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in both popular and professional dog worlds what is at stake is twofold:

1) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as culture in Western discourse and its cousins.

2) the correlated issue of who and what counts as an actor

These things matter for political, ethical, and emotional action in technoculture

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“However, within a few years medical ethics no longer saw decisive doctors as interesting but as paternalistic. Thus, there was a massive shift in medical ethics to arguing in favour of patient autonomy and the right of patients to make their own decisions. It evaluated care practices as either respectful (good) or undermining (bad) of patient autonomy.” (Mol, Moser & Pols, p.12)

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1. Where are you working at this moment?
I am a University Professor at New York University, teaching in the School of Law, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. (Carol Gilligan on Wikipedia)

2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to the ethics of care?
My research on identity and moral development led me to identify the ethics of care as a "different voice"-a voice that joined self with relationship and reason with emotion. By transcending these binaries it shifted the paradigm of psychological and moral theory. The ethics of care starts from the premise that as humans we are inherently relational, responsive beings and the human condition is one of connectedness or interdependence.

3. How did you get involved into the ethics of care?
I came to write about an ethics of care after listening to the ways in which people speak about experiences of moral conflict and choice that they face. My research focused on actual rather than hypothetical situations of moral conflict and choice and explored how people construct moral conflicts and choices, what they see as the moral problem or question, and how moral language comes into play in shaping the choices they consider and the actions they take. I was impelled to write about an ethics of care by the disparities I heard between the voice of moral theories and the voices of people on the ground.

4. How would you define ethics of care?
As an ethic grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully (in their own right and on their own terms) and heard with respect. An ethics of care directs our attention to the need for responsiveness in relationships (paying attention, listening, responding) and to the costs of losing connection with oneself or with others. Its logic is inductive, contextual, psychological, rather than deductive or mathematical.

5. What is the most important thing you learned from the ethics of care?
That morality is grounded in a psychological logic, reflecting the ways in which we experience ourselves in relation to others and that the origins of morality lie in human relationships as they give rise to concerns about injustice and carelessness. Studying development, I realized that concerns about oppression and concerns about abandonment are built into the human life cycle, given the differential power between children and adults and the fact that care is essential for human survival. An ethics of care speaks to these concerns.

6. Whom do you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?
The people who participated in my research along with great artists-playwrights, novelists and poets-who have enhanced our understanding of the human condition across cultures and time. In developing my thinking about the ethics of care, I also learned from the writings of moral philosophers, including Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Suzanne Langer, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell and David Hume.

7. What works in the ethics of care do you see as the most important?
Currently, the writings of Michael Slote, and the work being done in Paris by the moral philosopher Sandra Laugier and the sociologist, Patricia Paperman.

8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?
Joining the Resistance (2011), especially the first and last chapters, and also In a Different Voice (1982) and The Birth of Pleasure (2002).

For the alignment of care ethics with democracy and with resistance to patriarchy, I would also recommend my 2009 book with David A. J. Richards (my NYU colleagues and a constitutional law scholar and moral philosopher): The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future (Cambridge University Press).

9. What are important issues for the ethics of care in the future?
To address the question of why the ethics of care is still embattled (especially in the U.S.) but also now in Europe), to consider the ethics of care in light of new evidence in the human sciences that as humans we are by nature empathic and responsive beings, hard-wired for cooperation. Rather than asking how do we gain the capacity to care, the questions become how do we come not to care; how do we lose the capacity for empathy and mutual understanding? It is also crucial to clarify that within a patriarchal framework, the ethics of care is a "feminine" ethic, whereas within a democratic framework it is a human ethic, grounded in core democratic values: the importance of everyone having a voice and being listened to carefully and heard with respect. The premise of equal voice then allows conflicts to be addressed in relationships. Different voices then become integral to the vitality of a democratic society.

A feminist ethic of care is an ethic of resistance to the injustices inherent in patriarchy (the association of care and caring with women rather than with humans, the feminization of care work, the rendering of care as subsidiary to justice-a matter of special obligations or interpersonal relationships). A feminist ethic of care guides the historic struggle to free democracy from patriarchy; it is the ethic of a democratic society, it transcends the gender binaries and hierarchies that structure patriarchal institutions and cultures. An ethics of care is key to human survival and also to the realization of a global society.

10. In Tilburg our ambition is to promote ethics of care nationally and internationally. Do you have any recommendations or wishes?
Only that your efforts may flourish.

About the author: Webteam

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Interview on June 21st, 2011 1. Where are you working at this moment? I am a University Professor at New York University, teaching in the School of Law, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. (Carol Gilligan on Wikipedia) 2.

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A Marxist approach to human-nature interdependence (read up to "an old Marxist chestnut: the humanization of nature")

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A Marxist approach to human-nature interdependence (read up to "an old Marxist chestnut: the humanization of nature")

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Commentators like to point to Wuhan's "wet markets" as the source of the pandemic, but COVID-19 is the result of a much larger, global phenomenon of environmental degradation. Combatting both means putting the politics of food production and land use at the very heart of our socialist project.

In the eighteenth century, Edward Jenner, the inventor of the first vaccine, confronted a crisis similar to what we face today - a world undone by disease. It wasn't coronavirus that he was studying, but smallpox, an illness with a mortality rate ranging between 20 and 60 percent in the Old World, and higher yet in the New.

An astute observer and accomplished ornithologist, Jenner understood that epidemics are not timeless, unavoidable crises, but rather arise from civilization's increasing entanglement with nature. It is due to their origins as animal illnesses that pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 are called "zoonoses." "The deviation of Man from the state in which he was originally placed by Nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of Diseases," began Jenner in the 1798 treatise on his vaccination experiments. "He has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates."

Jenner's recognition of the close links between public health and broader environmental crisis is by no means shared by many commentators today. While the Right resorts to xenophobic tactics like scapegoating Chinese wet markets, the Left tends to emphasize the bungling of government responses, the need for Medicare for All, or perhaps the rare critique of factory farming. Too often, however, these debates assume that zoonoses are unavoidable events, the causes of which needn't concern us.

While there are indeed urgent problems that need addressing now, broader understanding of where SARS-CoV-2 has come from is also required. To understand it, we need to address the environmental crisis as a whole, because every facet of it - from extinction to climate change - has the potential to produce more diseases. Despite faddish use of concepts like the "Anthropocene," the Left's engagement with the natural sciences remains limited. This disjuncture is especially jarring considering the close ties between scientists and socialists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. If one were to follow scientific developments now, it soon would become clear that the deteriorating condition of the biosphere necessitates an entirely new form of socialism where the politics of food and energy are not marginal, but rather lie at its heart.

Epidemiologists divide the history of infectious disease into three great epochs. The first begins ten thousand years ago with the start of neolithic agriculture. Domesticated herds kept in close contact with humans created conditions for new diseases to jump between species with a frequency impossible in hunter-gatherer societies. The second is the brief modern era of rapid scientific progress spanning from the 1850s to the 1970s. The epidemiologist Rudolf Virchow, working in the scientific tradition begun by Jenner, coined the term "zoonosis" and argued that human and veterinary health should be studied together as one medicine or, as it is called today, " planetary medicine" and " one health." Medical advances in the twentieth century led to new vaccines and miraculous antibiotics, which saved millions of lives. But modernity didn't last. The third zoonotic era began in the 1980s, the dark age in which we currently languish, marked by the unprecedented emergence of new disease.

It is not mere coincidence that this latest period coincides with the forces that define postmodernity: globalized commodity chains, the ascendancy of neoliberalism, exhaustion of metropolitan natural resources, the rise of monopolistic multinational firms, deindustrialization in the Global North, and the rapid but uneven development in the South.

