Progress 01/01/13 to 09/30/13
Outputs
Target Audience: My target audience for this work is other social, biological, and environmental scientists, those who work in some capacity with indigenous communities. I also target bioethicists and policymakers who make decisions about research and regulation on and related to tribal lands. I also target educators who are interested in building science and science policy capacity in indigenous communities or that expands indigenous governance broadly. I worked closely with the Summer Internship for Native Americans in Genomics (SING) at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana as a bioethics faculty member. I also mentor young and aspiring indigenous scientists who complete the SING program in terms of developing their bioethical and tribal policy professional networks. As part of my work as anEditorial Advisory Board Member to theSACNAS Newsand the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, I helped conceive of news stories on Native American science and policy that were then contracted out to freelance writers and published in theSACNAS Newsthus reaching scientists and student scientists across the U.S. I also worked for 18 months as part of an advisory teach for the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) to help them develop a national conversation between bioethicists, scientists, science regulators, federal funders, and social scientists on the science and ethics of genetic ancestry inference in October 2014.From January- September 2013, I addressed multi-disciplinary academic and Native American community audiences via talks and on radio: Lectures 1.An Indigenous Ontological Discussion of Cryopreservation Practices and Ethics. Speculative Visions of Race, Technology, Science & Survival. The Center for Race & Gender and the Multicultural Community Center, University of California, Berkeley, CA,March 15, 2013. 2."Indigenous Thought Leads Change for All: What #IdleNoMore and Indigenous People Doing Science Have in Common."Understanding #IdleNoMore, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta,Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,February 8, 2013. 3.“Constituting Knowledge across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: Indigenous Bio-scientists.” Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, February 7, 2013. Media 1.Interview on genome research in indigenous communities. With Praba Pilar onBlack Mask,a radio news show on politics from an anarchist perspective. CKUW Winnipeg,http://ckuw.ca/programs/detail/black-mask/, September 25, 2013. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? I worked closely with multiple UC Berkeley graduate students in ESPM (Sibyl Diver, Hekia Bodwitch, Sharon Fuller, Carolina Prado, and Ashton Wesner), Anthropology (Rachel Ceaser, Peter Nelson, and Carolyn Smith), and the Energy Resources Group(ERG) (Cleo Woelfe-Erskine) on projects that involved cross-disciplinary field research spanning environmental science, environmental policy, and indigenous governance. Every one of these students works between academic scientific communities and with indigenous communities, including with traditional knowledge holders, tribal scientists, natural resource managers, and/or museum professionals. I gave students methodological and ethical feedback on their work and advised them on the writing of their dissertations as well as giving them career advice and writing many recommendation letters for fellowships, postdoctoral, and other academic opportunities. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Research has been disseminated to communities of interest via lectures and media interviews (most of which are not listed here because they occurred after September 2013). I also gave talks at the American Anthropological Association, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and to indigenous audiences interested in science and technology policy in Edmonton, Canada and in venues across the United States. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The impact of research over the past year includes networking young indigenous bioscientists through the SING program and through other informal networking opportunities, and mentoring them in their post-graduate experiences. I have also worked with SING graduates to look for opportunities to participate in science policy advising with tribal governments and tribal organizations, particularly related to advising tribal leaders on how to participate knowingly in human genome diversity research, especially that builds their capacity to do research on-reservation, and to not simply serve as research subjects or research review approval bodies.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2013
Citation:
D. Edmunds, R. Shelby, A. James, M. Baker, Y. Perez, and K. Tallbear. Tribal Housing, Co-Design & Cultural Sovereignty. Science, Technology & Human Values. Published online before print June 25, 2013, doi: 10.1177/0162243913490812: 1-28.
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2013
Citation:
TallBear, Kim. Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity. Social Studies of Science 43(4) (August 2013): 509-534.
