Science & Technology Studies

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Open Access
Anticipating the Astronaut: Subject Formation in Early American Space Medicine, 1949-1959
(2019-03-05) Bimm, Ernest Jordan; Jones-Imhotep, Edward
This project expands the scope of existing Space Race histories of the American astronaut mostly focused on daring test-pilots in the 1960sby examining a prior decade of research conducted by doctors and psychologists in the military field of space medicine on a surprising array of non-test-pilot subjects. Examining the historical, social, cultural, and political dimensions of space medicines pre-NASA work, which began in 1949, reveals two key insights. The first is that the astronaut emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and developed in concert with the Cold War for a decade before NASA began operations. The second is that the kind of person space medicine experts came to consider right for space was not solely determined by the requirements of spacecraft control and environmental systems, but also by cultural ideas about bodies, minds, technology, and extreme environments in post-war American society. Based on research conducted at NASA, USAF, and NARA archives, this study examines four nearly-forgotten but revealing episodes in which non-test-pilot subjects were used to establish standards and practices for astronauts later adopted and adapted by NASA. This projects four main chapters each focus on work with a different type of subject: a young, non-flying airmans week-long ordeal playing the role of astronaut in the first Space Cabin Simulator; a mountain-based study of high-altitude Indigenous people for astronaut acclimatization; the post-flight lives of monkeys Able and Baker, Americas first celebrity space animals; and the Lovelace Woman in Space Program, a comparative study of women pilots for space fitness. Beyond the purely technical problem of Who can survive a spaceflight?, this work developing the astronaut posed a more fundamental but unspoken question about Americans: Who should fight the Cold War? Critically examining space medicines work with these non-test-pilot subjects defamiliarizes the astronaut, recasting this utopian hero of the civilian Space Race as an older Cold War military creation with a surprisingly dystopian origin. Moving beyond space-race mythologizing, or internalist scientific progress narratives, this approach challenges the enduring gendered and racialized vision of the white, male, military pilot at its origin in an effort to demilitarize the astronaut and human ventures in space.
Open Access
Break, Make, Retake: Interrogating the Social and Historical Dimensions of Making as a Design Practice
(2019-03-05) Boeva, Yana; Jones-Imhotep, Edward
Making and digital fabrication technologies are the focus of bold promises. Among the most tempting are that these activities and processes require little initial skill, knowledge, and expertise. Instead, they enable their acquisition, opening them up to everyone. Makerspaces and fab labs would blur the identities between professional and amateur, designer and engineer, maker and hacker, ushering in a broad-based de-professionalization. Prototyping and digital fabrication would unite design and manufacturing in ways that resemble and revive traditional craftwork. These activities and processes promise the reindustrialization of places where manufacturing has disappeared. These promises deploy historical categories and conditionsexpertise, design, craft production, manufacturing, post- industrial urbanismwhile claiming to transform them. This dissertation demonstrates how these proposals and narratives rely on imaginaries in which countercultural practices become mainstream by presenting a threefold argument. First, making and digital fabrication sustain supportive environments that reconfigure contemporary design practice. Second, making and digital fabrication simultaneously reshape the categories of professional, amateur, work, leisure, and expertise; but not always in the ways its proponents suggest. Third, as making and digital fabrication propagate, they reproduce traditional practices and values, negating much of their countercultural and alternative capacities. The dissertation supports these claims through a multi-sited and multinational ethnographic investigation of the historical and social effects of making and digital fabrication on design practice and the people and places enacting. The study lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, and design research. In addressing the argument throughout this scholarship, it explores three central themes: (1) the idea that making and digital fabrication lead to instant materialization of design while re-uniting design with manufacturing; (2) the amount of skill and expertise expected for participation in these practices and how these are encoded in rhetoric and in practice; and (3) the material and social infrastructures that configure making as a design practice. The dissertation demonstrates that that the perceived marginality of making, maker cultures, digital fabrication allows for its bolder promises to thrive invisibly by concealing other social issues, while the societal contributions of this technoculture say something different on the surface.