Trade in exotic animals - whether in Wuhan or West Africa - cannot be understood in isolation from these trends. S ARS-CoV-2 could have originally been a bat or pangolin disease that crossed over to an intermediary animal, where it recombined and became infectious to humans. The exotic animal trade is central, because it puts not only humans in close contact with wild animals, but also varied species that would never keep company in nature. How did this happen, given that China had been famous for its millenia-old sustainable farming practices until as recently as the 1970s? Everything began to shift in the 1990s, when the country adopted an industrial meat-centric food system. Small farmers couldn't compete with factory farms, so the government has encouraged them to enter the wild animal trade, even though this has led to outbreaks like SARS in 2003, a coronavirus that jumped from bats to civets to humans.

Similar stories unfold all over the world, where poor people are forced into desperate circumstances by market forces and state policy, leading to the rapid destabilization of local ecological systems. When European trawlers invaded the fishing grounds off the coast of West Africa, locals turned to "bushmeat" for cheap protein. Such transnational and unequal food systems have contributed not only to mass extinction, with vertebrate species disappearing more than a thousand times faster than normal, but also new zoonoses like Ebola and HIV. Roads built to expand the reach of mining, oil, and timber firms have allowed hunters to reach previously inaccessible forested regions, putting humans into close contact with wildlife. In the Congo Basin alone, more than half a billion animals are caught every year, often to feed miners. Of course, the trade in wild animals includes the Global North, too. "Ecotourists," when they travel, have given primates measles, polio, and tuberculosis. Zookeepers and lab workers are disproportionately likely to carry simian foamy virus. The exotic pet trade likely gave the West Nile virus passage into North America, where it has devastated indigenous bird species and killed more than 2,300 people.

A narrow critique of the exotic animal trade ignores how it is tied up with the fate of the world's peasantry, a class that has been ravaged by industrial agriculture. Even a cursory glance at the economics of bushmeat shows that we cannot protect wildlife without getting rid of factory farms, too, which means no more cheap meat.

Perhaps the most important insight socialists can glean from planetary health is that the challenge of new zoonoses is inseparable from the broader environmental crisis. That is to say, there is a single, unified environmental crisis. It is a failure of the imagination to artificially divvy it up into discrete problems like climate change, urban sprawl, mass extinction, fertilizer runoff, noncommunicable diseases, and epidemics.

The science behind each of these phenomena is complicated, but the overall message is simple: the less room humanity leaves to nature, the more environmental problems - including new, deadly zoonoses - there will be. Making reference to the "Anthropocene" is one way to encapsulate the scale of the problem, but it is too descriptive when we need analytical concepts to understand why we have entered a new geological era. Here is one area where the Left can usefully intervene, providing scientists and broader society with the concepts able to frame the unitary environmental crisis. Rather than talking about the "Anthropocene," we can dust off an old Marxist chestnut: the humanization of nature.

The "humanization of nature" is an idea originating with Hegel, who considered humanity's alienation from nature the crux of world history. Labor was understood to be the process that reconciled the two, instilling nature with human consciousness. Rather than taking our food directly from nature, as animals do, humans use tools to guide natural flows to produce crops and livestock (admittedly a gross simplification). We might extend Hegel's logic to say that much of the humanization of nature, then, is the history of "land-use change," as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change might say.

Karl Marx made use of Hegel's concept, recognizing the process as an expression of human nature (i.e., our "species-being"). Unlike Hegel, however, Marx sensed that the humanization of nature had become distorted under capitalism because of the divorce between the unconsciousness of capital and human consciousness. For Marx, capital sought only to expand itself. The capitalist individual was "capital personified"; though "endowed with consciousness and a will," he argued, her freedom was limited, bent to achieve the sole goal of capital accumulation. We see this today: the CEO of a company may be a nature lover, but she cannot invest in expensive, environmentally friendly technology without her firm being crushed if she fails to make the going rate of profit. The concept of the humanization of nature, adapted by Marx, explains why society can be aware that it is nearing the precipice but remains unable to change course, why planned fossil-fuel extraction dramatically exceeds Paris Agreement limits. Politicians might say one thing, and even write it up in a treaty, but "leaving it in the ground" is unconscionable within our current economic system.

As a concept, the "humanization of nature" is useful - more so than the "Anthropocene" - because it highlights that capitalism is fundamentally a project of reorganizing nature that is distinct from other historical periods, and that it will ultimately lead to catastrophe because capital is an insensate force, unaware that it is destroying the biosphere. In the face of such a process, then, we need conscious control over the economy at the same time as we give nature the space it needs to function.

As socialists, we not only need to resist the capitalization of nature wherever possible, be it the burning of the Amazon rainforest by cattle ranchers or laying new pipelines in Canada to ship nonconventional oil. We should also be wary of a socialist humanization of nature: the will to dominate nature for left-wing ends. The fantasy of Promethean control retains a strong hold on the Left, especially among the adherents of "fully automated luxury communism" ( Aaron Bastani, who supports lab meat and rewilding, is a partial exception within this current).

Socialists too rarely apply their vaunted skills of critique and scientific nous at the dinner table. To be sure, Marx was not an environmentalist, and therefore we are forced to sometimes think against him to imagine what socialism could be. Marx may have been right that history began with the birth of farming, but he overlooked the appearance of its twin - the epidemic.

Scientists think that a majority, perhaps all, of human pathogens are ultimately zoonoses, originating not at the dawn of the human species but in the relatively recent past. Measles likely evolved from the bovine disease rinderpest 7,000 years ago. Influenza may have started about 4,500 years ago with the domestication of waterfowl. Jenner's own specialty, smallpox, probably originated 4,000 years ago in eastern Africa when a gerbil virus jumped to the newly domesticated camel and then to humans. In the New World, agriculture was widely practiced, but few animals were domesticated, which is why indigenous peoples lived relatively free of disease. With colonization, however, animal husbandry gave European invaders an epidemiological edge, and indigenous people were rapidly exposed to measles, typhus, tuberculosis, and smallpox. The population of the New World numbered between 50 and 100 million people in 1492, but fell by 90 percent over the following centuries, in large part because of Old World zoonoses.

For a while, it seemed that new drugs would eventually contain pathogens just as the welfare state had tamed capitalism. In 1972, the authors of a textbook on infectious disease believed that "the most likely forecast about the future of infectious disease is that it will be very dull." In 1975, the dean of Yale's medical school predicted that there were "no new diseases to be discovered."

It was only a year later that the Ebola virus was identified. Shortly thereafter, the editor of the first authoritative compendium on the new zoonosis warned, "The larger the scale of man-made environmental changes, the greater must be the probability of emergence of a zoonosis, old or new." HIV made the problem even more urgent. By the 1990s, the field of "emerging infectious diseases" transitioned from being a "mere curiosity" to an extensive discipline. After the 2005 H5N1 avian flu scare, the US government started the PREDICT program, which detected nearly a thousand new viruses in a decade, including novel strains of Ebola and coronavirus. The Trump administration shut down PREDICT last year.

Any facet of the humanization of nature will cause what scientists call " pathogen pollution," the spread of disease between different species of animals. Diseases like Lyme and West Nile proliferated because declining biodiversity resulted in the lopsided growth of some carrier species, like white-footed mice or robins. Deforestation and climate change expand the habitat of mosquitoes, so that dengue, Zika, malaria, and other illnesses have become more common. The current eruption of new diseases is a problem not only for humans, but for animals, too. New coral diseases are linked to algal blooms and climate change. Cats have given toxoplasmosis to spinner dolphins and belugas.

Industrialized animal husbandry has done the most to return us to the stone age of public health. Even Antarctic emperor penguins are not exempt from this epochal shift. They are now plagued by infectious bursal disease, an illness that emerged in the 1980s from the bowels of vast poultry factories on the US eastern seaboard. The livestock industry's expanse, some 4 billion hectares, encompasses 40 percent of the world's inhabitable surface, making it the greatest interface between humanity and nature, and thus the primary portal for new diseases.

Agriculture has changed qualitatively, too. Capital induces incredible pressures to increase efficiency of food production at the expense of health. Marx himself criticized Robert Bakewell, a famous capitalist eighteenth-century breeder, for reducing "the skeleton of sheep to the minimum required for their existence." Bakewell actually bred animals to have fewer bones so as to increase their bulky flesh. Unlike many of his epigones, Marx realized that one does not need a separate theory to analyze capitalism's environmental aspects, for capital's blind gaze saw no difference between animals and machines.