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Progress 01/01/12 to 12/31/12
Outputs
OUTPUTS: The researcher is on leave from UC Berkeley this year so activities and dissemination of research results for this project were reduced, and limited to the following research talks given on project at the following universities/programs: 1. ) Uppsala University, Sweden, Centre for Gender Research and UPPSAM (The Network/Association for Sami Related Research in Uppsala), 10/11/12. 2.) University of Texas, Department of Anthropology and Native American and Indigenous Studies program colloquium, October 2012. 3.) National Research Council of the National Academies, 9/20/12. SciSIP Principal Investigators' Conference. "Constituting Knowledge across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: Indigenous Bio-scientists." Washington, D.C. 4.) Columbia University, Anthropology Department, 2/12/12. Franz Boas Seminar. "Constituting Knowledge across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: Indigenous Bio-scientists." New York, NY. 5.) University of California, San Francisco. Center on Social Disparities in Health (CSDH), 1/11/12. Products, loosely interpreted, derive from the researcher's role as an editorial advisory board member to the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), which came about because of this research and my participant observation in that venue. This research informed my suggestion of an article on bioscience and its role in expanding U.S. tribal and Canadian First Nation governance in the SACNAS biennial news periodical. The piece was written by a professional science journalist. PARTICIPANTS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period. TARGET AUDIENCES: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.
Impacts
Given that no new research was conducted, outcomes/impacts were not assessed this year.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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Progress 01/01/11 to 12/31/11
Outputs
OUTPUTS: 1) ARCHIVAL RESEARCH: In 2011 I continued reviewing theoretical literature from indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial science and technology studies. 2) I and my Graduate Student Researcher (GSR) compiled demographics from various scientific organizations (i.e. numbers of Native American women and men in those fields) as background for interviewing Native American scientists. 3) CONTINUED INTERVIEWS: I interviewed 15 Native American bioscientists, many of whom who work on both human and nonhuman genetics. I interviewed one non-Native bioscientist, and a non-Native archaeologist. I further refined research questions. Interviews are ongoing throughout 2012 as I continue investigating the roles that indigenous scientists and their collaborators play in diversifying and democratizing bioscientific practices and institutions and their roles in informing tribal governance of research. 4) I did participant observation at two scientific gatherings, the Summer Internship for Native Americans in Genomcs (SING) at the University of Illinois and the 2011 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Native Americans and Chicanos in Science (SACNAS) in San Jose. 5) FUNDRAISING: I continue to work under a basic research grant that I received in September, 2010 from the National Science Foundation Social and Behavioral Sciences Division, Program Science, Technology, and Society (NSF 08-553) entitled: "Constituting Knowledge across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: An Ethnographic Study of Indigenous Technoscientists and Their Collaborators." I was awarded $101,016 for the first year to pay for travel and interview expenses, equipment, and for three semesters of graduate student research assistantships. I will apply for supplemental funds. 6) BLOG ON TECHNOSCIENCE AND INDIGENEITY: I continue to write a blog at kimtallbear.com about activities and findings that are funded, in part, by this project. In 2011, I blogged about the political economy of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields on display at SACNAS. I also blogged about the role of mentoring and self-reflexivity at SACNAS, and how members emphasized the role of their families and cultural backgrounds in keeping them in science. This is in line with what feminist philosophers of science call for, a wider variety of "standpoints" informing how scientific inquiry happens. My posts have been cited by the Scientific American Web site blog roll. My "tweets" or twitter postings are fed to my Web page and are followed by genome research centers, environmental, humanities, science and technology studies, and policy organizations around the world. I use blog posts as drafts for book chapters, academic talks, and peer-reviewed journal articles. 7) INVITED SPEAKER AT UNIVERSITIES AND TRIBAL FORUMS NATIONALLY: In 2011, I spoke about scientific research in indigenous communities at forums including SING, at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting in Montreal; in multiple UC Berkeley biology and environmental science classes; at the Berkeley environmental politics colloquium, and for the Energy Resources Group (ERG) colloquium series. PARTICIPANTS: PARTICIPANTS 1) INDIVIDUALS: Kim TallBear as Principal Investigator. 2) PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS: None officially under same research protocol. 