About the Project

The purpose of the project for creating a Centre for Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine Studies (C-STEMS) and bringing researchers together, in a long-term form. It intends to bridge departments/Faculties and capitalizes on existing expertise, enhancing contextual research and learning around STEMS.

It seeks to foster interdisciplinary collaborative research projects regarding the social context of science, technology, and medicine (sub-projects currently in process: (1) the impact of migration developments on modern medicine and science (a data base research project), (2) research into the material culture of science (UofC botanical and seed collections as well as the Alberta Health Services historical instrument collection), and (3) the visual imagery of medicine, science and technology (from anatomy to modern neuro-imaging).

The project seeks to bring faculty and researchers synergistically together in a centre, to enable their long-term research collaboration. While researchers in public health and medicine would be an integral part of this project, the research activities aim at further bridging departments and Faculties and capitalize on existing expertise and synergies, to enhance contextual research and learning around science, technology, environment, and medicine.

Beyond the scope of the UofC campus boundaries, this project also develops fruitful ways to engage other cultural institutions in Calgary and area (the Glenbow Museum, Whyte Museum, Alberta Health Services Archives), to foster history of medicine as well as science and technology studies research in Southern Alberta. In the scholarly literature, studies of science, technology, environment, and medicine in their cultural contexts have often been confined to uni-disciplinary forms of knowledge-making. What this project wants to achieve, in an innovative way, is the interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration between disciplines about the ways of knowledge creation in the medical and scientific sphere. Based on the material collections available, the relationship between societal interests and the processes of science can be more adequately understood. This project synthesizes such perspectives and advances science in context knowledge.

The ultimate benefit will be in fostering collaborative research endeavours in a public university, the involvement of students and trainees in these collaborative and interdisciplinary settings, and the sustainability of history of medicine research in tight alliance with contemporary public understanding of science.