Memo+14+Emerging+Narratives

No idea if I have interpreted this assignment correctly:

In the past several decades there has been an increased interest in analyzing science from both feminist and postcolonial point of views. For example, Sandra Harding's strong objectivity program argues that science is typically written from the white, privileged, male perspective, but that instead we should recognize the many different perspectives that science can be created and viewed from. If we acknowledge these different standpoints an objective science can still be created (side note: this sounds like an aggressive standpoint theory?). More recently researchers have been developing and utilizing the subaltern perspective – that is, giving a voice to those who typically go unheard. This is the discourse that I seek to add my voice to. Although I originally started this project with a focus on the contributions of piracy to the development of Western science and the shaping of economic policy in the New World, specifically the West Indies, I have chosen to expand this study. I would also like to include other contributions to colonial technoscience made by groups that are typically overlooked in the construction of science. These include, but are not limited to, indigenous peoples as well as colonial settlers. Coloial technosciene appears to be an emerging interest in both history and STS and a number of books have been published in the past five years or so including Londa Schiebinger's Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, Lucile Brockaway's Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Garden and Oliver Impey's The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe. So I believe that my project has two different but related narratives – the first is a study of contributions to Western science made by social groups that operate outside of the norms. Whether or not these social groups can be generalized as deviant, I have not yet ascertained, however, I think it is safe to say they do not fit the “norm” of a typical science producer as we have come to know them. The second and related narrative is the emerging interest in the development of colonial technoscience and its relationship to expansion in the West Indies and Americas.