Open Access
Dancing in Chains: A History of Friedrich Nietzsche's Physiological Relativism
(2017-07-26) Mitchell, Benjamin David; Steigerwald, Joan
This study examines the historical development of Friedrich Nietzsches physiological relativism through a reading of his private and published works as well as several of the periodicals and scientific popularizations with which he was familiar. Nietzsches early interest in the relationship between genius and physiology was influenced by Arthur Schopenhauers insistence that geniuses were able to intuitively understand the objective world because of their unique physiological organization. However, the more physiology Nietzsche encountered the more doubts he had about Schopenhauers philosophical claims and Richard Wagners re-articulation of them. Nietzsches rejection of Schopenhauer and Wagner can be seen in his changing assessment of the limits of knowledge and the meaning of genius, of physiological, moral, and psychological vivisection, and how he came to see a close relationship between cruelty, necessity, and knowledge. Nietzsches understanding of life as a process of dynamic self-regulation featured many similarities with other physiological thinkers of his age including Claude Bernard and his idea of the milieu intrieur and Hermann von Helmholtzs account of the active nature of perception. Nietzsches interest in educational reform, experimentation, and self-fashioning was a further development of his exploration of how organisms and individuals achieved a state of relative freedom and independence through their interdependence from their physical and cultural environments. His interest in the intersection of physiology, aesthetics, and epistemology led him to define meaningful freedom and creativity in terms of how individuals related to their own limitations and crafted new limitations for themselves. Even basic physiological perceptions were creative, for just as perceptions shaped ideas and experiences, ideas and experiences shaped perceptions. Nietzsches understanding of creativity within limits was the compliment of his idea of how an individuals independence was achieved through more refined forms of interdependence with their physical, perceptual, cultural, and cosmic environments. The bermensch was the culmination of this process. Just as organisms and individuals achieved states of relative independence through interdependence with their environments, the bermenschs independence was achieved through how they tamed contingency by assimilating the cosmos in its entirety by willing the eternal return of the same.
Open Access
Data Governance in Smart Cities: Personal Data as Private Asset, Commons, and/or Public Good?
(2023-12-08) Artyushina, Anna; Birch, Kean D.
Data is increasingly framed as an integral part of municipal governance as city administrations seek to deliver public services online and employ insights from data analytics. Real-time data collection in city spaces and the digital transformation of urban infrastructure are turning cities into “smart cities” according to many commentators. Since these digital technologies often rely on commercial algorithms implemented in public facilities, smart city initiatives are often governed by public-private partnerships. Predictably, smart cities pose new governance challenges in which data access, collection, use, and commercialization often come into conflict with the interests of individual and collective privacy, equality, and democratic participation. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the political economy of this new data governance regime as it marks a transition from mass data collection online to mass data collection in city spaces. This study draws on the concept of assetization, which has emerged in science and technology studies (STS) over the last few years. Assetization theory explores emerging socio-economic arrangements by analyzing the complex processes of co-construction between contemporary capitalism, technology, and society. In the empirical chapters of this thesis, I examine different forms of asset governance as they relate to digital personal data in two smart city initiatives: Sidewalk Toronto/Quayside and the City of Barcelona’s DECODE. These forms of asset governance include private, public, and commons forms of asset governance, which have very different implications for how municipalities manage the collection, use, and commercialization of personal data. My dissertation includes three key findings. First, data governance in smart city initiatives can be usefully theorized as a form of asset governance in light of the specific political economic logics that underpinned the proposals for Sidewalk Toronto and DECODE. Second, both smart city initiatives aimed to generate monetary value from digital personal data but failed to balance the interests of business with public and collective interests. Third, the policymakers and citizens engaged with these smart city initiatives displayed a variety of non-economic expectations and attitudes toward data, a phenomenon I conceptualize in the dissertation as “affective data governance.”
Open Access
Discourse, Design and Pedagogy in Translational Medicine
(2023-08-04) Murray, Cameron Michael; Martin, Aryn
This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration into how translation is defined, taught and practiced in translational medicine. Based on fieldwork at translational research centres–one in Saint John and one in San Francisco–I confront a central tension between ways of understanding what translation is and how it should be performed in biomedicine. For some, translational medicine is simply another approach to commercializing research. For others, it is a novel way to bring researchers, governments, private companies and local communities together to shape a more democratic biomedical future. I argue that the latter perspective suffers from a lack of deep appreciation for the cultural, political and ethical complexities of translation. This is problematic because translational medicine implies the coming together of multiple languages, disciplines, bodies, technologies and institutions, and suggests a greater sensitivity to the unique and ever-shifting experiences of patients and their loved ones. Addressing these concerns, I put translational medicine in conversation with a variety of STS theories, and those from other disciplines that have long debated the messiness of translation. Experimenting with a deliberative approach to STS, I used participant observation, semi-structured interviews and online ethnography to actively debate what’s at stake in a translational approach to biomedicine. My unique role as STS scholar allowed me to challenge frameworks proposed for the near and distant future of translational medicine. Rather than an antagonistic posture, I worked, though often failed, to develop what Sarah Franklin (2013) calls “interliteracies,” or the “disciplined reading across disciplines” with my interlocutors. These interventions culminated with me combining STS and translational medicine in the design of a role-playing exercise for high school students at Princeton University. This exercise imagined a future where non-expert publics were more fully involved in determining what pieces of research can and should be translated. This dissertation contributes to increased calls for engaged approaches to STS that challenge and make decisions about how technoscience is practiced. By showing that translation is a shifting, non-linear and always unfinished process, this project opens space for STS to not simply say “it could be otherwise,” but actively be a part of making it otherwise.
