Ph.D. CandidateScience and Technology StudiesCornell University
Epistemology in Flux: Changing Conceptions of What Counts as Clinical Evidence in 20th and 21st Century Russia
Abstract. My dissertation project takes advantage of the unique historical opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Union to explore how scientific methodological commitments and conceptions of what counts as proper evidence change during periods of rapid and profound social, political and economic transformation. In particular, I am concerned with how what counts as objective and reliable clinical evidence, the methodology for producing such evidence, and the actors who get to engage in evidence production have evolved in response to the social and political transformations that shook Russia in the 1990s.