Present-day Bakewells manipulate animal genetics to encourage traits like more egg production or breast meat, even at the cost of weakened immune systems. Firms raise genetically similar animals - even clones - in overcrowded facilities vulnerable to outbreaks. Widespread use of antibiotics may help keep disease at bay (and quicken animals' growth rates), though at the cost of creating "superbugs" like MRSA, a flesh-eating bacteria that has become common in hospitals worldwide. Even common bacterial diseases like urinary tract infections are increasingly resistant to treatments that would have worked just a decade ago; each year, some 35,000 Americans die from antibiotic-resistant infections. It is estimated that 71 percent of pork chops sold at US supermarkets contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria; the rate for ground turkey is even higher, at 79 percent.

The Nipah virus, first identified in a Malyasian town in 1998, reveals how the various strands of the environmental crisis converge to create epidemics. To increase profits, farmers had placed mango orchards next to pig herds so that manure could be easily applied to the trees. Slash-and-burn deforestation had forced fruit bats from their natural habitat, leading them to take up residence in newly planted trees, where they could pass on the disease to pig herds, and then to people. Bats, too, have become more vulnerable to virulent disease; as their populations fragment, they have only sporadic exposure to the disease pool. What had once been a harmless virus in bats caused severe neurological problems in pigs and humans. The virus killed approximately a third of its victims in Malaysia, but seven-tenths during a later outbreak in South Asia. Its spread was only arrested after strict quarantine and the slaughter of a million pigs; it was no coincidence that the outbreak began at the country's largest hog operation.

Epidemiologists working in the planetary health tradition are clear about what needs to be done. An emerging body of research suggests that land-use change is the "most significant driver of wildlife, domestic animal, and human EIDs [emerging infectious disease]." More specifically, the "increasing demand for meat and meat products by human population has made human contact with animals unprecedented." Part of the solution must be to " conserve areas rich in wildlife diversity by reducing anthropogenic activity."

The American Public Health Association calls for a moratorium on factory farming. In the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak, the association's journal published an editorial advocating for a change to "the way humans treat animals - most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten" as a basic measure of public health. "Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic."

Right now, the world is relatively fortunate, as life-sustaining food supply chains have so far remained intact. But there is no guarantee that natural disasters will politely space themselves out one after the other, especially in an age of climate change. Imagine the simultaneous emergence of a waterborne zoonotic illness during a major flood event in South Asia, all while the world's breadbasket regions suffer drought simultaneously. Disaster on this scale, which is becoming more likely with every molecule of CO ₂ that enters the atmosphere, with every microbe that jumps from animal to human, with every millimeter of sea level rise, would lead to extraordinary suffering.

To limit the impact of future pandemics, while also staving off mass extinction and mitigating climate change, we should fight to restructure our food systems and move away from meat production. The EAT-Lancet report, written by thirty-seven leading public health scholars and environmental scientists on behalf of a leading medical journal, argues for a dramatic increase in consumption of vegetables, fruit, healthy grains, and plant protein, and drastic reductions in meat and dairy.

Those cuts would occur overwhelmingly among the rich in the carnivorous developed world, as they eat two or three times more meat than the average in poor countries. Eventually, though, our political horizon should imagine plant-based diets for nearly everyone. It is unsustainable diets that are driving deforestation to make room for more pasture in some of the most biodiverse places on Earth, like the Amazon rainforest. If most societies were able to adopt the Eat-Lancet diet, an estimated 11 million deaths per year could be prevented. Malnutrition would be averted, while minimizing major noncommunicable diseases like diabetes or heart disease. Giving up meat and rewilding vast swaths of the earth - perhaps even half, as the controversial conservationist E. O. Wilson suggests - must be part of the socialist agenda.

Relying on vaccines, antibiotics, and antivirals to deal with future epidemics is like counting on carbon capture or geoengineering to save our carbon-based society from climate change. PREDICT was never going to catch every new outbreak, even if it hadn't been sabotaged by the current administration. Capitalism cannot fix problems it creates; Big Pharma underinvests in vaccines and antivirals because the juicy profits are in the diseases of affluence like diabetes and erectile dysfunction. Yet what's more worrying is that results can prove elusive even in well-funded fields. The HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has killed 32 million people, shows that not all diseases can be solved with a vaccine. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, the World Health Organization debriefed that "while modern science had its modern role, none of the most modern technical tools had an important role in controlling SARS . . . most important in controlling SARS were the 19th-century public health strategies of contact tracing, quarantine, and isolation." As socialists, we should think structurally and be skeptical of band-aid, technical "solutions" - especially because the efficacy of modern medicine seems to be waning - and instead go directly to the root of the problem.

It should be manifest that the humanization of nature has not led to the reconciliation of humanity and nature, but rather the ruin of both. We must become conscious of the limits of human consciousness - that our well-being is tethered to complex natural systems that we will never fully understand. Instead of the unconsciousness of the market directing nature and society, the Left must strive to consciously manage human affairs, but humbly leave much of nature self-willed. This is not because of some woo-woo mysticism, but a hard-nosed analysis of how we got into this mess.

A new socialism built at a geological scale will help scientists achieve what they cannot on their own. To do so, we need to see how the same toxic economic forces are at the heart of both pandemics and climate change. Socialists cannot put the world back together until they first understand how it came undone. Such understanding arises not only from engagement with science but from reflexive critique, too. As Jenner might have remarked, the Left's "love of splendour" and "the indulgences of luxury" - be it meat, leather, pets, or animal-tested products - have prevented it from seeing its complicity in the dangerous ruination of nature.

This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

End Mark

Drew Pendergrass is a doctoral student in environmental engineering at Harvard University and the coauthor of Half-Earth Socialism, to be published by Verso in the spring of 2021.

Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a William Lyon Mackenzie King postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the coauthor of Half-Earth Socialism, to be published by Verso in the spring of 2021.

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The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable

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Commentators like to point to Wuhan's "wet markets" as the source of the pandemic, but COVID-19 is the result of a much larger, global phenomenon of environmental degradation. Combatting both means putting the politics of food production and land use at the very heart of our socialist project.

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“Care had to do with warmth and love while technology, by contrast, was cold and rational. Care was nourishing, technology was instrumental.”

“Care (and caring relations) at home, technology (and instrumental relations) in the workplace.” (Mol, Moser and Pols pg.14)

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Please read up to the section "development of new methods"

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A feminist science studies perspective (read p. 23-26)

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A feminist science studies perspective (read p. 23-26)

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The First Birth Control Pill Used Puerto Rican Women as Guinea Pigs - HISTORY

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54 years of the Pill (on the NHS), and how Birmingham women got it first _ Science _ The Guardian

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This post ran in the Los Angeles Times on 18 October 2018.

When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize this month, she became only the third woman in history to receive the award in physics. An optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, Strickland is brilliant, accomplished and inspiring. To use Wikipedia parlance, she is very clearly notable.

Except that, somehow, she wasn't. Despite her groundbreaking research on a method of generating laser beams with ultrashort pulses, Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page until shortly after her Nobel win.

Perhaps more disconcerting, a volunteer Wikipedia editor had drafted a page about Strickland in March only to have it declined in May. The reason: There wasn't enough coverage of Strickland's work in independent secondary sources to establish her notability. Her achievements simply weren't documented in enough news articles that Wikipedia editors could cite.

Before Wikipedia points a finger that might rightly be pointed back at us, let me acknowledge that Wikipedia's shortcomings are absolutely real. Our contributors are majority Western and mostly male, and these gatekeepers apply their own judgment and prejudices. As a result, Wikipedia has dozens of articles about battleships and not nearly enough on poetry. We've got comprehensive coverage on college football but significantly less on African marathoners.

At the same time, Wikipedia is by design a living, breathing thing-a collection of knowledge that many sources, in aggregate, say is worth knowing. It is therefore a reflection of the world's biases more than it is a cause of them.