Open Access
Edible Subjectivities: Meat in Science Fiction
(2019-07-02) Parry, Jovian Lang; Fawcett, Leesa K.
This dissertation argues for the critical urgency of both challenging the constitution of subjectivity itself and disputing the a priori exclusion of other animals from attaining some kind of ethico-political subject-status. Deploying a Baradian performative posthumanist analysis attentive to patterns of difference, I engage the theoretical tools of ecofeminism, critical animal studies (CAS), and material ecocriticism to interrogate subjectivity by attending closely and critically to twentieth and twenty-first century Euro- American Anglophone science fiction (SF) stories about meat. Meat animal narratives open the subject to alternative modes of knowing that anthropocentric epistemologies foreclose, intervening against the structural exclusions imposed by various material- discursive apparatuses of domination that define, authorize and enact subjectivity as always and only human, over and against the figure of the animal. SF, a genre of alterity that has long been at the vanguard of literary engagements with nonhuman subjectivities, likewise works to subvert hegemonic notions of the subject as always- already human and complicate overdetermined configurations of the subject as an ontologically predetermined entity. Engaging SF narratives about human cattle dystopias, alien encounters, in vitro meat and alimentary xeno-symbiogenesis, I approach subjectivity as an emergent phenomenon born of the intra-action of differentially materialized agential entanglements, andcruciallytheir constitutive exclusions. Rejecting subject-object dualism as an unliveable onto-epistemological paradigm that excludes anything edible from relations of respectful use, I argue for the necessity of enacting subjectivities in terms of concrete practices of restraint and humility, with humans firmly situated as embodied animal beings, enmeshed with and accountable to a much larger community of more than human, more than animal and more than animate actants on a finite planet.
Open Access
From Science in the Arctic to Arctic Science: A Transnational Study of Arctic Travel Narratives, 1818-1883
(2017-07-27) Kaalund, Nanna Katrine Luders; Lightman, Bernard V.
This thesis examines the making and communicating of knowledge about the Arctic from a transnational perspective between 1818 and the First International Polar Year in 1882-83. By examining both well-known and hitherto neglected narratives from Danish, British, and British-Canadian Arctic explorations, I show that changes in ideas about what it meant to be an authoritative observer of Arctic phenomena were linked to tensions in imperial ambitions, national identity, and international collaboration. By framing polar surveying in the broadest sense as the ordering and quantifying of nature through travel, I analyse how abstract notions of the Arctic became tangible in the nineteenth century. I am concerned with the practices of writing the Arctic experience, especially the relationship between science, and the strategies for constructing a trustworthy narrative voice. That is, I investigate the ways in which the identities of the explorers and the organizing bodies shaped the expeditions, and by extension the representation of the ventures, the explorers, and the science they produced. In doing so, I argue that the Arctic played a key role in shaping Western science, and understandings of national and imperial identities, and that travel narratives were a significant resource for communicating this knowledge. This thesis is divided into four chapters that each considers three case studies, roughly organized according to chronology. Drawing on major themes within British and Danish imperial history, Canadian studies, studies in travel writing, history of science, transnational and global history, and environmental studies, I show how perceptions of the Arctic as a field-site for the production of scientific knowledge varied according to time and place throughout the nineteenth century, and how this influenced science in the Arctic. In particular, I show the shift from early scientific practices during Arctic explorations, to a more unified Arctic science as part of the International Polar Year. What emerges is a new and interdisciplinary look at how science was produced in the Arctic, how this information was perceived by both a specialist and general reading audiences, and how this process differed depending on national and cultural contexts at different points in the nineteenth century.
