I have to say, of all the responses to my defense of the Feminist Glaciology piece, this one (and the others along the same lines) is not what I was expecting.
The core complaint is that the original article doesn't supply any evidence to back up its claims -- claims about colonialism, about public attitudes toward scientific expertise, about mountaineering and expeditions. That lack of evidence strikes this critic as surprising.
It shouldn't. As I noted in the original thread, the article is explicitly NOT an empirical piece. It is a review article designed to link together the empirical work of others. And there's no shame in that. On the contrary.
Review articles like this are both very valuable and extremely common. Common in all fields and disciplines, including in the hard sciences. I mean, there's an entire series in the social sciences devoted to just this: reviews. And it rocks.
annualreviews.org
annualreviews.org
Here's a review article just published earlier this month. Not a whiff of original empirical evidence in it, but the authors (no doubt handsome and brilliant chaps the both of them) certainly seem confident they have something valuable to say.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.111…
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.111…
So yeah: the Feminist Glaciology article doesn't supply much evidence for its claims. Probably that's partly because some of those claims are taken as obvious givens in the literature (e.g. the masculinity of colonialism), but it's also just not the purpose or goal of the piece.
