Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Historical Study of Land Use Changes and Emerging Epidemics

该奖项支持研究大英帝国流行病的博士论文研究项目。研究人员将对贝尔法斯特、墨尔本和孟买这三个城市进行比较研究。她将重点关注微生物、殖民地管理者和细菌学家在这三个案例中的核心角色。她将通过对档案文件和其他来源的研究来深入了解使每个地区独特的社会、经济和文化复杂性。她计划展示这三个地区当地环境的具体特征，与大英帝国支持的卫生改善计划和土地利用变化相结合，如何创造出独特的环境，在这些环境中，特定的微生物茁壮成长。拟议的项目从多个学科的来源，并打算为多个学科的观众。她计划在历史系、流行病学、公共卫生系、公共卫生政策中心、气候研究机构主办的会议和研讨会上发表研究成果。该项目采用历史框架，同时涉及科学技术研究领域的一些核心主题。它结合了非人类代理的概念，关注微生物的生态特异性，并使用生态位构建理论来访问局部环境，并绘制出它们与微生物参与者的关系。科学和技术的文化建设，特别是与帝国主义和19世纪的殖民做法有关的文化建设，也将是这个项目的一个重要考虑因素。使用相对较新的社会科学框架来指导这段历史，该项目将与STS合作，其目标是诱导对生命体代理和行动者网络理论作为可行的历史和社会科学框架的新考虑。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award supports a doctoral dissertation research project that studies epidemic diseases in the British Empire. The researcher will develop a comparative study of three cities: Belfast, Melbourne, and Bombay. She will focus on the microbe, the colonial administrator, and the bacteriologist as the central actors in each of the three cases. She will do so by engaging in a study of archival documents and other sources to obtain a deeper understanding of the social, economic, and cultural complexities that make each region unique. She plans to show how specific features of the local environment in these three regions, when combined with plans of sanitary improvement and land use change espoused by the British Empire, served to produce unique environments in which particular microbes thrived. The proposed project draws from multiple disciplinary sources and is intended for multiple disciplinary audiences. The researcher plans to disseminate her research results at conferences and workshops sponsored by history departments, epidemiology and public health departments, public health policy centers, and organizations that engage in climate studies.This project uses a historical frame while engaging with a number of central topics in the field of science and technology studies. It engages with the concept of nonhuman agency with its focus on the ecological specificity of microbes, and it uses Niche Construction Theory to access the localized environments and to draw out their relationship to microbial actors. Cultural construction of science and technology, particularly as it relates to imperialism and nineteenth century colonial practices, will also be an important element of consideration to this project. Using relatively new social scientific frameworks to guide this history, this project will engage with STS in its goal to induce new consideration of the agency of living objects and actor-network theory as a viable historical and social scientific frame.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.