Scholar Spotlight
Karin Rosemblatt, Professor, Department of History
Awarded a NSF grant for her Expanding the History of Science, Techonology, Environment, and Medicine: The United States and its Regional Neighbors project.
Science has often been understood as a universal language, involving conversations across all parts of the planet. However, as recent controversies regarding vaccination and climate change remind us, not everyone understands science in the same way. Recent research on science, technology, environment, and medicine is addressing this issue by looking at how diverse publics engage with and apply science. They are also analyzing how these disparate publics influence scientific innovation. Still, most of this research focuses on the United States and Europe. This project provides a more comprehensive view of how science works by examining scientific innovation and application in Latin America and the Caribbean and the relation of science in the region to other sites. By sponsoring a website, workshops, and publications, the project will produce new resources for teachers and researchers, providing access to cutting edge studies of science in Latin America and the Caribbean. It will also train a new generation of graduate students in the history of science to conduct research on Latin America and the Caribbean and to incorporate the region into their courses.
This Research Coordination Network project brings together senior and established researchers and graduate students to take stock of the vibrant and burgeoning fields of science, technology, environment, and medicine in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our network will secure ties among researchers in North and South America and unify discussions taking place with a variety of academic societies and organizations. It will produce publications that make this research available to those who are not specialists in the region. The ethnic and racial diversity of Latin America and the existence of creolized Indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledge practices make it an excellent place for advancing knowledge of worldviews that challenge or coexist with scientific rationalities. Project participants will include graduate students in the history of science and provide them with in-depth training and mentoring on Latin America and the Caribbean--training that is not readily available in the majority of history of science graduate programs. K-16 teachers will gain access to bibliographies, lesson plans, essays, and collections of syllabi that allow them to cover a broader range of scientific endeavors and of a more diverse community of scientists. Their students will in turn incorporate and reproduce more complete and complex representations of how science functions globally.