Abstract
Against the background of the current drive toward diversity in modern scientific communities, this paper explores how a scientific practice might become more diverse by the inclusion of peripheral members. To demonstrate how peripheral members gain contributory expertise in the sciences in the absence of mentors and a readymade community, I present a case study of the Indian physicist C. V. Raman and his early self-training in the analysis of wave phenomena, especially in musical acoustics. Evaluating Raman’s example, I suggest that such peripheral agents might give us helpful pointers about our modern project of bringing diversity into a scientific community.
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Deepanwita Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research interests are in the area of cognitive and cultural studies of science, with an emphasis on emerging and peripheral scientific communities, which operate mostly outside the typical Euro-American contexts. She is working on a book which focuses on the contexts of such science in the early twentieth-century India, especially its physics community.
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Dasgupta, D. Making Research More Diverse: How Peripheral Members Join a Scientific Community. Phys. Perspect. 21, 93–107 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-019-00239-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-019-00239-8