Looking Beyond the Lab: The Young Historians and Philosophers in ASU’s Science Departments
The School of Life Sciences is well known for being the home of cutting-edge science, from massive biotechnology labs and innovative cancer research, to being at the forefront of ancient DNA sequencing and housing one of the biggest social insect research groups in the world.
One of the things that makes SoLS truly unique though, is its interdisciplinarity – not only holding scientists pursuing so many different areas of research, but also being home to scholars who study how and why science works. In particular, the Center for Biology and Society houses a group of early-career historians and philosophers of science who are using their position at ASU to collaborate across diverse fields and developing new ways of teaching ASU students to think about science more critically.
Learn more about a few of the historians and philosophers bringing more nuance to scientific research and the ways it's taught at ASU.
Kelle Dhein
Kelle Dhein didn’t get a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from ASU because he thought it would bring him a lucrative career.\
“I pursued it because I wanted to do something I liked, and I guess I’m just a very stubborn person,” he shrugs.
But after some time doing post-docs at other institutions, Dhein has landed a permanent position back at ASU as an associate faculty member in the newly-launched School of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), a transdisciplinary research center that works to understand a huge variety of real-world complex systems, including everything from the stock market to climate, ant colonies, and the human brain.
Starting this fall, undergraduate students will have a chance to earn their bachelor’s degree in CAS, which is usually only offered at the graduate level, if at all.
“The value of getting the bachelor’s degree is going to be pretty easy to sell,” Dhein argues, “because you’re going to have a really quantitative analytical toolkit when you finish, and you’re going to be a really interdisciplinary thinker.
Dhein is using his HPS background to create a class on the History and Philosophy of Complex Adaptive Systems, which will be one of the core courses of the bachelor’s degree program.
“Complex system science is a really new discipline, and so it’s really up to the sorts of people who are going to get these degrees to decide what the future of the field is going to look like.. And I think [my course], gives them an idea of what the forerunners in the discipline have thought was important and how to address what’s important… Hopefully that can help [students] locate what they care about within this evolving narrative of complex system science.
Outside of his teaching, Dhein continues to do more typical HPS research. However, he’s also gone in a path he never expected to go in: bioethics.
Specifically, Dhein, who is an enrolled member of the Diné Tribe, is a bioethicist on an NIH-funded project with Krystal Tsosie to build a data repository for Indigenous data. In his position, Dhein is helping create data policies that treat the various tribes he’s working with as sovereign nations, rather than ethnic minority groups, as a way of protecting the rights of those tribes to control how their data is stored and used. Indigenous nations historically have had little to no control over their data once it got into the hands of scientists. Dhein’s and Tsosie’s project work on the project is one in a series of many recent efforts to change that, and make sure Indigenous nations are benefitted by the research done with their data, too.
“There really aren’t any historians or philosophers of science who’ve been engaged with Indigenous data sovereignty,” Dhein shares, “So that’s one thing I’m excited about: doing things with my skill set that really matter in this context… It’s nice to be able to bridge the gap between doing this cool HPS stuff that I’ve always liked doing, and then having it influence things that matter for nation states and biobanks and different tribes.”
Dhein is excited about the ways he’s seeing ASU venture into new territory for an academic institution. He witnessed the benefits of it when he was a PhD student in the HPS program: “What has really defined the type of researcher that I am now was always being in close proximity to practicing scientists… Mixing historians and philosophers with the scientists at this institutional level makes it a lot easier for HPS to have an impact on science and be impacted by science.”
Now, as a faculty member, Dhein is witnessing that innovation both through the creation of the School of Complex Adaptive Systems, and through the growing presence of Indigenous scientists.
“Arizona State University, being in the American Southwest, it's important and cool that they're doing Indigenous research, and that they're hiring lots of Indigenous researchers to do that research –– that's new. If you look at any of the demographics for Indigenous peoples in the academy, it's always some super low percentage, especially in HPS or philosophy. So that's another space where it's like, who knows what this is going to lead to? Because it's never been tried before.”
Emma Kitchen
Emma Kitchen has been a historian of evolutionary biology for some time, but her experience at ASU so far feels different from the institutions she’s worked at before.
“It’s really unique to have historians in what, from outside eyes, is the biology department. That’s highly unusual, and really cool. I think having biologists in the same room with historians and philosophers makes for richer questions.”
Kitchen finds the prospect of forging new collaborations at ASU particularly exciting: “Being here makes collaboration really easy, and conversations very natural to have with colleagues. It doesn’t have to be a big event where you bring a representative from each discipline in. You’re just part of the same waters.”
Kitchen shares that she has especially come to value interdisciplinary collaboration after a recent research project she carried out in collaboration with Scott Lidgard, a practicing paleontologist.
“We have very different brains and very different approaches to the work. That was challenging for me, but in a really productive way.”
She and Lidgard investigated the history of how evolutionary theorists and anthropologists have used the metaphor of “living fossils,” the results of which they published in the Journal for the History of Biology last March.
