Doctoral Dissertation Research: Rivers of Milk: Dairy Science, Environment, and Technopolitics of Food Infrastructures

Over the last several decades human taste for and dependence on dairy has become a key area of concern in the debates about animal justice and the environment. This doctoral dissertation project analyses universalist accounts of cattle-led environmental degradation by highlighting how different actors–scientific experts and lay breeders, dairy farmers and milk traders, colonial bureaucrats and postcolonial politicians - conceptualized and connected dairy development with economic and political projects in colonial and post-colonial contexts between 1880-1970.

These years constituted the peak of the British colonial military’s experiments with organizing the milk supply, and they also mark the beginning of the world’s largest dairy development program. By investigating knowledge production about cattle, fodder, and milk, this project asks three broad questions: 1) what values, politics and concerns drove scientific experiments and public anxiety with purity, productivity, and the health of milk and the livestock 2) what role did the politics of race and caste play in the material organization of dairy infrastructures? and finally, 3) how did dairy development projects affect the cattle, cattle herders and pastoralists, and urban and rural environments?

This project applies historical and qualitative methods to archival material. Sources include popular and scientific journals and outlets that focused on animal husbandry, dairying, and agriculture as well as archival sources that focus on policies related to dairying and dairy development in the twentieth century. By foregrounding knowledge production about milk and cattle as a highly contested political and social process, this project connects critical scholarship on science and technology with histories of food, environment, caste, and race.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.