke or deranged) research. A major study, directly funded by NASA, on the potential of alien civilizations’ contacting humanity, wonders whether humanity’s sins — “racism, genocide, inequity, sabotage . . . the list sprawls” — might eradicate our species before it ever gets a chance to make contact with extraterrestrials.
American scientific journals have also displayed a keen interest in “decolonization.” “Decolonization should extend to collaborations, authorship and co-creation of knowledge,” the once-prestigious journal Nature tweeted in late November. The institution of scientific journals, it must be noted, is a Western invention originating in Britain, so, if the editors of Nature wish to remove European influence from science, they might consider ceasing their own publication as a start.
That same month, Nature published a feature entitled “Seeding an anti-racist culture at Scotland’s botanical gardens,” which described this institution’s announcement of an “action plan to ‘embed’ racial-justice work as a ‘core aspect’ of botany in order to ‘make the gardens a more inclusive space.’” According to Nature, this was necessary to honor George Floyd, as “before Floyd’s murder, botanical gardens had largely escaped the scrutiny” to which apparently everything must now be subjected.
These forays into purportedly decolonized astronomy and allegedly anti-racist plant science are representative of a growing trend. From physics to botany, hitherto serious scientific fields are being infected by radical identity politics — what Elon Musk has called “the woke mind virus.” The ideological extremism that was until recently mostly confined to the humanities, explicitly identity-focused fields (e.g., fat studies, “Latinx” studies, queer studies, etc.), and certain areas of the social sciences, is gradually extending its reach into the hard sciences.
The “Decolonizing Light” project has indeed shed light on something: It has demonstrated that no academic discipline is immune to the threat of takeover by the radical Left.