This postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Science and Society Program and the Biology Directorate supports advanced training for Eben Kirksey under Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star at Santa Clara University and ethnographic research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Advanced tutorial training is received in five specific science studies literatures: interessement, social worlds, instrumentation, biodiversity, and infrastructure. The location of the training in northern California affords access to a broader science studies network, enabling the co-PI to stay abreast of cutting-edge scholarship by following a number of speaker series at the multiple campuses in the region.
At the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) an array of scientific instruments and everyday technologies have been brought together to make plants, animals, and microbes relevant to human concerns. The ethnography involves study of the multiple scientific projects that coexist at STRI. This ethnography of a place - the rainforest of central Panama - explores the overlapping social worlds of scientists, parataxonomists, eco-tourists, forest rangers (guardabosques), and Panamanian farmers. Conventional ethnographic methods of participant observation and tape-recorded interviews are used at multiple locations in Panama.
The projects at STRI focus on the forest of central Panama which may be viewed as a "boundary object" that unites multiple social worlds. Boundary objects are meaningful to several intersecting social worlds. Objects come to form a common boundary between multiple worlds by inhabiting them all simultaneously. These objects retain traces of multiple viewpoints and satisfy potentially conflicting sets of concerns. Entrepreneurs bridge different social worlds by bringing agents into collectives. These collectives, oriented around focal species or theoretical problems, assemble broad coalitions of allies. The research project seeks out new empirical evidence to illustrate the dynamics of power at work when multiple collectives and social worlds interact.
The findings are communicated to broad audiences through an academic book length manuscript and articles in the popular media. The PI and co-PI plan a symposium on biodiversity in the Americas and a team-taught undergraduate science studies course.
