kbouldin@weber.ucsd.edu

Ph.D. Student, Department of Communication/Science Studies Program, University of California, San Diego.

Master of Science in Science and Technology Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Cum Laude, September 2005.
Thesis: “Picturing the Pieces: the Body in Images on the World Wide Web”
Advisors: Anne Beaulieu and Olga Amsterdamska

Bachelor of Arts in Geology, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, Cum Laude, June 1997.
Senior Thesis: “Mapping Miocene through Pleistocene unconformities on the Continental Shelf off the Central Oregon Coast”

My research interests developed out of a background in geology and museums, although I never formally worked as a geologist. After my undergraduate education, I spent 7 years working at museums of science, history of science, and technology.  I spent most of that time at The Bakken Library and Museum, a museum that focuses on electricity and magnetism, their history and relationship to everyday life. There, I taught courses on history of electricity, invention and circuitry workshops, and designed exhibits, all for elementary school students.

I began to ask how images are framed culturally and socially, and what is the role of these images and frames in communication with people from different backgrounds.  These questions lead me to the field of Science and Technology Studies.  In this light, the aim of my Master’s thesis was to explore social and scientific assumptions about the body, elements of visual representation that influence or are influenced by those latent social understandings, and how the technology of the World Wide Web both reflects and shapes the content, mediating how the knowledge is conveyed. 

I would like to focus on socio-cultural exchanges that surround the sharing of scientific and health ideas through images. I am interested in the symbolic means and abstractions, specifically visual representations, by which we make order of the world around us and by which messages and observations are shared between people and among communities.  I want to explore how understandings of the body are visually and technologically presented, how images are used across multiple mediums, and how the resulting representation and negotiation of meaning inform and mutually transform each other. 

I would also like to study how the Internet is creating new patterns, geographies, and networks of knowledge, and how this holds significance for the interpretations and understandings developed by people not grounded in the same socio-cultural experiences and histories.