First Year Seminar: Global Histories of Science and Knowledge

What makes a scientist a scientist? What is science? What are the social and cultural processes that have rendered science its meaning? This first-year seminar is an introduction to the global histories of science and knowledge, focusing especially on modern science's dynamic relationship with colonial rule, decolonization, indigenous or local knowledge traditions, and Cold War scientific internationalism. The course examines a wide range of historical, sociological, and anthropological materials and methods in order to trace the everyday workings of different scientific disciplines within a "living laboratory," which are a series of spaces and sites that produce knowledge. These also happen to be spaces that are conventionally not viewed as normative scientific spaces, but spaces where cross-cultural contact produced knowledge (i.e., early modern philosophical, brokered and subaltern, cartographic, mechanical, astral, environmental knowledge). We will trace the uneven and "indetermined" progression of this knowledge across the Global South to understand how these ideas were made, circulated, resisted, and changed over time not just in Europe, but in Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia. Given the interconnected nature of world history, students will also acquire tools to understand themes such as colonization, modernization, democracy, and social change critically engaged with categories of race, gender, and class.
Course Attributes: FYS; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS SC; BU Hum; BU BA; BU IS

First Year Seminar: Global Histories of Science and Knowledge

HISTORY 2162

Section 01