The Subaltern and Physics: Reconstructing Observers

• In Event: Can the Subaltern Research? I

Abstract

I posit that to constitute a concept of “physics community,” physicists assume two foundational axioms. First, the laws of physics are independent of cognitive inference/interference and therefore unchanging or only evolving according to their own rules, despite the findings of Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STSS) over the last few decades. Physicists nonetheless cling to this assumption, which I posit leads to the next axiom: the subaltern can be a subject of scientific research, but it cannot itself research.

This conceptual foundation has epistemic and ontological implications for both science and communities who trace their origins to the Global South and Aboriginal American communities. Because the subaltern is persistently axiomatically defined as outside of mainstream definitions of “physicist,” we become saddled with the difficult work of self-constructing as physicists while remaining, through external construction, outsiders to the physics community. I argue that these axioms indicate that science cannot be objective when the language embedded in it works to unconstruct Black women as physicists.

By excavating Black intellectual history and pairing it with currents in STSS, I will consider the epistemic implications of colonial, exclusionary ontologies of “physicist,” with the aim of clarifying how an historical and contemporary reconstruction of observers changes both physics and physicists.

Author

• Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, University of Washington