OPINION: Professor makes good points, but message gets muddled through use of ideological language
Cartographers who mapped nuclear testing did not take into account “women’s art and activism,” according to a Colgate University professor who studies “feminist geographies of resistance.”
Professor Emily Mitchell-Eaton presented on the topic earlier this month according to The Colgate-Maroon News.
“One of the things I noticed in these mapping projects was a troubling trend in nuclear-affected communities […] that a lot of these women, especially women’s art and activism, were completely absent from a lot of these mapping projects,” Mitchell-Eaton said at the New York university, according to the student newspaper. “They sort of vanished from the story that these maps were telling.”
Mitchell-Eaton made a good point, pointing out “nuclear testing” is a euphemism. “‘Testing’ tends to have a kind of a benign or banal association versus atomic bombing, right? But these tests were real, experienced as warfare by many of the people of the communities that lived through them,” she said during her presentation.
But instead of using an understandable ethical approach to nuclear testing and bombs, the professor applied esoteric academic terms to the issue, which possibly obscures her insights.
“Feminist geographic analyses of maps tend to look at things like positionality, identity, the social and lived meanings of place and relationality between place, emotions and so-called everyday experiences and stories,” Mitchell-Eaton said. “What I found was that many of these dimensions were actually missing from these maps, so I thought a feminist critique was sort of well-poised to help us understand these maps.”
One student attendee illustrated the problem with applying niche academic topics and terms to a subject that is otherwise worthy of discussion. “I was particularly drawn to Professor Mitchell Eaton’s commitment to a feminist methodology when considering nuclear overlay maps and artistic counter-cartographies because it spoke to the transdisciplinary applicability of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies praxis,” student Natalie Yale said.
Perhaps because the gender studies department presented the talk the professor used more academic jargon. There is a simpler way to discuss these issues, which Mitchell-Eaton showed.
“Maps are always subjective,” she said. “They’re always telling a certain story — so what are the kinds of stories that we want our maps to tell?”
This is a much easier to understand point.
Maps are going to reflect the viewpoints/biases of the people who make them.
And while concerns about nuclear testing and war in general might have once been seen as a liberal issue, there probably is more interest among center-right individuals in the ethics of war.
After all, President Donald Trump ran for office as the candidate of peace. Catholic Answers’ apologist Trent Horn also has criticized the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
There are areas of agreement between liberal professors and conservatives, but they are being lost through the use of academic jargon.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Professor Emily Mitchell-Eaton; Emily Mitchell-Eaton/LinkedIn