We are working to correct biases in Wikipedia's coverage. For instance, in 2014, Wikipedia editors evaluated all the biographies on English Wikipedia and found that only about 15% of them were about women. To rectify the imbalance, groups of volunteers, including the WikiProject Women Scientists and WikiProject Women in Red, have been identifying women who should have pages and creating articles about them.

Today, 17.82% of our biographies are about women. This near 3% jump may not sound like much, but it represents 86,182 new articles. That works out to 72 new articles a day, every single day, for the past three and a half years.

But signs of bias pop up in different ways. A 2015 study found that, on English Wikipedia, the word "divorced" appears more than four times as often in biographies of women than in biographies of men. We don't fully know why, but it's likely a multitude of factors, including the widespread tendency throughout history to describe the lives of women through their relationships with men.

Technology can help identify such problems. Wikipedia articles about health get close attention from our community of medical editors, but for years, some articles on critical women's health issues, such as breastfeeding, languished under a "low importance" categorization. An algorithm identified this mistake.

But there is only so much Wikipedia itself can do. To fix Wikipedia's gender imbalance, we need our contributors and editors to pay more attention to the accomplishments of women. This is true across all under-represented groups: people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, indigenous communities.

Although we don't believe that only women editors should write pages about other women, or writers of color about people of color, we do think that a broader base of contributors and editors-one that included more women and people of color, among others-would naturally help broaden our content.

Wikipedia is founded on the concept that every individual should be able to share freely in the sum of all knowledge. We believe in "knowledge equity," which we define as as the idea that diverse forms of knowledge should be recognized and respected. Wikipedia is not limited to what fits into a set of encyclopedias.

We also need other fields to identify and document diverse talent. If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don't recognize the work of women, Wikipedia's editors have little foundation on which to build.

Increasingly, Wikipedia's content and any biases therein have ramifications well beyond our own website. For instance, Wikipedia is now relied upon as a major source in the training of powerful artificial intelligence models, including models that underlie common technologies we all use.

In such training processes, computers ingest large data sets, draw inferences from patterns in the data and then generate predictions. As is well understood in the programming world, bad or incomplete data generate biased outcomes. This phenomenon is known by the acronym GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

People may intuitively understand that Wikipedia is a perennial work in progress. Computers, on the other hand, simply process the data they're given. If women account for only 17.82% of the data, we may find ourselves with software that thinks women are only 17.82% of what matters in the world.

It is true that Wikipedia has a problem if Donna Strickland, an accomplished physicist, is considered worthy of a page only when she receives the highest possible recognition in her field. But this problem reflects a far more consequential and intractable problem in the real world.

Wikipedia would like to encourage other knowledge-generating institutions to join us in our efforts to balance this inequity. We may not be able to change how society values women, but we can change how women are seen, and ensure that they are seen to begin with. That's a start.

Katherine Maher, Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
Image adaptation by Eryk Salvaggio/Wiki Education Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0; underlying photo by Darapti, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Wikipedia is a mirror of the world's gender biases

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This post ran in the Los Angeles Times on 18 October 2018 . When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize this month, she became only the third woman in history to receive the award in physics. An optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, Strickland is brilliant, accomplished and inspiring.

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Ksenia Coffman's fellow editors have called her a vandal and a McCarthyist. She just wants them to stop glorifying fascists-and start citing better sources.

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

When Ksenia Coffman started editing Wikipedia, she was like a tourist in Buenos Aires in the 1950s. She came to learn the tango, admire the architecture, sip maté. She didn't know there was a Nazi problem. But Coffman, who was born in Soviet-era Russia and lives in Silicon Valley, is an intensely observant traveler. As she link-hopped through articles about the Second World War, one of her favorite subjects, she saw what seemed like a concerted effort to look the other way about Germany's wartime atrocities.

Coffman can't recall exactly when her concern set in. Maybe it was when she read the article about the SS, the Nazi Party's paramilitary, which included images that felt to her like glamour shots-action-man officers admiring maps, going on parade, all sorts of "very visually disturbing" stuff. Or maybe it was when she clicked through some of the pages about German tank gunners, flying aces, and medal winners. There were hundreds of them, and the men's impressive kill counts and youthful derring-do always seemed to exist outside the genocidal Nazi cause. What was going on here? Wikipedia was supposed to be all about consensus. Wasn't there consensus on, you know, Hitler?

A typical person might have thought, Something is wrong on the internet again. What a bummer. Next tab. But Coffman is the person who finishes the thousand-page Holocaust novel. Whatever she chooses to spend her time on-powerlifting, fragrance collecting, denazification-she approaches the assignment like a straight-A student. You can time-travel back and watch her begin. Wikipedia never forgets; it keeps a permanent public record of every change an editor makes.

In early November 2015, you will find K.e.coffman in "20 July plot," an article about the failed plan by German officers to assassinate Hitler. A sentence has jumped out at her. It says that some of the conspirators came to see the plot as "a grand, if futile gesture" that would save "the honour of themselves, their families, the army and Germany." The claim isn't supported by any sources. It's conjecture, hearsay. And to her it seems strangely flattering.

Coffman navigates over to the Wikipedia article about one of the conspirators-Arthur Nebe, a high-ranking member of the SS. Apart from his role in the plot, Nebe's main claim to notability is that he came up with the idea of turning vans into mobile gas chambers by piping in exhaust fumes. The article acknowledges both of these facts, along with the detail that Nebe tested his system on the mentally ill. But it also says that he worked to "reduce the atrocities committed," going so far as to give his bloodthirsty superiors inflated death totals.

Coffman will recall that she feels "totally disoriented." She cannot believe that an innovator in mass murder would have tried to protect the Jews and other supposed subhumans his troops rounded up. She checks the footnotes. The claim is attributed to War of Extermination, a compendium of academic essays originally published in 1995.

Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article's wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: "This is, of course, nonsense."

The level of bad faith is eye-opening for Coffman. She is "very appalled." She sees that her confidence in Wikipedia was "very much misplaced." All it takes to warp historical memory, she realizes, is something this small, achievable for almost anyone with a keyboard. "So few people can have so much impact, it's a little scary," she says. She begins to turn a more critical eye to what she sees on Wikipedia. Especially the footnotes.

In a long spree of edits, Coffman cleans up the two articles. She goes to the Talk page for "20 July plot," where editors debate changes to the main article. She copy-pastes the language about the grand, futile gesture. "I would like to remove this part," she writes. "Thoughts? Objections?" Another editor voices support. With a click, the paragraph is gone.

In the Nebe article, Coffman adds a "[citation needed]" tag to the flagrantly false claim. She identifies two more dubious sources-one misleadingly quoted, one potentially invented. She checks out a book called The SS: Alibi of a Nation to make sure. Over and over again, she reworks Nebe's legacy: At first, it's that some historians "have a much harsher view" of him than others. Then it's that they "have a less generous view." Then it's "Historians have a negative view of Nebe and his motivations, despite his participation in the 20 July plot." Coffman is beginning to understand that history is an edit war. Truth, factual and moral, hangs in the balance.

Similar battles over how to remember the past have been raging across society. Do we let the old bronze statues stand in our boulevards, or do we put them in a museum someplace, or do we melt them down? Can there be a "hero" who fought for a morally rotten cause? Are qualities like valor and self-sacrifice and tactical brilliance worth admiring anywhere they occur, even if, say, racial supremacism is there too? Some choose to take to the streets. Coffman fights on the terrain most familiar to her, with the weapons she knows best. Not that she would put it that way; she's not big on war metaphors.

Several weeks into her new obsession, Coffman realizes that she's supposed to fill out her User page-the Wikipedia equivalent of a profile, where editors broadcast opinions, grudges, achievements, pet peeves. One Saturday night she updates it for the first time. "I'm a new editor to Wikipedia," she writes. "I enjoy contributing and engaging with other editors."

An hour later, past midnight, she adds: "My editing style tends to be bold."

