Colorado astrophysicist moans her field is riddled with ‘white supremacy’ and sexism
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Now SPACE is racist! The Woke Colorado astrophysics professor complains that her field is rife with “white supremacy” and sexism, with colleagues using “hypermasculine” and “violent” language to describe the cosmos.
- Natalie Gosnell has tried to merge physics and art, but is limited by racism, she says.
- Gosnell, an assistant professor at Colorado College, studies binary star systems.
- She claims ‘hypermasculine’ and ‘violent’ language is used to describe stars
A Colorado astrophysicist has claimed that 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 to humans to turn science into an art.
In an interview with the university newspaper, he said he has fought to overcome a divide between art and science that is rooted in “systemic racism.”
Her work aims to “cross typical disciplinary boundaries to create pieces of art and science that re-inscribe outer space as feminist space,” she said on her website.
“Both artists and scientists just observe things about the world, interpret those observations, and then share their interpretation.” Gosnell told the Colorado College News.
“As an astrophysicist, I am a product of institutions steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,” she said.
Astrophysicist Natalie Gosnell says her field is steeped in sexism and white supremacy because “hypermasculine” and “violent” language is used to describe stars.
Gosnell takes an unconventional approach to physics by comparing the lifespans of stars to that of humans in order to turn science into an art.
Suggestions that academic fields like science and engineering are male-dominated are common and generally accepted, but Gosnell goes further to argue that the language used to describe scientific phenomena is sexist and racist.
The way stars burn their fuel and die is seen through a ‘hypermasculine’ lens and the metaphors used are often ‘very violent’, he stated.
One example he gave was that stars that take mass from other stars are labeled “bad guys”, although this doesn’t seem to be a widely used scientific term.
She may have referred to an article written by popular science journalist Nancy Atkinson in 2009in which Atkinson wrote that ‘blue stragglers [which] stealing mass from companion stars by crashing into their neighbors’ are ‘stellar bad boys’.
Much of Gosnell’s research is devoted to understanding blue straggling binary star systems, which often involve one star burning up and merging with another.
Gosnell, who studies binary star systems using telescopes and imaging, has said he tries to combine art and science because the two fields are more similar than people realize.
“I think because science and art were so far apart, and that’s how it is […] systemic issues within science, often chosen metaphors [to discuss science] they are very violent and hypermasculine,’ he said.
‘The Emerging White Supremacist Tenants [in physics] of individualism and exceptionalism and perfectionism… it’s an either/or thought and there’s no subtlety, no gray area. All of this comes out in the way we think about our research and what counts as good research, what counts as important research,” he said.
Gosnell is an assistant professor of physics at Colorado College, where she conducts research on stars and teaches
Gosnell has published dozens of papers as an astrophysicist in the past decade, including an issue looking at blue straggling star systems (first page of one shown)
Gosnell was involved in a creative project, The Gift, which was an experimental play that anthropomorphized straggling blue star systems.
Gosnell has published dozens of papers as an astrophysicist in the last decade and was awarded the Cottrell Scholar Award in 2021 for a combination of her research and teaching approaches.
He received his MS and PhD in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was offered a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin.
His work on the exclusive and exclusive world of physics has been published in the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society.
More recently, he was involved in a creative project, The Gift, which was an experimental play that anthropomorphized blue stragglers and made comparisons between life spans and star-human interactions.
The artwork is lived in a room and involves sound and video to narrate the death of a star. The installation opened at the New York Public Library on December 6, but will move to Colorado College sometime in 2023.