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sawylMost interesting day so far with a really good session on climate change narratives.
Kim Stanley Robinson was on the panel and enthusiastically advocated the replacement of the current models of economics with something a bit more sustainable. As he put it, if everything is fungible it becomes rational to say "let's destroy the world to maximise growth, because we can always buy another when we're done"
The other panelists all had interesting things to say, ranging from comments about the power of literature to change hearts and minds through the nature and science and the role of economics and the other social sciences, to the experiences of a chastened member of the Australian Green Party faced with the current administration's decision to abandon their hard-won carbon tax.
(Stan made an interesting comment about cancer narratives during the discussion of carbon taxes. He said that often patients go to the doctor with a pre-symptomatic cancer, the doctor tells them they need to be poisoned to within an inch of their life, and provided the patient survives, they thank the doctor for saving their life. Whereas with climate change, which seems analogous, the patient seems determined to resist the prescription for change)
The following session on girl scientists in YA, moderated by Seanan McGuire (which may have influenced my choice to attend somewhat) was interesting and threw up lots of good suggestions for other books to read and things to look into.
The panel also covered some of women in science, comparing the treatment they received - having their expert views immediately dismissed by unqualified men, having their work appropriated etc - as comparable to many of the cases identified by Russ in How to Suppress Women's Writing. The Lego Research Institute was held up as a good example of this, with one of the panelists mentioning that when it had first come out, she'd mentioned it to someone who'd assumed it was a joke because all the scientists were women.
McGuire mentioned that she'd taken a certain amount of flak for including two female scientists in her two Mira Grant series — Dr Abby in Newsflesh and Shanti Cale in Parasitology — with critics tending to claim that they were simply retreads of the same character. But as she rightly pointed out, their actual motivations are very different: Dr Abby is driven by anger into full-on mad science, creating zombie octopi; whereas Shanti Cale is more of an amoral sociopath intent on pushing the envelope for its own sake. Again, had both the characters been men, it's unlikely anyone would have batted an eyelid at their inclusion.
On the YA front there were some interesting comments about how, while they often strong heroines, they were usually action figures rather than scientists, with the scientists tending to be passive and supporting figures, but representation was often rather better in visual media than in literature.
Kim Stanley Robinson was on the panel and enthusiastically advocated the replacement of the current models of economics with something a bit more sustainable. As he put it, if everything is fungible it becomes rational to say "let's destroy the world to maximise growth, because we can always buy another when we're done"
The other panelists all had interesting things to say, ranging from comments about the power of literature to change hearts and minds through the nature and science and the role of economics and the other social sciences, to the experiences of a chastened member of the Australian Green Party faced with the current administration's decision to abandon their hard-won carbon tax.
(Stan made an interesting comment about cancer narratives during the discussion of carbon taxes. He said that often patients go to the doctor with a pre-symptomatic cancer, the doctor tells them they need to be poisoned to within an inch of their life, and provided the patient survives, they thank the doctor for saving their life. Whereas with climate change, which seems analogous, the patient seems determined to resist the prescription for change)
The following session on girl scientists in YA, moderated by Seanan McGuire (which may have influenced my choice to attend somewhat) was interesting and threw up lots of good suggestions for other books to read and things to look into.
The panel also covered some of women in science, comparing the treatment they received - having their expert views immediately dismissed by unqualified men, having their work appropriated etc - as comparable to many of the cases identified by Russ in How to Suppress Women's Writing. The Lego Research Institute was held up as a good example of this, with one of the panelists mentioning that when it had first come out, she'd mentioned it to someone who'd assumed it was a joke because all the scientists were women.
McGuire mentioned that she'd taken a certain amount of flak for including two female scientists in her two Mira Grant series — Dr Abby in Newsflesh and Shanti Cale in Parasitology — with critics tending to claim that they were simply retreads of the same character. But as she rightly pointed out, their actual motivations are very different: Dr Abby is driven by anger into full-on mad science, creating zombie octopi; whereas Shanti Cale is more of an amoral sociopath intent on pushing the envelope for its own sake. Again, had both the characters been men, it's unlikely anyone would have batted an eyelid at their inclusion.
On the YA front there were some interesting comments about how, while they often strong heroines, they were usually action figures rather than scientists, with the scientists tending to be passive and supporting figures, but representation was often rather better in visual media than in literature.
