Doctoral Dissertation Research: Rivers of Milk: Dairy Science, Environment, and Technopolitics of Food Infrastructures

在过去的几十年里，人类对乳制品的口味和依赖已经成为动物正义和环境辩论中关注的一个关键领域。这个博士论文项目通过强调不同的参与者——科学专家和非专业饲养者、奶农和牛奶贸易商、殖民官僚和后殖民政治家——如何将1880-1970年间殖民和后殖民背景下的乳业发展与经济和政治项目概念化并联系起来，分析了牛导致的环境退化的普遍主义解释。这几年是英国殖民军队组织牛奶供应实验的巅峰时期，也标志着世界上最大的乳制品发展计划的开始。通过调查关于牛、饲料和牛奶的知识生产，该项目提出了三个广泛的问题：1)什么价值观、政治和关注推动了科学实验和公众对牛奶和牲畜的纯度、生产力和健康的焦虑？ 2)种族和种姓政治在乳制品基础设施的物质组织中发挥了什么作用？最后，3)乳制品开发项目如何影响牛、牧民和牧民以及城市和农村环境？本项目将历史和定性方法应用于档案材料。来源包括关注畜牧业、乳业和农业的流行和科学期刊和渠道，以及关注20世纪与乳业和乳业发展有关的政策的档案来源。通过将关于牛奶和牛的知识生产作为一个高度争议的政治和社会过程的前景，该项目将科学技术的批判性学术与食物、环境、种姓和种族的历史联系起来。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。

Over the last several decades human taste for and dependence on dairy has become a key area of concern in the debates about animal justice and the environment. This doctoral dissertation project analyses universalist accounts of cattle-led environmental degradation by highlighting how different actors–scientific experts and lay breeders, dairy farmers and milk traders, colonial bureaucrats and postcolonial politicians - conceptualized and connected dairy development with economic and political projects in colonial and post-colonial contexts between 1880-1970. These years constituted the peak of the British colonial military’s experiments with organizing the milk supply, and they also mark the beginning of the world’s largest dairy development program. By investigating knowledge production about cattle, fodder, and milk, this project asks three broad questions: 1) what values, politics and concerns drove scientific experiments and public anxiety with purity, productivity, and the health of milk and the livestock 2) what role did the politics of race and caste play in the material organization of dairy infrastructures? and finally, 3) how did dairy development projects affect the cattle, cattle herders and pastoralists, and urban and rural environments?This project applies historical and qualitative methods to archival material. Sources include popular and scientific journals and outlets that focused on animal husbandry, dairying, and agriculture as well as archival sources that focus on policies related to dairying and dairy development in the twentieth century. By foregrounding knowledge production about milk and cattle as a highly contested political and social process, this project connects critical scholarship on science and technology with histories of food, environment, caste, and race.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.