Description:

This session invites contributors and audience members to reflect on how privilege and marginalization influence what scientists know about the atmosphere and its behavior. Knowledge about weather and climate is not simply "discovered." It is produced through social systems: peer review, research organizations, government bureaucracies, grant distribution, data assimilation, and field experiments, to name a few examples. This session explores who has participated in creating atmospheric science (and its historical antecedents), plus how differences in participation have affected what 'we' understand and can predict.

Questions that may guide presenters include: How has the development of the atmospheric science been shaped by social factors like race, class, gender, access to educational credentials, or citizenship? What kinds of practices have historically excluded particular groups of people from participating in science? What kinds of work in the meteorological enterprise have been devalued because they have performed by women or other socially marginalized groups? In what ways has the provision of meteorological or climatological services been shaped by inequality, or conversely, by individuals’ commitments to achieve a more just and equitable world? How have indigenous forms of weather knowledge influenced 'western' practices of atmospheric science, and how have indigenous people and other marginalized weather knowers interacted with the people more commonly recognized as atmospheric scientists? How have the demographics of atmospheric scientists been shaped by assertions of power, including sexual harassment, microaggressions, or differential patterns of mentorship? More positively, how have particular institutions or individuals successfully worked to make atmospheric science more inclusive? How can historical examples inspire us to make science more fair?