Scientists from a range of disciplines and institutions have been grappling with the violent colonial legacies embedded within Western science. From archaeology to public health to natural history, efforts focused around naming and unwinding those legacies have flourished, particularly in the wake of last year’s racial justice uprisings.
A new paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution offers some steps that ecologists, in particular, can take to begin unraveling the colonial systems and perspectives that pervade academia.
“Ecology, like most scientific disciplines that exist in the world today, comes out of the history of universities that were founded in colonization,” says coauthor Jess Auerbach, an anthropologist at North-West University in South Africa. “And so our whole knowledge structure, as a kind of global research community, is based really in these processes of unequal power and violence.”
Read more in Ellie Shechet’s article in Popular Science.