3) COLLABORATORS AND CONTACTS: Nanibaa Garrison, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Palo Alto, CA; David S. Edmunds, Environmental Director, Pinoleville Pomo Nation, Ukiah, California; Ryan Shelby, Berkeley Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. Candidate and member of the Berkeley Energy and Sustainable Technologies Design Lab; Ripan Malhi, Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois. 3) GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCHERS: Hekia Bodwitch, Ted Grudin, and Pam Mei Graybeal, all Ph.D. students at UC Berkeley, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. TARGET AUDIENCES: 1) TARGET AUDIENCES: A diverse set of individuals and social actors constitute the audience for this work. They include bioscientists and other STEM field researchers and administrators, federal funders, students, bioethicists, biotechnology industry representatives, and the press. The second audience consists of tribal regulators including those that I addressed in November and continue to address throughout the year about the intersections of technoscience and indigenous governance. The third audience consists of undergraduate students in my "Society, Environment, and Culture" course and students in my graduate indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to science, technology, and environment class. This course includes UC Berkeley graduate students in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), Ethnic Studies, and Anthropology, and a postdoctoral fellow from ESPM. This class is divided between men and women with three people of color (one Native American and three Latinos) who have special interests in the intersections of feminism, race, and colonialisms with histories and practices of science and technology and conceptions of "environment." A fourth audience is comprised of students, faculty, and community members who attended my AAA lecture in Montreal and my multiple guest lectures at Meiji University and Sophia University in Tokyo. 2) EFFORTS: a talk on Native American bioscientists in Montreal, Canada at the American Anthropological Association. Multiple guest lectures during November and December at Meiji University and Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan on indigenous peoples and the ethics of science and technology. I also organized with Cori Hayden of UC Berkeley anthropology a symposium in April 2011 that in part featured indigenous concepts of nature and culture and how this might change natural science research. The symposium was called "Why the Animal Queer Animalities, Indigenous Naturecultures, and Critical Race Approaches to Animal Studies." We had well over 100 registrants from across university departments, both faculty and students, as well as community members from outside the university. Finally, I featured speakers during the spring 2011 ESPM colloquium that I co-organized who discuss the intersections of indigenous and feminist approaches to technoscience. The colloquium is attended by faculty and students from ESPM, from across campus, and sometimes draws community members. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.
Impacts
CHANGE IN KNOWLEDGE/RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS: Indigenous bioscientists are represented in early career positions, i.e. graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships. They don't have the influence substantially change make their fields' practices more multicultural. I may follow them for more years, a "cohort study," in order to see how they change scientific questions, practices, methods and ethics. I focus on the different metaphysics that indigenous bioscientists potentially bring to scientific work, how they reconcile indigenous worldviews, both material and immaterial, with non-indigenous scientific understandings that see science as dealing only with materiality. I share lessons in on-line, journal, and book publications. POLICY CONTRIBUTIONS: I am now a member of SACNAS's editorial advisory board. This is an opportunity to shape content in a magazine that highlights Native Americans and Chicanos in scientific practice and policy. I gave a talk on DNA concepts in relation to Native American identity at the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Citizenship Forum in Edmonton, Canada in November. I addressed hundreds of First Nation policy makers and community members. The talk resulted in a publication in "Aboriginal Policy Studies" published by the University of Alberta. Consequently, the Alberta Association of Chiefs and one California tribe asked me to address their constituencies as they ponder DNA rules in First Nations and tribal governance. In addition to delivering my own research and policy recommendations, I network indigenous governing bodies with science advisers who can help them incorporate sound science into their political decision-making. TEACHING CONTRIBUTIONS: This research continues to inform my evolving graduate course, "Feminist, Indigenous, and Postcolonial Approaches to Science, Technology, and Environment." The course pushes students to take seriously indigenous knowledge production and encourages them to open up their ideas of what constitutes science, to think critically about the role of power and capital in helping constitute "science" as a universal form of knowledge or body of knowledges that travel. In turn, teaching the course continues to help me deepen the theoretical foundation of my ethnographic project and helps me revise interview questions. I have incorporated insights gained from U.S.-based indigenous bioscientists to teach about how indigenous critiques of genome science are changing how research is done. Students are eager for real-life examples of how to reconfigure research as more collaborative. They also come to appreciate the considerable work involved in setting up a collaboration. CONTRIBUTIONS TO STUDENT AND VISITING SCHOLAR RECRUITMENT: My AAA talk in Montreal generated several requests to work with me on future research by prospective graduate students in the U.S. and Canada, and from an impressive postdoctoral scholar from France/Canada who will bring his own funding.
Publications
- PUBLICATIONS TallBear K. 2012. The Political Economy of Tribal Citizenship in the US: Lessons for Canadian First Nations Aboriginal Policy Studies 1(3): 70-79.
