Science, Technology and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard

Date: 

Monday, March 25, 2019, 1:15pm to 3:15pm

Location: 

CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S050

"Repossessing the Wilderness: New Deal Sciences in the Eastern Bank of the Cherokee Nation"

Speaker:

Eli Nelson, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Science and Technology Studies Programs, Williams College.

Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University.

Contact:

Tito Carvalho
tito_carvalho@hks.harvard.edu

Chair:

Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP via our online form before Thursday afternoon, March 21st.

Abstract:

Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps--Indian Division (CCC--ID) at the Qualla Boundary employed Eastern Band citizens in forestry, infrastructure development, and public health projects geared toward the stabilization and preservation of both Cherokee people and lands. In this paper, I trace how the CCC—ID mobilized what I term “frontier sciences” to reconstitute sites of uniquely settler American knowledge production in the wake of Progressive era economic, political, and environmental collapses. It was a project born of a scientized imperialist nostalgia that refused to accept the loss of the object of its mourning: the epistemically and technologically productive experience of transgressive encounter, or the frontier. At the same time, the CCC—ID, as a program carried out by the hands of Eastern Band employees, fractured that larger New Deal project, making use of these initiatives for their own political ends. The result was an epistemically and geographically stratified Qualla Boundary, both a frontier and a boundary conceived through the material production of Native science.

Biography:

Eli Nelson (Mohawk) is an assistant professor in the American Studies and Science and Technology Studies programs at Williams College. He works on the history of Native and settler sciences, Indigenous science fiction and futurism, gender and sexuality, and critical Indigenous theory. His current book project, Making Native Science: Indigenous Epistemologies and Settler Sciences in the United States Empire, looks across different Indigenous national contexts and scientific disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries to trace the history of Native science, an episteme that is particular to a settler colonial context in which settler sciences systemically and cyclically work to appropriate and terminate Indigenous bodies, lands, and knowledges in the service of capital and legitimacy production for the settler state. The book explores how Native science emerged as the knowledge production of the cast objects and tools of settler normative sciences