Is Science a Tool of Colonization? | Kendall Clements

Conversations with Peter Boghossian

While in New Zealand, I had the opportunity to interview Kendall Clements, a professor of biology at the University of Auckland. His name may sound familiar because, in 2021, Clements was the lead author of a controversial letter titled "In Defence of Science," published in The New Zealand Listener. The letter (commonly referred to as the “Listener Letter”) was a direct response to a proposed curriculum that sought to promote the discussion and analysis of how science has been used to support the dominance of Eurocentric views, including its role in the “colonization” of Māori peoples and the “suppression” of Māori knowledge.

The curriculum also proposed that science itself, as a Western European invention, could be viewed as a tool of European dominance over Māori and other indigenous groups. We discussed this and more.

Watch this episode on YouTube.