DOES "BRAIDING" SIGNIFY AN IMPLICIT BIAS?

It might be sound empiricism to incorporate folkloric traditions into studying environmental phenomena.  You know, plant tomatoes when oak leaf is size of squirrel's ear.  And yet, when today's Enlightened Thought Leaders make it a Holy Cause, it's unlikely to turn out well.

I am not a fan of the academic fad of identifying "alternative ways of knowing."  There is experience, and experience is a powerful tool.  "It's possible that those 'western, educated, individualistic, rich, democratic' values are evolutionarily stable in ways that those 'alternative ways of knowing' are not."

Now, though, comes a report that the academic fad has made its way into public policy.  "The White House urges federal agencies to consider tribal religion alongside scientific studies."

That sort of faddish thinking has now infected the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Co-production is a methodology that leverages the expertise of practitioners and community members to develop holistic solutions to multifaceted problems at the intersection of society and the environment. By fostering collaboration and integrating diverse perspectives, co-production enables a deeper understanding of causes and potential remedies of environmental stressors. However, despite its potential benefits, the full extent of its key considerations and best practices for its implementation across various projects and programs remains to be fully comprehended. Additionally, challenges arise in incorporating the unique insights and perspectives of local and Indigenous communities for decision-making and adapting proven practices to various contexts.

I think that translates as "Everybody has observations, but sorting the useful from the distracting is hard."  Naturally, that sorting requires a junket.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will convene an ad hoc committee to conduct a study on co-production approaches to knowledge-building and decision-making in environmental change contexts to optimize societal benefits. The study will make findings and recommendations based on information gathered about the challenges, needs, and opportunities associated with co-production of environmental knowledge between scientists and local and Indigenous experts, especially at local and regional scales where fine-grained peer-reviewed scientific knowledge may be absent or limited.

To gather evidence, approximately three workshops will be held in communities of place or practice, where co-production of knowledge approaches have been employed to assess the principles, methods, and practices that have evolved in diverse social-environmental contexts. The workshops will focus on both policy and practice considerations, as well as cross-cultural and cross-community engagement strategies to support co-production throughout the research process. Understanding the nature and sociocultural dimensions of bridging and integrating Indigenous and local knowledge systems with professional scientific ones will be a centerpiece of the workshops.

If that's not pretentious enough, the committee stenographer's title has been upgraded to "rapporteur."

Now, the junketeering has become another battleground in the Culture Wars.

Jerry Coyne, emeritus evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, voiced concerns about the project and similar efforts at other institutions in a recent phone interview with The College Fix.

The National Academies committee was “particularly distressing for us for two reasons,” Coyne said in a recent phone interview. “First of all, the attempt to put indigenous knowledge on par with modern science is distressing. But it also leads to a lot of misguided statements and political clashes that don’t have to exist.”

Yes, it isn't enough to have presentism ruining history, now you might have presentism ruining the earth sciences.  "It's probably asking for trouble to suggest that 'Indigenous ontologies' might have left practitioners thereof in a bad place to respond to 'settler colonialism' fortified by more robust ontologies."  Professor Coyne isn't afraid to ask for trouble.

Professor Coyne told The Fix the academy project is representative of a broader issue with oppressor-oppressed narratives in academia.

“There’s a certain group of academics inspired by post-modernism who see the whole world as jousting for power between different groups,” he said.

“And that’s turned into a sort of DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] philosophy, which is that groups should be arrayed in a hierarchy according to how oppressed they are, with the most oppressed on top, and that those people should be deferred to most,” he said.

“It also goes along with intersectionality, the view that different groups can have different kinds of oppression and that those people are even more oppressed,” Coyne said. “So this is the dominant theme in a lot of academia today, … [and] it is starting to affect the hard sciences.”

That is, at the gatherings, one of which was apparently scheduled to be at a Chippewa Nation casino in Michigan, it matters more whether it's the shaman or the settler who observed the size of the squirrel's ear than whether a maple tree might have been more useful to observe.

Perhaps we should all be relieved that the junkets were suspended last April, “due to concerns about the study’s approach.”

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