Coffman was raised by engineers in the waning days of the Soviet Union. She had what she describes as a "culturally privileged upbringing" in Moscow. She went to galleries, museums, the theater. In her neighborhood, she remembers fondly, there was a recycling kiosk that rewarded you with literature. "For this number of kilos of paper you could get these books," she says. "Classics: Pushkin, Tolstoy. Reading was encouraged."

She wasn't taught to romanticize the war. "The martial qualities of the veterans were never celebrated," Coffman says. "It wasn't about the glorious victories, fighters zooming down on enemy ships." Her grandfather, a soil scientist, served in the Red Army as a combat engineer and survived the assault on Leningrad. But in typical fashion, she says, she heard next to nothing about his experiences when she was kid. (For the first time, in response to questions for this article, Coffman asked her father what he knew. She reported back that at one point her grandfather had considered suicide. "The only thing that prevented him from doing this was the thought that he had to get back to his wife and kids," she wrote.)

At university, Coffman majored in computational linguistics, a field that combined her interests in language and science. She was a top student and won a scholarship for business school in the Bay Area. She arrived during the dotcom boom and never left. "When I moved to the US, I didn't have this idea of the shining beacon of democracy," she says. But at least she could feel safe. "I would walk down the street and the police officer wouldn't assault me or ask me for a bribe."

Coffman, who has broad shoulders under a bob of blond hair, thinks and talks deliberately. She lives in a compact townhouse in a planned community in San Jose, California. The museums and galleries are harder to get to now ("I have to drive to San Francisco, find parking"), but she keeps stimulated with books, hobbies, and books about her hobbies. When I visited her at home earlier this year, she walked me past the weight-lifting setup on the ground floor. (She read Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training for that one. She approves of the book because it's "like a science manual.") Upstairs, I recognized the tall, narrow bookshelf that appears behind her during Zoom calls. It contains dozens of titles that wouldn't look out of place in a history grad student's apartment- Hitler's Generals on Trial. Kiev: 1941. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying. A few others, like In the Company of Women, nod to a career in business.

The Second World War is where Coffman feels most comfortable, but in 2015, she says, she got interested in the US Civil War. That summer, a young white supremacist murdered nine congregants at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooting made her realize, she says, that "there was all this other America" that lay beyond her experience-a place deeply scarred by a past she barely understood.

So Coffman did what she always did: She read. And because she happened to be between jobs, she was free to immerse herself in history for long stretches. She learned about the Civil War, the conflict behind so much of the turmoil in the United States. She read about "lost cause" ideology, which claims the Confederacy actually fought to preserve high-minded Southern ideals, not specifically the institution of slavery. She brushed up on her knowledge of the Second World War, a struggle more familiar to her.

Maybe the lack of a job, of people to collaborate with, is also what made Wikipedia seem like an attractive pastime. That's what it was supposed to be: another hobby. At first, Coffman stuck to tentative, sporadic suggestions. But then she was making edits nearly every day; there was so much to fix. She liked the site's intricate bureaucracy-the guidelines on etiquette and reliable sourcing, the policies on dispute resolution and article deletion, the learned essays and discussion pages that editors cite like case law. "Wikipedia is very regimented," she says. "I am good with instructions."

"G'day," Peacemaker67 begins his note for K.e. coffman. It's late 2015, and he is concerned about recent changes to an article on Wikipedia ("WP" for short) about an SS tank division made up of Nordic Nazi volunteers. "Sorry but there appears to be some sort of misunderstanding about what should be deleted on WP, and I just want to clarify it before this gets too far down the track."

Coffman recognizes this editor's handle. He's Australian, and his User page says he served as a peacekeeper in the former Yugoslavia. He is the same person who invited her to join WikiProject Military History, a group where editors can chat, take classes, win plaudits, and work on articles together.

Not for the first time, Coffman has been removing material from the article about the tank division. She thinks it's full of unsourced fancruft, the Wikipedia word for fawning, excessively detailed descriptions that appeal to a tiny niche of readers-in this case, those thrilled by accounts of battle. The article tells how "the division acquitted itself well" even against "stiffening resistance," how it "held the line" and earned the "grudging respect" of skeptical commanders. One contributor has used the eyebrow-raising phrase "baptism of fire." It's as if the editors don't see the part lower down the page where a soldier uses the phrase "and then we cleaned a Jew hole."

The glorifying language, Coffman thinks, is a clear sign that this is historical fan fiction. It elides the horrors of war. If editors want such details to stay on the page, at a minimum they should use a better source than Axis History, a blog whose motto is "Information not shared is lost."

The interaction starts out politely enough. "IMHO it is good that you are deleting citations from unreliable bloggy sources," Peacemaker67 says. "But just because material is sourced to them doesn't mean it is wrong."

K.e.coffman replies in less than an hour. "Thank you for your note," she writes. "Yes, I was surprised about how little I was able to salvage as I was editing the article." She lists 17 bullet-pointed examples of biased language, Nazi glorification, and unreliable claims. "Would Wikipedia not be better without such content?" she asks.

"Well, people are on WP for different reasons," Peacemaker67 replies. "I don't go around deleting stuff because I think it might be dodgy." He cites a page that counsels gradualism in editing, because Wikipedia is a work in progress. "Articles have long histories, and there is no WP:DEADLINE," he says.

Coffman cites a different doctrine in response. "I'm of the view that there's indeed a deadline: Wikipedia:The deadline is now," she writes. "Why perpetuate misinformation when it can be removed, or give legitimacy to glorification while there are already plenty of sites that do that? I believe Wikipedia's standards to be higher."

Peacemaker67's final response, nine minutes later, is curt: "If you take this sort of action on articles on my watchlist, expect to be reverted and asked to provide reliable sources that contradict what is in the article."

Like other editors whom Coffman will encounter, Peacemaker67 sees something pernicious in her work. In a recent email, he told me that he considers Coffman's approach "most unencyclopaedic and a prime example of what Wikipedia is not (see WP:NOTCENSORED)." He went on: "Will we apply the same censorship to military history articles on units of the Khmer Rouge? Turkish military units involved in the Armenian Genocide? Rwandan military units involved in the genocide in that country? US cavalry units that massacred Native Americans? Arkan's Tigers? Where does that end?"

Coffman finds her next target in the footnotes of the article about the tank division. This one's name is Franz Kurowski, and he seems to pop up all over the place. Kurowski served in the Luftwaffe. After the war, he tried his hand at all sorts of popular writing, often with a pseudonym to match: Jason Meeker and Slade Cassidy for his crime fiction and westerns, Johanna Schulz and Gloria Mellina for his chick lit. But his accounts of the Second World War made him famous under his own name. Kurowski's stories weren't subtle. As the German historian Roman Töppel writes in a critical essay: "They depict war as a test of fate and partly as adventure. German war crimes are left out-much unlike allied war crimes."

To understand this dubious chronicler better, Coffman goes to Google, where she comes upon a book called The Myth of the Eastern Front. It describes how, in the immediate aftermath of the war, characters like Kurowski worked to rehabilitate the image of the German army-to argue that a few genocidal apples had spoiled the barrel. With a guy like Hitler to pin the blame on, the rest was easy. The so-called "myth of the clean Wehrmacht" took root on both sides of the Atlantic: German society needed to believe that not everyone who wore a gray uniform was evil, and the Americans were courting every anti-Communist ally they could find. Then, in the mid-1990s, a museum exhibit cataloging the crimes of the Nazi-era military traveled throughout Germany. An odd situation emerged: Germans began to speak more honestly about the Wehrmacht than non-Germans did.

When Coffman reads this, something clicks. She is dealing with a poisonous tree here. She shouldn't be throwing out individual pieces of fruit. She should be chopping it off at the trunk. She starts to pivot from history (the facts themselves) to historiography (the way they're gathered). She begins to use Wikipedia to document the false historical narrative, and its purveyors, and then make the fight about dubious sources rather than specific articles.

On Christmas Eve, she returns to Arthur Nebe's page and makes a one-word addition: "Historians have a uniformly negative view of Nebe and his motives."