Open Access
How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies: Alternative Futures and Uncertainty in Strategic Management
(2018-05-28) Fosbrook, Bretton; Jones-Imhotep, Edward
How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies tracks the transformation of scenario planning, a non-calculative technique for imagining alternative futures, from postwar American thermonuclear defence projects to corporate planning efforts beginning in the late 1960s. Drawing on archival research, the dissertation tells a history of how different corporate strategists in the second half of the twentieth century attempted to engage with future uncertainties by drawing heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory rational and intuitive techniques together in their developments of corporate scenario planning. By tracing the heterogeneity of methodologies and intellectual influences in three case studies from corporate scenario planning efforts in the United States and Britain, the dissertation demonstrates how critical and countercultural philosophies that emphasized irrational human capacities like imagination, consciousness, and intuitionoften assumed to be antithetical to the rule-bound, quantitative rationalities of corporate planning effortsbecame crucial tools, rather than enemies, of corporate strategy under uncertainty after 1960. The central argument of the dissertation is that corporate scenario planning projects were non-calculative speculative attempts to augment the calculative techniques of traditional mid-century strategic decision-making with diverse human reasoning tools in order to explore and understand future uncertainties. Consequently, these projects were intertwined with an array of sometimes contradictory genealogies, from technical postwar military planning practices to countercultural intellectual resources that questioned the technological imperatives of modern life. Yet, by the mid-1980s, corporate scenario planning efforts transformed from contemplative strategies for exploring uncertainties into a method associated with the capacities of thought leaders. It was through the rising thought leadership industry of the late-twentieth-century that scenarios gained legitimacy, enabling multinational corporations to rely upon the charismatic authority of scenario practitioners in the face of unknowable futures. In making this argument, the dissertation revises assumptions in the history of postwar science and technology and science studies that pivot on the importance of impersonal, calculative strategies and technical capacities in uncertain conditions.
Open Access
I'm a Juggling Robot: An Ethnography of the Organization and Culture of Autism-Based Applied Behaviour Therapies in Ontario, Canada
(2018-11-21) Gruson-Wood, Julia Frances; Mykhalovskiy, Eric
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the culture, social organization, and everyday practices of providers and recipients of autism-based applied behavior therapies in Ontario, Canada. Autism-based applied behavior therapies are highly controversial evidence-based autism interventions that have become the standard of care, and the only guaranteed-funded services, for autistic people in this province. These therapies are provided by teachers in public autism classrooms, by parents in the home, and by personal support workers in group homes with autistic residents. The lives of many autistic people in this province, whether at school, in the home, or the community, are structured through completing behaviour therapy activities. The growing voices that resist and proliferate applied behaviour therapies, highlight the importance of critical scholarly attention to these therapies. This dissertation is situated within the fields of science studies, medical anthropology, and critical autism studies, and focuses on the experiences and practices of providers. Learning about what providers do, and how they make sense of what they do, helps to understand the professional culture in which they work, and the complex forces of power that govern both their activities and the everyday lives of autistic people in this province. For this project, I completed an ethnography, which included participant observation activities and interviews with thirty-two providers and recipients of these therapies. To understand the complex power relations that constitute everyday enactments of behaviour therapies, I combined the governance-focused approach offered by Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge, with anthropological approaches to ethnography that focus on meaning and description. The merger of these two methods of inquiry, where cultural analysis bolsters an organizational account, enables a rich and comprehensive analysis of behaviour therapy practices.
Open Access
Inventing Psychiatric Drug Maintenance
(2019-03-05) Deshauer, Dorian Alvin; Kroker, Kenton M
This dissertation explores a major change in the way the maintenance of recovery from mental illness was authoritatively represented between the mid 1950s and the present. A shift from individual case reports to clinical trials as medicines authoritative knowledge-framework made possible a view of mental health as something to be achieved then maintained pharmaceutically. Through a controversial experiment that both produced and studied responders to maintenance drugs, it became possible to assess maintenance drugs in terms of an idealized, optimized state, rather than in relation to a personalized baseline. This new, idealized understanding of mental health emerged in the early 1970s and operated alongside traditional concepts of psychiatric diagnosis and prognosis, where each disease category implied an expected trajectory that interventions could only temporarily alter, for example by sedating or restraining. It harmonized with a managerial style of thinking among mental hospital psychiatrists who imagined a future in which medicated inmates would flow and circulate through institutions, achieving live release, rather than sedimenting into long-term custodial care. Pharmaceutically-maintained mental health unfolded in treatment phases, in the margins of epidemiological diagrams, in the minds eye of life insurance company medical directors as financial payouts due to suicide, in the pages of medical journals devoted to narrative medicine and in the decisions of physicians considering self-reporting to medical regulators. Mental health achieved and maintained with drugs, viewed from the perspective of business or occupational risk managers was seen as inherently untrustworthy, fragile, and at risk of failing. The result was on the one hand, a medical discourse that confidently represented and even promoted the idea that mental health could be pharmacologically maintained, and on the other a discourse of corporate risk management that saw fragility and risk among anyone who used mind altering drugs. Diverging from studies that isolate specific categories of mental illness, the dissertation bridges histories of pharmacology, medical epistemology, insurance, and professionalization. It shows how a science of maintenance psychiatric drugs evolved to favor the interests of its makers, while at the same time stacking the odds against the very consumers it claimed to serve.
