Race, Ethnicity and Science: The Case of Lung Function

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

SES 0220237 -- Race, Ethnicity, and Science: The Case of Lung Function Lundy Braun, Brown University This award is for a professional development fellowship designed to enable the principal investigator (Lundy Braun) to acquire advanced background training in science and technology studies in order to study the practices by which biomedicine produces, naturalizes, and legitimizes notions of racial and ethnic difference. The training takes place with Evelynn Hammonds, historian of science in the Science, Technology, and Science Department at MIT. Elements of the training program include learning the methods and modes of analysis of historical Research through coursework; directed reading; and participation in relevant workshops, colloquia, and activities of the newly established Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine at MIT. The research activities focus on several issues: i) how the technology of lung function testing has been deployed to produce knowledge about race and ethnicity from the mid-19th century to the present; ii) the ways in which notions of difference became embedded in the practices of pulmonary and occupational medicine and why they have remained invisible to practitioners; iii) the relationship between popular and scientific theories of race and ethnicity; and iv) the socio-political consequences of the knowledge produced. This research has several interrelated components. The first involves an examination of the explanations provided in the primary scientific literature for observed racial and ethnic differences in lung function. The second part of the project involves mapping the circulation of ideas on racial difference in lung anatomy, capacity, and disease in scientific disciplines -- physical anthropology, medicine, statistics, and epidemiology -- and popular culture, through an analysis of the scientific literature, conference proceedings, textbooks, popular journals, and newspapers. The third part examines contemporary understandings of the meaning of racial difference in lung function and the implications of those understandings in the medical subspecialties of occupational and pulmonary medicine through interviews with researchers, clinicians, and trade unionists. The research is to be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science and should lead to several papers published in academic journals. Braun also plans to develop a course on race and science to be offered at Brown University for undergraduate students on her return. She intends to integrate science studies approaches into her teaching of basic science to lay people.