Two projects have been selected to receive support through the Dean for Research Innovation Funds for New Ideas in the Social Sciences. 

Atoms for Memory: Nuclear science at Princeton and its impact on the Navajo Nation

Ryo Morimoto, assistant professor of anthropology and the Richard Stockton Bicentennial Preceptor, will lead student researchers from the Nuclear Princeton project in the exploration of Princeton University’s history of nuclear science research and related intergenerational struggles among the Navajo community. From 1944 to 1986, more than 4,500 Navajo people worked at uranium mines in the Southwest, helping to extract over 3.9 million tons of ore. The team will research the unequal human and environmental costs that stem from the atomic bomb project and create a multimedia public digital exhibit called Atoms for Memory. Morimoto, an affiliate of the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the Program in History of Science, and the team will work with the Princeton University Library and the Center for Digital Humanities, with support from the Program on Science and Global Security, to digitize existing oral histories of uranium miners and their families to find intersections with the history of nuclear research at Princeton.

Conservation frontiers: Engaging indigenous ecologies of knowledges

João Biehl, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology, Chair of the Department of Anthropology, and director of the Brazil LAB, and Agustín Fuentes, professor of anthropology, will explore how to combine the ecological knowledge and practices of Amazonian Indigenous peoples with conservation sciences and anthropological perspectives to reshape ideas of conservation and better protect the Amazonian ecosystem. Biehl and Fuentes will collaborate with anthropologist Carlos Fausto, a global scholar at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and a professor at Brazil’s Museu Nacional, and an interdisciplinary group of Princeton young scholars to gain insight into Indigenous perspectives and methods for protecting the rainforest. By engaging anthropological and interdisciplinary research and partnering with Indigenous and local communities, the team aims to develop a working toolkit for Amazonian forest protection that is grounded in history and in Indigenous and local knowledge and practices and in critical dialogue with conservation sciences and agendas.