Open Access
Knowing Water Worlds: A Postphenomenological Approach to Socioenvironmental Imaginaries in Costa Rica
(2020-08-11) Rodríguez Mansilla, Francesc Gabriel; Alsop, Steven John
In a context of increasing liberalization and privatization of the energy sector in Costa Rica, a wave of applications for private concessions to build run-of-the-river dams has swept over the country during the last decade. These hydroelectric projects have caused concern among residents adjacent to the targeted rivers to the extent that a socioenvironmental conflict has erupted in several communities in the southern Pacific side of the country, which I refer to as water worlds. I use the term water worlds both to transcend the limits of a human-focused notion of community, and to refer to the mutually sustaining confluence of relations between the materiality of water, human and non-human living beings, knowledge claims and practices (acts-of-knowing) and their corresponding socioenvironmental imaginaries in particular territories and river water areas. This dissertation focuses on the acts-of-knowing and the underlying socioenvironmental imaginaries of these water worlds. My empirical study seeks a postphemenological ethnographic approach, and draws theoretical connections between Cornelius Castoriadis and Science & Technology Studies. Using advocacy research, it was conducted in 34 fieldwork sites, involved 14 unstructured interviews and dozens of conversations with community participants, and drew on numerous documents and visual resources. My analysis shows how: - The Environmental Impact Study (EIS) report of the San Rafael River over-simplifies the knowledge capacities of neighbor communities and environmental groups. The EIS report does not fully take into account knowledge about biophysical dynamics that members of the communities are able to co-create using alternative acts-of-knowing, such as: (i) giving attention to historical perspectives, (ii) embodying practices, and (iii) creating community coalitions in response to perceived knowledge deficits. - Local communities co-create imaginaries of water worlds associated with ways of living and the maintenance of community relations, upon which rivers have significant influence. This notion of imaginaries as a life force of connectivity challenges the underlying (modern) assumptions and treatments of rivers, as expressed in the EIS report. That is, it defies the imaginary of rivers as quantifiable, determinable, divisible, and isolated from the human and non-human communities. - Multispecies encounters in daily situations represent an important element in understanding acts-of-knowing articulated by the local communities in the water worlds of this dissertation. Drawing from Cornelius Castoriadis perspective of living beings, I offer alternative imaginaries of the role of non-human animals in Costa Rica that are more intimate and affective than what I understand as mechanical and passive notions of non-human animals in the multiple spaces that they share together with humans. Overall, this dissertation contributes to a deeper (and politically significant) understanding of acts-of-knowing in a particular conflict over (more than) water. In doing so, it contributes to existing work on sociotechnical and environmental imaginaries in Science & Technology Studies and political ecology by adopting a postphenomenological perspective, which aims to transcend taken-for-granted assumptions about acts-of-knowing under the sustainable development approach in Costa Rica.
Open Access
Making bodies, making kin: Storytelling and the professionalization of medical illustrators in North America
(2024-07-18) Belsky, Danielle Louise; Lightman, Bernard V.
Contemporary concerns about diversity and inclusion in medical practice demand a more nuanced understanding of medical illustrations as part of a larger system of medical knowledge informed by historical and economic conditions in which they are produced. This dissertation explores the professionalization, pedagogy, and practices of medical illustrators in North America since the First World War. I analyse medical illustrators’ professional formation and epistemic culture through a combination of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in graduate programs and professional gatherings, paying close attention to the role of gender in disciplinary formation. Graduate education transforms students from epistemic misfits into “storytellers” capable of bridging cultural binaries of art and science by reasserting colonial hierarchies of knowledge. In contrast to the patriarchal “founding father” narrative of professional emergence, the structural work of professionalization such as standardizing training and organizing professional bodies was carried out largely by female illustrators. Emphasis on metaphors of “family” and “storytelling” has enabled a feminized group of scientific workers to navigate an uncertain social and economic position by situating their knowledge practices within established institutions and forms of authority. However, positioning medical illustrators as subservient and limiting their knowledge claims ensures their continued invisibility as expert knowledge workers and limits their ability to challenge colonial conventions of representation. Exploring the making of medical illustrators presents an opportunity to reimagine their role in making medical knowledge.
Open Access
Marana: Leishmaniasis and the Pharmaceuticalization of War in Colombia
(2020-08-11) Pinto Garcia, Lina Beatriz; Elliott, Denielle A.