In the spring of 2016, Coffman goes through hundreds of articles about the winners of various Nazi medals, including one called the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. She removes biased sources and any information based on those sources. When she is done, typically, there is nothing left to the article-nothing to say about the person-other than the fact that he won an award. She then insists that an award isn't reason enough for a stand-alone Wikipedia article. Without a reliable source telling your life story, you can't be notable. Poof. Another Nazi legend bites the dust.

A particularly revered medal winner, or a high-ranking one, might survive Coffman's purge. But the results aren't pretty. When she arrives at Kurt Knispel's page, it says that he was "one of the, if not the, greatest tank ace of all time." His photo shows a young gunner with shaggy blond hair and a goatee. He flashes a smile, unaware that he is doomed.

Unfortunately for Knispel, his reputation rests almost entirely on stories told by Kurowski, as well as an account in the Wehrmachtbericht, the Nazi propaganda broadcast. Coffman strips away the apocryphal stories of action and adventure, like the one that says Knispel was held back from promotions because he assaulted a superior. When she's done, the article is reduced to four paragraphs, three of which relate to his death, at age 23, when he was struck by a Soviet tank. Later, someone will leave a short, sad note on the article's Talk page: "There used to be a lot of information here about his military career, unconventional attitude to military discipline etc. ... Why has it been deleted?"

Coffman's edits have jumped from 1,400 a month to 5,000. She is entering her most prolific period. She has been filling her User page with study guides and research, but now her tone gets bolder, punchier. The names of the sections go from dry ("Waffen-SS revisionism") to cheerfully contemptuous ("High Moral Fiber Sub-department"). The page is becoming a sprawling tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of her obsession-and the parapet from which she taunts her adversaries.

"G'day," she reads in a note in the summer of 2016. It's Peacemaker67 again, back with one last warning. "I've noticed that you have been nominating articles on Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross recipients for deletion, after you have deleted significant amounts of text and possible sources from them," he writes. "That type of behaviour is deplorable, and not appropriate on en WP." (Coffman's detractors often imply that she doesn't fit in on "en WP," or English Wikipedia. They often assume that she is a visitor from German Wikipedia, "de WP," because of her insistence on holding the Wehrmacht to account.) "I suggest you stop," Peacemaker67 concludes. "Cheers."

They go back and forth again. Eventually, Coffman appeals to the broader Wikipedia community to decide who is right about the notability of these medal winners. "The issue appears to be complex, so I would appreciate further input," she writes. The debate hinges on certain policy wordings, along with the question of how to compare military awards from France, the US, Great Britain, and Germany. The WikiProject Military History members are well represented, but Coffman picks up crucial support. A user called MaxRavenclaw objects to the claim that purging Iron Cross winners is a form of "victor's justice": "You should know that history is written by the literate, not the victors. You can't expect anyone to take you seriously when you make such statements."

The fight rages across pages for months. In the fall, Peacemaker67 writes that he is "frankly sick to death" of K.e.coffman's "ongoing campaign." It is "detracting from the enjoyment of the volunteer editors who actually contribute to this encyclopaedia," he writes. A careful reader of his cri de coeur will note that he assumes Coffman to be a man ("Community norms rule on WP, not his personal views"). This is a common misimpression among the Military History gang. Coffman never tries to correct it.

After six months of debate, on January 22, 2017, Coffman is vindicated. An administrator leaves a note steeped in Wikipedia reasoning. "In the case of the Knight's Cross the community has established a consensus," it concludes. "Sufficient reliable sources are lacking for many recipients." In other words, there should be no presumption that winning a Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross makes you notable enough for a Wikipedia article. The only thing you're guaranteed is a one-line spot on a long list of winners.

Coffman keeps track of the accusations against her-"campaigning," "forum-shopping," "not dropping the stick."

After the case is settled, Coffman and her more vocal opponents retreat to separate corners. But one bitter-ender, LargelyRecyclable, appears to create a troll account and continues objecting to her changes. She finally takes the user to the Arbitration Committee, English Wikipedia's version of the Supreme Court.

The panel doesn't wade into the specifics, writing explicitly that "it is not the role of the Arbitration Committee to settle good-faith content disputes among editors." But what it does rule gives Coffman a feeling of support, she says. LargelyRecyclable is banned indefinitely from editing English Wikipedia. The ArbCom also notes that groups like WikiProject Military History "do not have any authority over article content or editor conduct, or any other special powers." They can accuse Coffman of whatever they like-vandalism, McCarthyism, "deletionist zeal." She has just as much right to edit history as they do.

And few can match her output: 97,000 edits, 3,200 pages created, countless debates argued and won. Today, K.e.coffman is a solid member of English Wikipedia's editorial elite-No. 734 out of 121,000, as of this writing. She keeps a watch list with about 2,000 articles on it. A notification pops up next to the listing whenever someone tries to make a change. That's the thing about edit wars: They never end.

But Coffman, of course, avoids martial language. Wikipedia isn't a battlefield; it's real estate. "You have to maintain your house," she says. "You have to have a security system."

On her User page now, there are sections called "Nazi fancruft" and "Apocryphal nicknames." There are lists of apologist sources and right-wing publishers. There is an entire offshoot page called "My allegedly problematic behaviour," where she keeps track of the accusations against her-"campaigning," "forum-shopping," "not dropping the stick." She has even given herself an award for all her heroic work: the Vandal's Cross of Iron Cross with Swords and Diamonds.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

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One Woman's Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia

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Ksenia Coffman's fellow editors have called her a vandal and a McCarthyist. She just wants them to stop glorifying fascists-and start citing better sources. When Ksenia Coffman started editing Wikipedia, she was like a tourist in Buenos Aires in the 1950s. She came to learn the tango, admire the architecture, sip maté.

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From asking the ‘woman question’ in science to asking the more radical ‘science question’ in feminism.

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“The Western philosophical tradition favours the fantasy that this author, the subject of theory, is located outside the object of reflection. This is a voyeuristic tradition.” (Mol, 2008, p.32)

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The eating self is not an agent in even a remotely similar way. It does not control ‘‘its’’ body at all. Take: I eat an apple. Is the agency in the I or in the apple? I eat, for sure, but without apples before long there would be no ‘‘I’’ left.

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This post ran in the Los Angeles Times on 18 October 2018.

When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize this month, she became only the third woman in history to receive the award in physics. An optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, Strickland is brilliant, accomplished and inspiring. To use Wikipedia parlance, she is very clearly notable.

Except that, somehow, she wasn't. Despite her groundbreaking research on a method of generating laser beams with ultrashort pulses, Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page until shortly after her Nobel win.

Perhaps more disconcerting, a volunteer Wikipedia editor had drafted a page about Strickland in March only to have it declined in May. The reason: There wasn't enough coverage of Strickland's work in independent secondary sources to establish her notability. Her achievements simply weren't documented in enough news articles that Wikipedia editors could cite.

Before Wikipedia points a finger that might rightly be pointed back at us, let me acknowledge that Wikipedia's shortcomings are absolutely real. Our contributors are majority Western and mostly male, and these gatekeepers apply their own judgment and prejudices. As a result, Wikipedia has dozens of articles about battleships and not nearly enough on poetry. We've got comprehensive coverage on college football but significantly less on African marathoners.

At the same time, Wikipedia is by design a living, breathing thing-a collection of knowledge that many sources, in aggregate, say is worth knowing. It is therefore a reflection of the world's biases more than it is a cause of them.

We are working to correct biases in Wikipedia's coverage. For instance, in 2014, Wikipedia editors evaluated all the biographies on English Wikipedia and found that only about 15% of them were about women. To rectify the imbalance, groups of volunteers, including the WikiProject Women Scientists and WikiProject Women in Red, have been identifying women who should have pages and creating articles about them.

Today, 17.82% of our biographies are about women. This near 3% jump may not sound like much, but it represents 86,182 new articles. That works out to 72 new articles a day, every single day, for the past three and a half years.