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Progress 01/01/10 to 12/31/10
Outputs
OUTPUTS: 1) PROJECT SCOPING & BACKGROUND RESEARCH: In 2010 I continued reviewing theoretical literature from indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial science and technology studies. 2) BEGAN INTERVIEWS: I also worked on the genetic science interviews, refining research questions and began interviewing indigenous geneticists who work on both human and nonhuman genetics. This work will be ongoing throughout 2011 as I continue investigating the roles that indigenous scientists and their collaborators play in both diversifying and democratizing genetic science practices and institutions and their roles in informing tribal governance of research. 3) FUNDRAISING: I was awarded a basic research grant in September, 2010 from the National Science Foundation Social and Behavioral Sciences Division, Program Science, Technology, and Society (NSF 08-553) entitled: "Constituting Knowledge across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: An Ethnographic Study of Indigenous Technoscientists and Their Collaborators." I was awarded $101,016 for the first year to pay for travel and interview expenses, equipment, and for three semesters of graduate student research assistantships. 4)BLOG ON TECHNOSCIENCE AND INDIGENEITY: I have started a blog at kimtallbear.com on which I blog about my activities and findings that are funded, in part, by this project. I blogged, for example, from the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) Presidential address in November, 2010 in which the association president documented changes in collaborative research relationships between indigenous groups and genetic scientists due to indigenous peoples' pressures for more collaborations. My posts have been re-posted, for example, on the Canadian Institutes for Health Research Web site. Furthermore, my analysis of this speech and the change it documents in research relationships is featured in the final chapter of my forthcoming book, noted below. 5) INVITED SPEAKER AT UNIVERSITIES AND TRIBAL FORUMS NATIONALLY: During the reporting period I spoke about scientific research in indigenous communities at forums including a national tribal government conference; in multiple UC Berkeley biology, environmental science, and public health classes; in large public lectures for both UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources Homecoming lecture series and at Bard College at Simon's Rock (Great Barrington, MA); and at the University of Arizona in an indigenous researcher speaker series. PARTICIPANTS: 1) INDIVIDUALS: Kim TallBear as Principal Investigator. 2) PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS: None officially under same research protocol. 3) COLLABORATORS AND CONTACTS: Jenny Reardon, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California-Santa Cruz; Deborah Bolnick, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas; Roderick McInnes, Professor of Genetics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada; Laura Arbour, Professor of Clinical Genetics, University of British Columbia; Nanibaa Garrison, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Palo Alto, CA; David S. Edmunds, Environmental Director, Pinoleville Pomo Nation, Ukiah, California; Ryan Shelby, Berkeley Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. Candidate and member of the Berkeley Energy and Sustainable Technologies Design Lab; Michelle Baker, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9, Office of Pollution Prevention and Solid Waste. TARGET AUDIENCES: 1) TARGET AUDIENCES: A diverse set of individuals and social actors constitute the audience for this work. They include attendees at American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) annual meeting in Washington D.C., which included genome researchers, clinicians, bioethicists, regulators, federal funders, students, biotechnology industry representatives, and the press. The second audience consists of tribal regulators whom I addressed in October about the technical and cultural issues of using genetic testing in conferring tribal citizenship. I also spoke about the need for tribes to be more active in commissioning, governing, and building human resource capacity on reservations through research activities. The third audience consists of undergraduate students in my "Society, Environment, and Culture" course and students in my graduate indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to science, technology, and environment class. This course includes UC Berkeley graduate students in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), the Energy Resources Group (ERG), African-American Studies, Anthropology, and Science Education as well as one biomedical Anthropology student from UC San Francisco. This class is evenly divided between men and women with three people of color (African American, Native American, and Latino) who have special interests in the intersections of feminism, race, and colonialisms with histories and practices of science and technology and conceptions of "environment." A fourth audience is comprised of students, faculty, and community members who attended my university and public lectures in Massachusetts, Arizona, and Berkeley during 2010. 2) EFFORTS: three talks on democratizing genome science at the University of Arizona, the University of California at Berkeley College of Natural Resources homecoming, and at Simon's Rock at Bard College. I am also engaged in a year-long independent reading on genetics and race with a Navajo geneticist from Stanford who is retraining as a bioethicist. She is well positioned to become a very influential bioethicist in the field of indigenous peoples' genome research. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Not relevant to this project.
