MILE HIGH, MILE DEEP: Imagining and Modifying Topographical and Subterranean Environments

Montana State University, Bozeman MT

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal is an SGTR to involve postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in a research group at Montana State University dedicated to understanding the importance of space and place for the practice of science and to sharing that understanding with undergraduate students. Given its twofold commitment to research and teaching in exciting new cross-disciplinary curricula at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, MSU is an ideal venue for training advanced graduate students and recent scholars in remapping the boundaries of the history of science and technology, environmental history, and historical and political geography. Over the past four years, the Department of History and Philosophy has hired a cohort of faculty with expertise in the history and philosophy of science and technology and environmental history. Working closely with faculty from the Department of Earth Sciences and the Program in Native American Studies, the department has inaugurated a new undergraduate major in Science, the Environment, Technology, and Society, and new Ph.D. programs in History and Earth Sciences with specific emphases on geography, environmental history, and the history of science and technology. In addition, the university is implementing a new undergraduate core curriculum that requires students to take a new course entitled "Contemporary Issues in Science." The postdoctoral scholars and graduate students supported by the SGTR will conduct research and receive training in teaching in innovative programs designed to improve students understanding of the critical links between science, technology, society, and the environment. Because of the distinctive configuration of disciplines within the Department of History and Philosophy, which includes specialists in the history and philosophy of science and technology, students and scholars supported by the SGTR will have the opportunity to work closely with scholars in a department with a long tradition of working collaboratively across disciplines. Intellectual Merit: The research component of this project advances the spatial turn that has been underway in each of the disciplines noted above by combining the history of science and technology with environmental history and geography. The project directors have both focused their careers on understanding place-based and culturally informed sites of knowledge generation. The PI and co-PI are experts in the social and cultural history of science and technology and their broader societal impacts. Broader Impacts: First, this project affords a unique training opportunity for recent Ph.D.s and doctoral students to link their research with ongoing curricular reform that seeks to put knowledge about science, technology, society, and the environment at the center of student learning. Second, because of its "place-centeredness" in the Greater Yellowstone Heritage Region, this project is committed to drawing on the intellectual resources and needs of Montana's Native American communities that comprise Montana's largest ethnic minority group.