Workshop: Empire and Science: Contact, Authority, Collaboration (28-30 March 2008)

The Hill Center For World Studies Inc., Ashfield MA

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal is for the Hill Center for World Studies in cooperation with the Community College Humanities Association and Professor Nancy Jacobs (Department of History, Brown University) to hold a 3-day workshop at Brown University, March 28, 29, 30, 2008, titled Empires and Science: Contact, Authority, Collaboration. The workshop will bring together scholars, whose work integrates the history of science into a wide range of historical specializations, with history faculty from 2 and 4-year colleges. The goal is to encourage general awareness among attendees of how and why history of science materials should be incorporated into historical surveys. The proposal is being made under the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) section of the Science and Society Program (SS). In a society increasingly dependent on science and technology, the cultural relevance of historical inquiry is sometimes called into question. Although historians of science have always recognized that the practice of science is historically determined, this fundamental insight does not receive the attention it deserves in American science education. This workshop examines how an exciting new field in historical studies--the cross-cultural study of empire--can shed new light on the cultural bonds that tie the sciences and the humanities together. By bringing together a diverse body of scholars who study different regions across the globe, it will show how the history of science is not purely the province of western Europeanists. By combining university researchers with community college teachers, it will suggest new ways in which contemporary scholarship can affect wider education and public awareness. No one disputes the importance of science and science education in planning for the future; this workshop examines one way in which science and science education can also be enriched by the study of the past. Papers from the workshop and a selection of projects undertaken and completed by attending faculty will be published in the Community College Review, a peer-reviewed annual journal published by the Community College Humanities Association and sent to its 1700 members. The projects will produce teaching modules, syllabi for new courses, research agendas for faculty, and research projects for undergraduate students. These items will be posted on the Hill Center website. The projects will serve as models, collectively demonstrating the possibilities for integrating new material in the history of science into college curriculum, particularly in world history and world studies courses. The specific kind of history of science that will be presented illuminates the lives of people often relegated to the wings, and rescues them from obscurity. These include Islamic textual commentators, 16th century Spanish natural scientists and their American collaborators, colonial subjects, Polynesian sailors and their Pacific Island descendents, and others. Given the diversity in American community colleges, many students who are not used to finding their forebears included in curriculum, especially in connection to science, and who may never have thought of careers in science for themselves, will rethink their choices.