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Who Gets to Decide the Difference Between Science and Pseudoscience?
Author Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, PhD, argues that it’s time to decolonize science
We often see science as the pinnacle of objectivity — a disinterested, mechanical practice built on empirical observation and above more subjective ways of understanding our world and what lies beyond it.
Too often, we forget the social and cultural questions embedded in the history of science: Who gets to define science? What social issues get consumed by or pushed out the realm of science? How has science been used in ways that were both helpful and harmful? How has science intersected with issues of race, gender, class, and colonialism?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, PhD, tackles these questions in The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, her upcoming book on physics and the historical, political, and social dynamics that inform it. A theoretical physicist and assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire, Prescod-Weinstein has been an influential voice in fighting racism, sexism, anti-Indigenous sentiments, and other dehumanizing systems within science.
“In American society, for example, science is often treated as if it is…
