Postcolonial Science

Catalog description

Scientific knowledge and practice enacted colonial divisions and served postcolonial struggles. How then might we understand the work of science in the struggles that shape our world today? This class considers science outside Europe and the United States. We take the postcolonial as a dynamic space reworking the dichotomies that structured colonial power and knowledge, including western-indigenous, modern- traditional, global-local, centers-peripheries, and developed-underdeveloped. In the process, students confront the complex histories embodied in institutions, identities, bodies, and landscapes. Through controversies over the environment, medicine, and indigenous knowledge, we investigate the processes through which claims to the universal emerge and the effects of such claims. We attend to the collaborations and alliances through which substance is articulated, and the world in all its multiplicities is apprehended.