This ethnographic monograph explores how the Colombian armed conflict and a vector-borne disease called cutaneous leishmaniasis are inextricably connected and mutually constitutive. The stigmatization of the illness as the guerrilla disease is reinforced by the states restriction on access to antileishmanial medicines, a measure that is commonly interpreted as a warfare strategy to affect insurgent groups. Situated at the intersection between STS and critical medical anthropology, this work draws on multi-sited field research conducted during the peace implementation period after the agreement reached in 2016 by the Colombian government and FARC, the oldest and largest guerrilla organization in Latin America. It engages not only with the stigmatization of leishmaniasis patients as guerrilla members and the exclusionary access to antileishmanial drugs but also with other closely related aspects that constitute the war-shaped experience of leishmaniasis in Colombia. It traces the social construction of non-deadly leishmaniasis as a life-threatening disease; the systemic and systematic use of a highly toxic drug for a relatively benign disease; the mutual constitution of wartime social orders and pharmaceutical regimes; the rise of leishmaniasis as a strategic problem for the Army; and the vulnerability shared by human and non-human military populations towards the disease. I have chosen to represent the intricate association between leishmaniasis and war in Colombia as a maraa. Maraa is a word in Spanish that means tangle, but is also commonly used in Colombia to name the entangled greenery, braided lianas, and dense foliage that characterize the tropical forests where the disease typically occurs. Through this metaphor, I argue that the maraa formed by leishmaniasis and the war makes fundamentally impossible to make sense of this disease without taking serious consideration of the armed conflict. This work illuminates how leishmaniasis has been socially, discursively, and materially constructed as a disease of the war, and how the armed conflict is entangled with the realm of public health, medicine, and especially pharmaceutical drugs.
Open Access
Mediated Cognition: Information Technologies and the Sciences of Mind
(2016-11-25) Mcmillan, Alasdair James; Jones-Imhotep, Edward
This dissertation investigates the interconnections between minds, media, and the cognitive sciences. It asks what it means for media to have effects upon the mind: do our tools influence the ways that we think? It considers what scientific evidence can be brought to bear on the question: how can we know and measure these effects? Ultimately, it looks to the looping pathways by which science employs technological media in understanding the mind, and the public comes to understand and respond to these scientific discourses. I contend that like human cognition itself, the enterprise of cognitive science is a deeply and distinctively mediated phenomenon. This casts a different light on contemporary debates about whether television, computers, or the Internet are changing our brains, for better or for worse. Rather than imagining media effects as befalling a fictive natural mind, I draw on multiple disciplines to situate mind and the sciences thereof as shaped from their origins through interaction with technology. Our task is then to interrogate the forms of cognition and attention fostered by different media, alongside their attendant costs and benefits. The first chapter positions this dissertation between the fields of media studies and STS, developing a case for the reality of media effects without the implication of technological determinism. The second considers the history of technological metaphor in scientific characterizations of the mind. The third section consists of three separate chapters on the history of cognitive science, presenting the core of my case for its uniquely mediated character. Across three distinct eras, what unifies cognitive science is the quest to understand the mind using computational systems, operating by turns as generative metaphors and tangible models. I then evaluate the contemporary cognitive-scientific research on the question of media effects, and the growing role of electronic media in science. My fifth and final section develops a content analysis: what is said in the media about the popular theory that media themselves, in one way or another, are causing attention deficit disorders? The work concludes with a summary and some reflections on mind, culture, technoscience and markets as recursively interwoven causal systems.
Open Access
Mediating Public Science: Experts, Politics, and Climate Change in the News Media in Canada
(2019-03-05) Isopp, Bernhard Isaac; Alsop, Steven John
This project offers a reconstructionist science and technology studies (STS) analysis of climate change coverage in three Canadian newspapers, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Star from 2006 to 2013. It employs a combination of framing, critical discourse, and philosophical analyses to address two core questions: (1) Why has climate change been represented in these newspapers in the ways it has? (2) What effects have these newspapers had in shaping issues of climate change? These broad inquiries are organised by a set of six more specific conceptual concerns stemming from STS: i) How do scientists relate, engage, and compete with other actors in influencing climate change coverage? ii) To what extent can these newspapers be understood as a site of scientific practice, communication, and knowledge production? iii) What broader social, political, and economic factors are linked to the competing representations of climate change and actor coalitions that emerge in these newspapers? iv) What broader images, ideologies, and philosophies of science and scientists shape and emerge from these media discourses? v) What do STS conceptions of scientific rhetoric suggest about these discourses? vi) How is the authority of science and scientists established, affected, challenged, and undermined through and by all these interacting influences and processes? While the answers to these questions are multifaceted, the authority of science is a culminating theme. Here there is ambivalence: concerned and sceptical voices in these newspapers accuse each other of politicisation, while appealing to the authority of objective, apolitical science to bolster their positions. A paradox appears in that the more fervent the appeal to unpoliticised science, the more the politicisation of science is on display. A normative suggestion is offered: the discourses found in these newspapers all involve rhetorical, ideological, authority-seeking, and thoroughly political appeals to science, thus undermining any hope of grounding responses to climate change in science that is free from politics. But they are not all equivalent: some offer a means to sincere and accountable public deliberations involving scientific knowledge, and thus are preferable for addressing climate change.
