The History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine in Latin America and the Caribbean (HSTEM LAC)

This course examines the interrelationships between scientific knowledge production, technological development, environmental transformations, medical discourses and practices, politics and power in Latin America and the Caribbean from the colonial period to the present day. We will explore the global circulation of commodities like cocoa and medicinal plants – including abortion medication; Jamaican Black metallurgists’ invention of technologies that drove the Industrial Revolution; ideas of racial immunity to yellow fever in medicine as well as history-writing; insect-scientists’ critiques of technological progress; how indigenous knowledge was appropriated to mass produce hormones for the birth-control pill; the impact of anthropological studies of Black kinship on the European welfare state; how postwar development and welfare programs were connected to the emergence of neoliberalism; and the emergence of dependency theory and world systems theory. These topics will serve as a starting point for broader discussions about social and political epistemology: we will interrogate knowledge circulation as much as ignorance, ask whose contributions have been counted or dismissed, and how to historicise critique and counter narratives and account for internal contradictions in ideological apparatuses. Theory-focussed sessions will engage Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” as a framework for narrating counter-histories and examine contemporary challenges for a global history of science in public.