Social and Political Dynamics of Lab-Community Relations

这个项目重新思考了美国勘探的执行者、目标和地缘政治后果。它调查了不同的女性和男性如何以及为什么在探索旅行中追求，解释和报告知识，以及他们如何应用他们所学到的知识来帮助他们的社区忍受由殖民暴力塑造的世界。探索的历史已经是美国公众非常感兴趣的一个话题；的确，对许多美国人来说，对这片大陆的探索和定居仍然是国家科学和社会的中心故事。因此，这个领域在科学史上提供了一个独特的机会，一个通过引人入胜的故事向公众介绍更丰富的知识生产者的机会，这些故事避开了流行的科学和探索概念中胜利的欧洲中心主义。通过展示美国最具标志性的科学追求之一从一开始就完全多样化，这个项目可以帮助更多的美国人把自己想象成研究人员，并有可能在今天的科学领域取得进步。这个项目问，当我们把所有参与其中的人都包括进来时，美国的勘探是什么样子的？基于跨学科的研究，《知识就是生存》认为土著、黑人和白人探索北美是一种抵抗统治和破坏的智力策略。尽管对土著居民来说，对这片大陆进行了数百年甚至数千年的调查，但非白人探险家几乎完全没有出现在探索史上。这种忽视不仅导致了一个不完整的故事，而且扭曲了该领域的一些核心前提。长期以来，学者们一直强调知识和权力之间的联系，特别是控制土地和人民的野心如何引发探索，以及通过探索发展的知识如何鼓励征服。然而，这些联系只是知识、权力和探索故事的一半。许多美国探险家非但没有寻求统治他人，反而追求那些有望帮助他们自己的人民克服奴役或免于被消灭的发现。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 project rethinks the performers, goals, and geopolitical consequences of American exploration. It investigates how and why diverse women and men pursued, interpreted, and reported knowledge amid exploratory travel and how they applied what they learned to help their communities endure a world shaped by colonial violence. The history of exploration is already a topic of immense interest among the American public; indeed, for many Americans, the exploration and peopling of the continent remains the central story of national science and society. The field thus offers a unique opportunity in the history of science, a chance to introduce the public to a far richer cast of knowledge producers through fascinating stories that eschew the triumphant Eurocentrism embedded in popular conceptions of science and exploration. By demonstrating that one of America’s most iconic scientific pursuits was thoroughly diverse from the beginning, this project can help more Americans envision themselves as researchers and, potentially, advance representation in the sciences today. What, this project asks, does American exploration look like when we include all of the peoples who engaged in it? Based on interdisciplinary research, Knowledge is Survival argues that Indigenous, Black, and white individuals explored North America as an intellectual strategy for resisting domination and destruction. Despite centuries—and, for Indigenous people, millennia—of investigating the continent, non-white explorers have been almost entirely absent from histories of exploration. This neglect has not merely led to an incomplete story but has distorted some of the field’s core premises. Scholars have long emphasized connections between knowledge and power, particularly how ambitions to control lands and peoples engendered exploration and how the knowledge developed through exploration encouraged conquest. However, these connections were only half the story of knowledge, power, and exploration. Far from seeking to rule over others, many American explorers pursued discoveries that promised to help their own people overcome subjection or survive elimination.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.