An Other Science: Technical Knowledge in Multiethnic America

Catalog description

This course expands the scope of how we think about scientific and technical forms of knowledge beyond a Western techno-science to consider other forms of systematic knowledge present in the technical and cultural landscape of the contemporary United States. We will pay particular attention to "minoritarian" knowledge-ways and the identities and communities formed around/through them, emphasizing race/ethnicity as a paradigm of analysis. How is the formation of a "science" a necessarily communitarian practice and how do different sciences articulate and envision different communities at both local and global levels - and choreograph different relationships between the individual and the collective? What does science have to do with the question of belonging and the relationship between self and other? How can we parse the alliances between science(s) and particular political aspirations/goals? In addition to papers, artifacts, and theories more apparently a part of the scientific corpus and the history of science, we will look to places atypical to the history and study of science, such as fiction, oral storytelling, interviews, manuals, speculative work, and scripture, to reconstitute a history of Other sciences - technical, rigorous, and empirical ways of knowing that represent a collective and generational construction of systematic knowledge.