Some biologists use the term “living fossils” to refers to organisms who evolved millions of years ago, and have persisted in nature appearing essentially unchanged, like horseshoe crabs or ginkgo trees. However, Kitchen and Lidgard trace how the term is also wrapped up with the history of problematic ideas about racial hierarchies. European anthropologists used the metaphor to describe Indigenous populations who were disappearing as a result of violent colonization, asserting that Indigenous peoples were essentially maladapted “living fossils” whose lifestyles made them not fit to persisting in the modern world.
“[Lidgard] and I were both surprised to learn how loaded the idea was with cultural assumptions around race and extinction… I think that might be surprising to biologists who advocate the continued use of it.”
Her experience with Lidgard also reinforced her belief in the importance of history of science research: “Not all scientists, I would wager, actively engage with the history of their discipline. And I think that's incredibly important: just as a basic premise of asking why we do things the way we do and what questions we find worth pursuing.”
Kitchen is also excited to bring this way of thinking to younger STEM students. In her last position as a teaching fellow at the University of Chicago, Kitchen was teaching specialized courses to students already well versed in the history of science. At ASU, though, many of the students who Kitchen will teach in the history of medicine course are pre-med. For many of them, the history of medicine course will be the only time in their career that they’ll think through science from a humanities perspective.
Kitchen sees that as an exciting opportunity: “It’s really interesting to think about how to convey these deeper questions and problems in the history of medicine to a student who is approaching medicine as this standard, scientific, modern phenomenon, where we have these diagnostic tools and these ethical questions. How do you convey the value of those through the history of getting there?”
Kitchen and Kate MacCord, the associate faculty member who co-developed the course, worked to make the subject matter engaging. They made the course’s main assignments case studies in which students have to imagine themselves as doctors treating patients at different moments in history.
“It’s kind of like role playing, for people who play those tabletop games. It’s really fun,” Kitchen smiles.
This fall, Kitchen also started teaching an immersive history of science class in which students reconstruct historical experiments and debates.
“Our class has been fascinated to see how [early scientists] experienced the tracking of shadows over time using a humble stick in the ground, for example, and how culturally-specific interpretations of changing shadows became necessary to turn those observations into meaningful knowledge.”
Kitchen has high hopes that her future students will come away from her classes recognizing that science is a process done by people, and influenced by people’s whims.
“[Scientific concepts] don’t just exist in a bubble of scientists asking their questions and doing their methods,” she asserts, “They’re always entangled with broader societal motivation.”
Christopher Rojas
When most early-career professors start teaching, they’re often teaching a syllabus someone else put together on a campus they may have never been to. But when Christopher Rojas started teaching environmental ethics online, the course was more than just familiar to him –– it had shaped his career trajectory.
When Rojas had transferred to ASU, he was “an aimless college student,” he recalls. “But I knew I was interested in philosophy, so I started that as a major.”
That major quickly led him to environmental ethics –– a subject he hadn’t formally studied before, but was intensely passionate about.
“I was a vocal animal rights guy, like I handed out flyers on campus. I wore a chicken suit just to bring awareness to a local chapter of PETA.”
Rojas’s time in the environmental ethics course and discussions with the professor, Ben Minteer, pushed him to think more critically about what kinds of actions would be of more use to the environmental movement. His curiosity about the subject led him to pursue a PhD with Minteer, where he continued questioning how environmental ethics play out in the real world. Specifically, Rojas looked at how protected land areas in Arizona are collaboratively governed, and how people with different ethical and political values are able to come to agreements about the fate of different areas, like the White Tank mountains in west Phoenix.
Since finishing his PhD, Rojas has continued working on collaborative governance questions as part of a working group called the “CollaboLab,” led by Mike Schoon.
“[We’re] trying to understand what exactly makes collaborations in environmental contexts work,” Rojas explains, “What are the ingredients that are needed to cook a recipe of success, basically.”
When Rojas became an associate faculty member in the Biology and Society program, he also
helped create an online version of the environmental ethics course he knew so well, which he’s taught for years now.
“It’s a really weird, full circle moment,” Rojas says, “I doubt there’s anyone on campus that has that particular experience.”
Rojas isn’t leaving the course the same as it was when he first took it over a decade ago, though. This spring, he’s hoping to launch a version of the course that brings in information on topics like environmental justice, law and policy, and the emotions that come with living in times of ecological crises.
“Eco-anxiety is something more and more students are expressing to me,” Rojas says, especially because so much of the course is spent exploring issues like accelerating biodiversity loss, climate change, and the fact that many people still don’t accept or care that those issues are actually happening.
Rojas hopes to make space in the course to not only point out all that is wrong in humans’ relationship to the environment now, but also help give students some hope about the future.
“We should not de-prioritize environmental causes because the outlook appears grim,” Rojas says, “Not working on these issues guarantees it will be."