Impacts
CHANGE IN KNOWLEDGE/RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS: In doing archival work and conversing with high level genetic scientists from the U.S. and Canada I came to understand more deeply how indigenous critiques of genome science and calls for collaborative research are re-shaping what counts as ethical research in mainstream institutions. Collaborative research and indigenous governance of research is institutionalized in Canada, thus presenting lessons and challenges for the U.S. genome research community. I analyze and share these lessons in on-line, journal, and book publications for 2010. POLICY CONTRIBUTIONS: In 2010, I served as an adviser to the president of the American Society for Human Genetics president, Dr. Roderick McInnes of McGill University (Canada) as he prepared his annual presidential address. He presented the address to nearly 7,000 genetic scientists and clinicians at the annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on November 3, 2010. McInnes took lessons learned in Canada and from advisers such as myself to call on genome scientists internationally to take seriously indigenous cultural critiques of genome science, to recognize subject property rights in biological samples, indigenous political jurisdiction on their lands, and subject interests in the economic development that often surrounds genetic science. He called on genome scientists to see indigenous peoples as more than simply repositories of biological samples. This was a groundbreaking speech that is forthcoming in March 2011 in the American Journal of Human Genetics. TEACHING CONTRIBUTIONS: This research continues to inform my evolving graduate course, "Feminist, Indigenous, and Postcolonial Approaches to Science, Technology, and Environment." The course pushes students to take seriously indigenous knowledge production and encourages them to open up their ideas of what constitutes science, to think critically about the role of power and capital in helping constitute "science" as a universal form of knowledge or body of knowledges that travel. In turn, teaching the course continues to help me deepen the theoretical foundation of my ethnographic project and helps me revise interview questions. In particular, I have incorporated insights gained in conversations with Canadian genome scientists to teach about how indigenous critiques of genome science have actually changed how research is done on the ground. Students are always eager for examples of how to reconfigure research questions and processes such that they can be more collaborative and democratic in their own projects. Of course, students also gain an appreciation of the considerable work involved in setting up a truly collaborative project. CONTRIBUTIONS TO NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENT RECRUITMENT: My conversations with the UC-Berkeley/Pinoleville Pomo National collaborative green housing design project folks continue to generate Native American student recruitment opportunities. I just met with a promising student lead, a tribal cultural resource manager from Yurok. He will apply to UCB for 2012-13 to work on a project related to the California Marine Life Protection Act and tribal interests in that.
Publications
- 1. Reardon J and TallBear K 2010. "Your DNA is Our History." Genomics, Anthropology, and the Construction of Whiteness as Property. Current Anthropology (accepted).
- 2. TallBear K 2011. A Genetic Articulation of Indigeneity. (Submitted) Social Studies of Science. (pending).
- 3. Edmunds DS, Shelby R, James A, Steele L, Baker M, Perez Y, and TallBear K. 2011. Housing You Can Live With: the Pinoleville Pomo Nation/UC Berkeley Co-Designed House as an Embodiment Cultural Sovereignty. Progressive Planning (pending).
- 4. TallBear K. Native American DNA: Origins, Race, and Governance. 2012. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press (accepted).
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Progress 10/01/09 to 03/31/10
Outputs
OUTPUTS: 1) PROJECT SCOPING & BACKGROUND RESARCH: During 2009-10 while I complete another project and manuscript, my efforts on this project have been to further scope and refine proposed field research. I performed archival work, reviewing theoretical literature from indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial science and technology studies. I have paid particular attention to postcolonial scholarship from Asia and the Pacific that disrupts the alleged divide between "western science" and "indigenous knowledge." This foundational scholarship supports my ethnographic inquiry into the roles that indigenous technoscientists and their collaborators play in disrupting that binary thus perhaps aiding the diversification and democratization of western scientific fields and reconfigurations of indigenous governance and knowledge practices. 2) EARLY CONVERSATIONS: Conversations with indigenous scholars and their non-indigenous collaborators in the U.S. and New Zealand have lead me to revise the scientific fields I will study. In my AES proposal I anticipated studying indigenous scientists working in genetic, environmental, and archaeological science. I now plan to interview indigenous scientists and their collaborators who work on human and nonhuman genetics, marine science, and scientists and engineers working in fields related to renewable energy development and green building. I also have a more developed list of contacts in these fields and potential case studies for fieldwork in the U.S. (California and other states in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest), Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Major fieldwork will begin this coming fall of 2010. 3) FUNDRDAISING: I submitted a basic research proposal (February 1, 2010) to the National Science Foundation Social and Behavioral Sciences Division, Program of Science, Technology, and Society (STS)(NSF 08-553) entitled: "Constituting Knowledge across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: An Ethnographic Study of Indigenous Technoscientists and Their Collaborators." I requested $308,085 over three years to fund especially international research expenses and six semesters of graduate student research assistantships. 