N i c h o l a s B u c h a n a n

Nicholas Seong Chul Buchanan

Doctoral Candidate and
Fellow of the MIT Martin Family Society for Sustainability

Program in History and Anthropology of Science and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

nscb@mit.edu

I'm a doctoral candidate in the Program in History and Anthropology of Science and Technology (HASTS) at MIT, a graduate program jointly run by the departments of History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. I'm also a fellow of the MIT Martin Family Society for Sustainability. My educational background is in Geography, with a focus on the human and physical dimensions of environmental change.

My research focuses on questions of indigenous peoples, rural communities, and environmental legality. My dissertation, which is motivated by concern for the struggles engendered by the profound environmental and social transformations underway today in rural America, is an historical and ethnographic exploration of resource management in action. The dissertation follows disputes over water, land, and endangered species and considers the oft-fraught interactions between different ways of knowing and living in nature; the strengthening interconnections between scientific and legal authority and the responses of different groups to this situation; the interplay of cultures and environments; and the emergence of new configurations of governance meant to address the perceived shortcomings of top-down regulations.

I've TA'ed in courses on law and society and the history of technology in the United States, and in 2008, I will teach History 103 (21H.103), "American Indian History." With Eve Darian-Smith and Chris Anderson, I'm founder and coordinator of the Collaborative Research Network on Law and Indigeneity of the Law and Society Association. Since beginning graduate school, I've held a number of fellowships, including the MIT Kenan Sahin Presidential Graduate Fellowship and the US Department of Education Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship.

Education

• Doctoral Candidate (2003 – ), Program in History and Anthropology of Science and Technology, MIT.
• BA in Geography (2002), with Highest Honors, Highest Distinction, and Phi Beta Kappa, UC Berkeley.

Some Recent Work

• Review of The Machine in America, by Carroll Pursell. Agricultural History (forthcoming).
• “Making Histories: Expert Witnesses, Difference, and the Legal Production of the American Indian Past.” Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, Berlin, Germany (July 2007).
• “The Legal Contestation of American Indian Authenticities.” Session organizer. Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, Berlin, Germany (July 2007).
• “Negotiating Environmental Governance: Science, Law, and Indigenous Knoweldges along the Klamath River.” Northeast Law and Society Meeting, Amherst, MA (May 2007).
• "Politics of Uncertainty: Drought, Fish, and Environmental Conflict in the Klamath Basin, 2001-2004." Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, Baton Rouge, LA (February 2007).
• "Food-Processing." In Eric Arnesen ed. Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History. New York: Routledge, (2006).
• "Becoming Scientific Experts: Resource Management and Tribal Governance in Oregon and California." Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, Vancouver, BC (November 2006).
• "The Compulsory Pastoral: The Failure of Forced Agriculture on the Klamath Indian Reservation, 1860-1900." Research in Progress II, MIT, Cambridge, MA (April 2006).
• "Making Environmental Truth: Causes and Uses of Expert Disagreement in Environmental Planning." Presented at the Workshop on Governance for Sustainable Development, Institut für angewandte Ökologie (Institute for Applied Ecology), Berlin, Germany, (February 2006).
• "The Atomic Meal: The Cold War and Irradiated Foods, 1945-1963." History and Technology, vol. 21, no. 2 (2005).