Gordon McOuat’s research project has a long name and an even longer list of contributors. McOuat, a University of King’s College professor, is the project director of Cosmopolitanism and the Local in Science and Nature: Creating an East/West Partnership.

It’s a far ranging project, involving a dozen researchers and collaborators from universities including Dalhousie, Harvard, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and the National University of Singapore.

“The project aims to open up new perspectives on the genesis and place of globalized science, expose a largely Eurocentric scholarly community in Canada to widening international perspectives and methods, and create a robust international research network that can support student and scholar exchanges, summer schools, workshops, lecture series, course development and more,” McOuat explains.

The three-year, $200,000-project launched this summer and is funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

McOuat points to the project’s potential to create a connected network of students and scholars across Canada, India and Southeast Asia: “Communities that haven’t networked very much yet.”

“Our world is increasingly shaped locally and internationally by science and technology. This fact is a source of both social hope and anxiety,” he says.
“We also must look internationally, especially to those societies facing the full force of a developing scientific modernity. India, for instance, is now one of the largest producers of scientists and technologists in the world today, and scholarly and public discourses on science and technology are urgently needed if fundamentalism, for or against science, is to be avoided.”