But signs of bias pop up in different ways. A 2015 study found that, on English Wikipedia, the word "divorced" appears more than four times as often in biographies of women than in biographies of men. We don't fully know why, but it's likely a multitude of factors, including the widespread tendency throughout history to describe the lives of women through their relationships with men.

Technology can help identify such problems. Wikipedia articles about health get close attention from our community of medical editors, but for years, some articles on critical women's health issues, such as breastfeeding, languished under a "low importance" categorization. An algorithm identified this mistake.

But there is only so much Wikipedia itself can do. To fix Wikipedia's gender imbalance, we need our contributors and editors to pay more attention to the accomplishments of women. This is true across all under-represented groups: people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, indigenous communities.

Although we don't believe that only women editors should write pages about other women, or writers of color about people of color, we do think that a broader base of contributors and editors-one that included more women and people of color, among others-would naturally help broaden our content.

Wikipedia is founded on the concept that every individual should be able to share freely in the sum of all knowledge. We believe in "knowledge equity," which we define as as the idea that diverse forms of knowledge should be recognized and respected. Wikipedia is not limited to what fits into a set of encyclopedias.

We also need other fields to identify and document diverse talent. If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don't recognize the work of women, Wikipedia's editors have little foundation on which to build.

Increasingly, Wikipedia's content and any biases therein have ramifications well beyond our own website. For instance, Wikipedia is now relied upon as a major source in the training of powerful artificial intelligence models, including models that underlie common technologies we all use.

In such training processes, computers ingest large data sets, draw inferences from patterns in the data and then generate predictions. As is well understood in the programming world, bad or incomplete data generate biased outcomes. This phenomenon is known by the acronym GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

People may intuitively understand that Wikipedia is a perennial work in progress. Computers, on the other hand, simply process the data they're given. If women account for only 17.82% of the data, we may find ourselves with software that thinks women are only 17.82% of what matters in the world.

It is true that Wikipedia has a problem if Donna Strickland, an accomplished physicist, is considered worthy of a page only when she receives the highest possible recognition in her field. But this problem reflects a far more consequential and intractable problem in the real world.

Wikipedia would like to encourage other knowledge-generating institutions to join us in our efforts to balance this inequity. We may not be able to change how society values women, but we can change how women are seen, and ensure that they are seen to begin with. That's a start.

Katherine Maher, Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
Image adaptation by Eryk Salvaggio/Wiki Education Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0; underlying photo by Darapti, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Wikipedia is a mirror of the world's gender biases

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This post ran in the Los Angeles Times on 18 October 2018 . When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize this month, she became only the third woman in history to receive the award in physics. An optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, Strickland is brilliant, accomplished and inspiring.

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For how to separate us out to begin with, the apple and me? One moment this may be possible: here is the apple, there am I. But a little later (bite, chew, swallow) I have become (made out of) apple; while the apple is (a part of) me. Transubstantiation. What about that for a model to think with?

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Lara

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“We have shown how being a Wikipedian – that is, being a member of the Wikipedia community – involves acquiring particular forms of sociotechnical expertise and authority that constitute the knowledge or epistemological infrastructure of Wikipedia”

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Wikipedia’s infrastructure, in sum, extends and reinforces the biases of its installed base in the logics and principles that characterized the technoscientific project. We see this in the experiential and traditional (predominantly oral) knowledges that are rejected as a result, but we also see it in the emphasis on skills required to be a successful Wikipedian. Infrastructures are not neutral.

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We have shown how being a Wikipedian that is, being a member of the Wikipedia community – involves acquiring particular forms of socio-technical expertise and authority that constitute the knowledge or epistemological infrastructure of Wikipedia. Beneath the rhetoric of amateurism, we found that a new form of expertise, and hence power, is being constituted, but that it is once again gender-coded as male.

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Reflecting developments in feminist theory that interpret gender as ongoingly produced in interaction with technology, we argue that Wikipedia’s gendering is constituted not only by the agency of its editors but also by the deeper logics embedded in the infrastructural relations of the technoscientific project itself.

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”They then behave neither like business or professional people transacting private affairs, nor like members of a constitutional order subject to the legal constraints of a state bureaucracy.  Citizens behave as a public body [...]”

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Technological development in the means of transmission of news (after the telegraph and the telephone came the wireless tele- graph and telephone and shortwave and radio) has in part hastened and in part made possible the organizational unification and economic interlocking of the press. The homogenization of news services by monopolistically organized press agencies was soon followed by the editorial homogenization of smaller papers through the sharing of plates and the advent of factories producing inserts.

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The shift in function of the principle of publicity is based on a shift in function of the public sphere as a special realm. This shift can be clearly documented with regard to the transformation of the public sphere's preeminent institution, the press.

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‘The concept of the public sphere was developed not simply to understand communication flows but to contribute a normative political theory of democracy. […] a public sphere is conceived as a vehicle for marshaling public opinion as a political force.’ (7)

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“a public sphere is conceived as a vehicle for marshaling public opinion as a political force. Mobilizing the considered sense of civil society, publicity is supposed to hold officials accountable and to assure that the actions of the state express the will of the citizenry” (pg. 7)

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"public opinion is legitimate if and only if it results from a communicative process in which all potentially affected can participate as peers, regardless of political citizenship" (Fraser p. 22)

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"The culture of harmony infused into the masses per se invites its public to an exchange of opinion about articles of consumption and subjects it to the soft compulsion of constant consumption training." pg.192

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https://lsecloud-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/s_hilhorst_lse_ac_uk/EcpA_6NvJbdFqTtVQdtVvMcBI1QTmksWDSsQDkOl8DOnlQ?e=bIgb0v

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https://lsecloud-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/s_hilhorst_lse_ac_uk/EYGBsQSqwdBKmlC47k7LGRwBflge9A_r50UHXLaCKRoCKA?e=p1HsPF

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https://lsecloud-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/s_hilhorst_lse_ac_uk/EUltoOsEVWJMj6Po2HJ6S8sBaVaHIgdO19L1YwEnk3fEoA?e=F2sCJX

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Just as an innovation can become increasingly predictable by black-boxing longer and longer chains of associations, an actor can become so coherent as to be almost predictable. P.123

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Just as an innovation can become increasingly predictable by black-boxing longer and longer chains of associations, an actor can become so coherent as to be almost predictable. P.123

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"As a more general descriptive rule, every time you want to know what a nonhuman does, simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this
character not present."  (Where Are the Missing Masses?, p.155)

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If the listener - in this case the hotel customer - forgets the order inscribed on the sign, or if he doesn't speak the language, the statement is reduced to a bit of paint on the piece of board. If the scrupulous customer obeys the order, he has complied with the imperative, thereby adding reality to it. The strength of the statement thus depends in part on what is written on the sign, and in part on what each listener does with the inscription.

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"It is as if we might call technology the moment when
social assemblages gain stability by aligning actors and observers.
Society and technology are not two ontologically distinct entities
but more like phases of the same essential action."

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That particular people have the power to construct and enforce their definition of reality is due to socially prevalent economic and political defini- tions of reality.

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“There is a division of labour in conversation”

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There are also times when there is no direct, situational evidence of "requirement" from the man, and the woman does so "naturally."

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“Power is a product of human activities, just as the activities are themselves products of the power relations in the socio-economic world” (Fishman pg.397)

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“The work is not seen as what women do, but as part of what they are. Because this work is obscured, because it is too often seen as an aspect of gender identity rather than of gender activity, the maintenance and expression of male-female power relations in our everyday conversations are hidden as well”.

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"The work is not seen as what women do, but as part of what they are. Because this work is obscured, because it is too often seen as an aspect of gender identity rather than of gender activity, the maintenance and expression of male-female power relations in our every- day conversations are hidden as well. When we orient instead to the activities involved in maintaining gender, we are able to discern the reality of hierarchy in our daily lives" (p.405)

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"The failure of the women's attempts at interaction is not due to anything inherent in their talk, but to the failure of the men to respond, to do interactional work." (p. 404) - Yasmin

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"Appearances may differ by case: sometimes women are required to sit and "be a good listener" because they are not otherwise needed. At other times, women are required to fill silences and keep conversation moving, to talk a lot. Sometimes they are expected to develop others' topics and at other times they are required to present and develop topics of their own" (Fishman, p.405).