Open Access
Navigation, Commercial Exchange and the Problem of Long-Distance Control in England and the English East India Company, 1673-1755
(2018-08-27) Grier, Jason Peter; Hamm, Ernst
In this dissertation I address the related problems of expertise and long-distance control in the context of British navigation and the bureaucratic practices of the English East India Company. Expertise, in particular, is used as a framework from which I build outward to establish a stronger understanding of commercial trade, the circulation of knowledge and, most crucially, the place of the metropole. The first half of this dissertation introduces expertise and long-distances control and puts the concepts into historical context through the example of navigation between 1673 and 1755. Navigation is illustrative of the problem of expertise because it was a contentious subject at the time and, therefore, the contemporary debates can be followed. Expertise is a crucial problem because it directly addresses power and who controls knowledge. Thus, the question of navigational expertise ties directly to the problem of long-distance control. Therefore, my dissertation begins by moving outward from navigational instruction at the Royal Mathematical School to the practice of navigation on Edmond Halleys first Paramore voyage. In the context of global commercial exchange, long-distance control became an increasing priority for those who sought to assert such control from a presumed centre onto agents around the globe. As such, the second half of the dissertation continues to follow actors further away from London with the setting moving to India and China where I contrast the idea of long-distance control with the reality. In practice the East India Company had little ability to impose itself on either its own employees or on the peoples with whom the Company wished to trade. Instead, the Companys efforts often drew attention to its ignorance of Asian trade and served to underline its weakness in the first part of the eighteenth century. The dissertation concludes by questioning the notion of the metropole and the periphery in the history of science and suggests an inversion of the traditional locations, with London now a periphery rather than centre, a state of affairs more in line with the situation at the time.
Open Access
Nearly Perfect: Notes on the Failures of Salvage Linguistics
(2018-11-21) Wajsberg, Jeffrey; Pettit, Michael
This dissertation examines the salvage era of American linguistics (c.19101940) and its focus on the extraction of knowledges and cultural artifacts from Indigenous groups whose civilizations were believed in peril. Through close readings of historical archives and published materials, I imbricate the history of these scientific collection practices through the interpretive frames of Science & Technology Studies (STS), deconstructive criticism, and postcolonial theory. I centre the project on the career of linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir, seizing upon his belief that linguistics was more nearly perfect than other human sciencesthat linguistic methods were more akin to those of the natural sciences or formal mathematics. I employ Sapir as the chief focalizer of my work to map the changing topography of the language sciences in North America over these pivotal decades of disciplinary formation. Failure, here, offers a heuristic device to interrogate the linear logics of science and success which buttress that desire for perfection. Both conceptually and historically, the dialectics of failure and success throw into relief the vicissitudes of fieldwork, the uncertainty of patronage relationships, and the untenable promise of salvage that characterized these years. Through this approach, I present linguistics instead as a kairotic sciencefrom the Greek kairos, suggesting opportunitynot perfect, but situated vividly in the world, bound by space, identity, and time. I examine how linguists conducted their collection work through the extension of a scientific network (Chapter 1), their construction of a scientific identity to the gradual exclusion of amateurs and the reduction of informant contributions (Chapter 2), and the development of an experimental system within the temporalities of fieldwork (Chapter 3). My dissertation hence invites a critical intervention within the history linguistics to re-encounter the sciences disregarded past and re-think its shared responsibility toward Indigenous communities in the present.