4) GREENBUILD U.S.A. PANEL PRESENTATION AND ARTICLE IN PREPARATION: A project in which I have begun doing participant-observation is the Pinoleville Pomo Nation (PPN)-UC Berkeley engineering partnership to build culturally and environmentally sustainable housing. The tribal-university partnership lead to a high visibility panel presentation at the U.S. Greenbuild symposium in November in Phoenix, AZ. A Berkeley engineering graduate student, U.S. EPA greenbuilding expert, tribal program director, and I presented four talks highlighting the opportunities to democratize greenbuilding and the national LEED standards by using a "co-design" process developed by Berkeley engineers. Our panel attracted 300, filling the venue to capacity. I applied social theories of science and technology studies and indigenous knowledges to analyze the collaborative knowledge production of this project. We are currently working on a policy-oriented co-authored article based on our panel for an environmental planning journal. PARTICIPANTS: 1) INDIVIDUALS: Kim TallBear as Principal Investigator. 2) PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS: None officially under same research protocol. 3) COLLABORATORS AND CONTACTS: David Edmunds, Environmental Director, Pinoleville Pomo Nation, Ukiah, California; Ryan Shelby, Berkeley Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. Candidate and member of the Berkeley Energy and Sustainable Technologies Design Lab; Michelle Baker, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9, Office of Pollution Prevention and Solid Waste; Aroha Mead, Senior Lecturer in Maori Management, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand; Nanibaa Garrison, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Palo Alto, CA; Mike Barns, Architect, and Mike Barns & Associates (Auckland, New Zealand) and Director of Sustainability, Hyder Holfords (Dubai, United Arab Emirates). TARGET AUDIENCES: 1) TARGET AUDIENCES: As this project is still in the planning and conceptualization stage, the audiences served to date are limited to a nonetheless diverse set of individuals and social actors. They include attendees at the panel I participated in at the U.S. Greenbuilding 2010 symposium, 300 individuals in total from the building industry; from tribal and city planning departments; other city, state, tribal, and federal regulators; and students. The second audience consists of students in my indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to science, technology, and environment class. This course includes graduate students in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) and Geography at UC Berkeley as well as one biomedical Anthropology student from UC San Francisco. 13 out of 15 students are women and three are people of color (African American and Latino) who have special interests in the intersections of feminism, race, and colonialisms with histories and practices of science and technology and conceptions of "environment." 2) EFFORTS: U.S. Greenbuilding symposium talk on democratizing greenbuilding; and hosting a graduate class panel and discussion on the same project and efforts between the university and a Native American tribe directed at collaborative research and housing design. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: The objectives and approach to this project remain the same. But I have decided not to study indigenous scientists and their collaborators working in the field of archaeology, but rather in marine science. This will enable me to stick with themes that are more easily understood as "environmental" and consistent with the overall goals of my home department. But perhaps more importantly, I am following the ethnographic trail in making this change. My early conversations with Maori contacts have alerted me to intense Maori activity in marine science fields in New Zealand. It appears to be an active site of indigenous and western technoscientific cross-cultural work. There are important ramifications for indigenous resource management and cultural practice and for scientific practices and cultures as a result of Maori being involved in marine science activities that I would like to explore. In addition, I have deepened my focus within the field of "environmental science" to include inquiry into the tribal-university co-designed greenbuilding project as an example of work that troubles the divide between western technoscience and indigenous knowledge.
Impacts
1) CONTRIBUTIONS TO TEACHING: In the course of doing the literature review for this project, I developed the graduate course, "Feminist, Indigenous, and Postcolonial Approaches to Science, Technology, and Environment." The course follows the theoretical thread of this project by challenging the alleged dichotomy between western science and indigenous knowledge. The course pushes students to take seriously indigenous knowledge production and encourages them to open up their ideas of what constitutes science, to think critically about the role of power and capital in helping constitute "science" as a universal form of knowledge or body of knowledges that travel. In turn, teaching the course is helping to deepen the theoretical foundation of my ethnographic project and helping me configure and revise research hypotheses and interview questions. 2) CONTRIBUTIONS TO NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENT RECRUITMENT: Especially through my participant observation in the Greenbuild panel and its related university-tribal collaborative project, I have been involved in recruiting California Native American youth from the involved tribes to apply to UC-Berkeley. In the spring of 2010 I also hosted the Greenbuild panel members and tribal community members in the above-noted graduate course, thereby exposing community members to UC Berkeley graduate education. 3) RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS: Aside from the literature review and building the theoretical foundations of this project, ethnographic results are yet to emerge. As noted earlier, ethnographic work will begin in earnest in Fall 2010.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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