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"Appearances may differ by case: sometimes women are required to sit and "be a good listener" because they are not otherwise needed. At other times, women are required to fill silences and keep conversation moving, to talk a lot. Sometimes they are expected to develop others' topics and at other times they are required to present and develop topics of their own" (Fishman, p.405).

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“To control conversation is not merely to choose the topic. It is a matter of having control over the definition of the situation in general, which includes not only what will be talked about, but whether there will be a conversation at all and under what terms it will occur.” (Fishman, p.400)

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I didn't understand the "I eat an apple" text. Could you explain a bit more?

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I didn't understand the "I eat an apple" text. Could you explain a bit more?

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The Mol text is a tricky one, absolutely. I would say that it is easier to understand once you know what she is arguing against. In Western philosophy, since the writing of the philosopher René Descartes, there has been a distinction between the "subject" - he who observes - and the "object" - that which is perceived. The subject is supposedly neutral and universal, but according to feminist critiques implicitly coded as male. The subject comes to be associated with the mind, and with rational thinking. Annemarie Mol is trying to challenge these oppositions, between subject and object, male and female, mind and matter, rationality and feeling. Sure, she says, the subject might perceive an apple as though it is distinct from himself, but without the sustenance that the apple (or any other type of food) provides, s/he would die from hunger. So the subject and the object are not as separate as they seem. We also tend to assume that the subject has agency, whereas the object is passive. This, too, she challenges (think of the joke about the grains). Once we get rid of this idea of the subject as a rational mind which perceives passive objects, we can start to recognise how intertwined we are with the world.

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The studies reported in this paper
attempt to detect some expectancies
that lend commonplace scenes their
familiar, life-as-usual character, and to
relate these to the stable social struc-
tures of everyday activities.

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society is organised on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in a correspondingly appropriate way - Goffman

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“For the purposes of conducting their everyday affairs persons refuse to permit each other to understand "what they are really talking about" in this way. The anticipation that persons will understand, the occasionality of expressions, the specific vagueness of references, the retrospective-prospective sense of a present occurrence, waiting for something later in order to see what was meant before, are sanctioned properties of common discourse” (Garfinkel pg.229)

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They can also assume from past experience that only individuals of a particular kind are likely to be found in a given social setting.

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Compare and contrast two readings: Marx versus micro-sociology

- How is social order reproduced and sustained?

-What patterns of social life do they refer to?

- How is this perspective relevant today?

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https://sway.office.com/zZvpJrqHPcPonnho?ref=Link

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Their very presence, as ‘equal’ members rather than as service staff (porters, cleaners, clerks and nannies), who take up a different rhythm in the occupation of space, challenges the ways in which racialised bodies have been categorised and fixed.

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Take Germany first. There is little doubt that it is important to prevent assassins of memory from denying or minimizing the Holocaust; but it is also important not to forget to show the link, well-established in contemporary Jewish consciousness, between the Holocaust and the founding of Israel as a haven for Jews. That this link also meant the disestablishing of the Palestinians from their homes and farms is practically never stated. (p.183)

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‘People look to refashioned memory to give themselves a coherent identity, a national narrative, a place in the world’ (paraphrased!)

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If you are unmarked by race and considered to be just human, then you can—unlike racialized people are limited to speaking for their race—claim to speak for the whole of humanity.  (Puwar, p. 65)

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‘The more one disinvests one’s own body from . . . [a] ... space, the less able one is to effectively inhabit that space as one’s own’ (Grosz 2001: 9)

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pp72-73: the utterances of these people are linked to their bodily existence. Their

voices are anchored to what they are seen to embody

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The claims ‘black’ bodies make on institutions by occupying spaces they are not expected to be in are constantly challenged by a look which abnormalises their presence and locates them, through the workings of racialised framings, as belonging elsewhere. (p.42)

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“National identity always involves narratives-of the nation's past, its founding fathers and documents, seminal events, and so on. But these narratives are never undisputed or merely a matter of the neutral recital of facts. In the United States, for example, 1492 was celebrated very differently by people who saw themselves as victims of Columbus's advent” (Said pg. 177)

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Please add one (or more) suggestions for a Christmas song playlist

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"Memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority. Far from being a neutral exercise in facts and basic truths, the study of history, which of course is the underpinning of memory, both in school and university, is to some considerable extent a nationalist effort premised on the need to construct a desireable loyalty to and insider's understanding of one's country, tradition, and faith" (Said, p.176).

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Week 10 Social Theories of Space: Thinking Globally

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Week 10 Social Theories of Space: Thinking Globally

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Week 10: Social Theories of Space: Thinking Globally

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Memory and its representations impact the idea of identity, nationalism, power and authority.

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The town belonging to the colonized people, ...It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other.

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I remember some of my most painful times as a geographer have been spent unwillingly struggling to think how one could draw a boundary around somewhere like the 'East Midlands'. But that kind of boundary around an area precisely distinguishes between an inside and an outside. It can so easily be yet another way of constructing a counter-position between 'us' and 'them'. (Massey, p.28).

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If time-space- compression can be imagined in that more socially formed, socially evalu¬ ative and differentiated way, then there may be here the possibility of develop¬ ing a politics of mobility and access. For it does seem that mobility and control over mobility both reflects and re¬ inforces power. It is not simply a ques¬ tion of unequal distribution, that some people move more than others, and that some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people. Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak. The time-space-compression of some groups can undermine the power of others.

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“What gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the face that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus."

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The Battle of Algiers (sequence of bombings) Part A

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For what is happening is that the geography of social relations is changing. In many cases such relations are increasingly stretched out over space. Economic, political and cultural social relations, each full of power and with internal structures of domination and subordination, stretched out over the planet at every different level, from the household to the local area to the international (Massey).

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“How, in the face of all this movement and intermixing, can we retain any sense of a local place and its particularity? An (idealised) notion of an era when places were (supposedly) inhabited by coherent and homogeneous communities is set against the current fragmentation and disruption.” (Massey pg.24)

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"The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him.” (p. 43)

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SO201 Week 9 - Social Theories of Space: Situating Social Theory

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SO201 Week 9 - Social Theories of Space: Situating Social Theory

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https://sway.office.com/KIbqfWKBb47zeAp7?ref=Link

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Sway: Create and share interactive reports, presentations, personal stories, and more.

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Sway is an easy-to-use digital storytelling app for creating interactive reports, presentations, personal stories and more. Its built-in design engine helps you create professional designs in minutes. With Sway, your images, text, videos, and other multimedia all flow together in a way that enhances…

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The degree to which we can move between countries, or walk about the streets at night, or venture out of hotels in foreign cities, is not just influenced by 'capital'. Survey after survey has shown how women's mobility, for instance, is restricted - in a thousand different ways, from physical violence to being ogled at or made to feel quite simply 'out of place' - not by 'capital', but by men.

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'The way we always have to think about how other people see us and compare it to how we see ourselves. I mean it is really who we are and what we need to do on a daily basis to survive being Black and female in this world.'

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(choreography) "[Young black women] are aware that if they rely on socially determined assessments to define their self-worth, they would be exiled from their own bodies and any home spaces they might establish for themselves - a state of eternal homelessness." (Cox, p.29)

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Fanon's vivid phrase, 'individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless - a race of angels'

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Fanon's vivid phrase, 'individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless - a race of angels'

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It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that 'knowledge'

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"Sex positivism makes room for Black women to move through, but not necessarily past, histories of bodily degradation and sexual violence that undoubtedly shape the ways in which they explore and experience their sexuality."

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"Sex positivism makes room for Black women to move through, but not necessarily past, histories of bodily degradation and sexual violence that undoubtedly shape the ways in which they explore and experience their sexuality."