Open Access
Never Before Seen: Spectacle, Staging, and Story in Wildlife Film's Blue-Chip Renaissance
(2019-03-05) Louson, Eleanor MacLeod; Anderson, Katharine
The topic of this dissertation is wildlife film and its representation of animal behaviour. I identify a blue-chip renaissance of wildlife documentary filmmaking in the early twenty-first century featuring conventional natural history subject matter, stunning visuals, unprecedented costs, an extended rhetoric of authenticity, and an emphasis on novel footage of animal behaviour. The blue-chip renaissance is a fertile site for investigating wildlife films as hybrid objects, as these films inhabit a set of major conceptual tensions between nature and culture; entertainment and education; and authenticity and artifice. In a review of extant literature (Chapter 1) I examine how those conceptual boundaries have been permeable and productive for scholars of wildlife film and related topics in multiple disciplines, motivating this dissertations interdisciplinary approach. I argue in Chapter 2 that the blue-chip renaissances visual spectacle is not an entertaining impediment to education, but rather a route to immersion and affective knowing, drawing from the legacy of natural history display. In Chapter 3, I analyze working filmmakers attitudes about staging practices in wildlife documentaries, a controversial topic that influences their professional identity as storytellers and observers of nature. Chapter 4 offers a taxonomy of the representation within the blue-chip renaissance and its authoritative public demonstration of nature, arguing that these films model and simulate a variety of real and theoretical entities and processes. In Chapter 5, I show that the authenticity of the blue-chip renaissances portrayal of nature is predicated on the extensive use of behind-the-scenes making-of documentaries employing observational realism. I conclude by exploring the challenges of locating any definitive cultural impacts of wildlife films, and offer instead directions for further research into wildlife films as experienced science communication.
Open Access
Plastics: Mapping the Childhood of Modernity’s Worst Material
(2022-08-08) Cope, Angela A.; Anderson, Katharine
This dissertation, “Plastics: Mapping the Childhood of Modernity’s Worst Material,” traces plastic’s fall from grace, from its utopian interwar beginnings to the proliferative and detrital form it takes today. It seeks to answer the question of why certain plastics are regarded as disposable and finds the answer in part in children’s toys. Children’s toys are a vital manifestation to understand plastics as fit for disposal. Starting with a historical background in early plastics to set the stage for its later deterioration, it then takes three key thermoplastics – polystyrene, polyethylene, and polyvinyl chloride – and their key material interlocutors – pez dispensers, hula hoops, and pool toys – and demonstrates how the growth of the toy industry was intimately intertwined with changing ideals of consumption, obsolescence, and discard with respect to plastics. The pairing of polystyrene with foodstuffs is the subject of the second chapter, focusing on the intimate and intertwined relationship between toy and packaging. The role of the hula hoop in changing ideals of hygiene, and in the rise of the use of synthetic detergents, is the subject of the third chapter. Finally, the fourth chapter regards the role of polyvinyl chloride pool toys in teaching postwar children that plastic is a fundamentally ephemeral material, while indelibly associating it with childhood. This association meant that ultimately the material was infantilized, and one of the things that one discards when they “put away childish things.”
Open Access
Potentiating Algae, Modernizing Bioeconomies: Algal Biofuels, Bioenergy Economies, and Built Ecologies in the United States and Turkey
(2017-07-27) Kasdogan, Duygu; Myers, Natasha
This dissertation is an ethnography of potentiation the labourious processes by which potential is imagined and materialized. It investigates how life scientists and engineers potentiate algae as alternative sustainable biofuels in the wake of the global food versus fuel debate of the late 2000s. I draw on two years of multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in the United States and Turkey to document why, how, and to what end do algal biofuel advocates figure algae as a material brimming with potential. I show that this potential is grounded in the reproductive capacities of algae as a life form, through its activation in environmental remediation projects, and through its compatibility with new biotechnologies and bioeconomic markets. At its heart, this dissertation troubles the notion of potentiality in two ways: it disrupts imaginaries of algaes potential as a natural, innate sustainable energy resource, while it simultaneously de-naturalizes ideas about the inherent potential of the United States as the hegemonic model of all bioeconomies. I begin with a historical overview of biofuels research in the United States and Turkey to demonstrate national differences in algal biofuel advocacy. While state and governmental initiatives profoundly shape algal biofuels research in the United States, the biofuels sector is actively sidelined by the Turkish state. As this dissertation demonstrates, Turkish scientists instead have sought to fill this science and energy policy vacuum by modeling algal biofuels inside their imaginaries of modernity. As such, this dissertation intends to provincialize American-centered accounts of bioeconomies. Further, it contributes to STS literature on bioeconomies by examining how biovalue is made within systems, as well as inside of the frameworks of systems biology and integrated systems of production. By drawing on fieldwork conducted inside laboratories, conferences, and critical textual analyses, I coin the analytic of built ecologies the infrastructures such as test tubes and photobioreactors to unpack how sustainable algal biofuels are made and remade inside of designed and engineered processes. Challenging these processes, this dissertation instead invites readers to explore alternate ways of engaging with algae and biofuels as a way to confront relentless reductions of life forms into energetic biomass.