For the last two years, we have conducted ethnographic research on a federally‑funded undergraduate program intended to increase the number and competitiveness of underrepresented minorities in research science careers. While religion is not addressed within the program, or in the undergraduate science curriculum more generally, some students profess religious convictions in private spaces. In this chapter, we examine how students and professor--and we, as researchers--manage the relationship between science and religion with each other, in and out of the college science classroom. We will explore when and for what reasons science and religion are treated as mutually exclusive and incompatible and when and for what reasons they are experienced as culturally congruent. If individuals do not learn to negotiate this dilemma in school, where and through what social means are they educated in these matters? We anticipate that Durkheim's notion of "collective effervescence" will be important to our analysis. That is, lab procedures can be compared to collective religious rituals; journal clubs and conferences, to religious services (even revivals) for the elect; talks given by guest speakers, to testimonials; the trope of the lone scientist in the lab coat, to the ascetic monk sacrificing himself for the common good; and the animal sacrifices required of many experiments, to religious offerings. The students' emotional states are likely to be heightened via the program's curriculum‑in‑practice. But science classrooms--as well as the social scientific research on science education--represent science and religion in ways that do not reflect the way they are practiced and experienced socially.
Paper