VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Hester, Rebecca"

Browsing by Author "Hester, Rebecca"

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Accelerating Innovation: Assessing Nanotechnologies, Prototypes and Research Teams
Shaler, Lisa Marie (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-29)
The Army-sponsored Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) was an entrepreneurial research institute established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002. Using Science and Technology Studies (STS) concepts from Actor-Network Theory, I study the founding era of this twenty-first century laboratory-based community, from 2002-2007. Actor-Network concepts of enrollment and translation, described by Bruno Latour, and heterogeneous engineering, described by John Law, are used as I 'follow the actors' founding this emergent institution. The operationalization of translation is traced through four case studies, structured around Defense funding constructs and Science and Technology communities: 6.0 Founding the Institute; 6.1 Building Basic Research Networks; 6.2 Shaping Applied Research for Cancer Research and Science Education to include non-users; and 6.3 Student Prototyping Teams Accelerating ISN Research for Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI). Scientists, engineers, and transitioners partnered in new ways to transition innovative technologies to improve human protection, with soldiers as the first of many users. Using public information, I used qualitative and quantitative methodologies to assess the actor networks and research portfolio changes. These historical case studies extend STS with operationalization of translation and a new dynamic of bi-directional actor enrollment, as research teams transitioned nanotechnologies and prototypes.
An Alchemy of Smoke and Flame: The Politics of Tear Gas Use Against Social Movements in the United States
Leff, Jack Rance (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-08)
Tear gas is a chemical weapon used by the police to put a stop to protests, riots, and other large-scale political actions. It has been employed for over one hundred years, yet our historical and political understanding of the technology is relatively limited. The historical framings of tear gas are dominated by deference to state and military claims and the biomedical literature furthers this one-sided approach to the security technology. At the same time, many groups have fought against tear gas and fought through tear gas as part of the struggle against state politics. The history of tear gas is deeply intertwined with that of policing and questions of state violence against protest movements. A deeper knowledge of tear gas enables us to better understand how and when it is used against protestors as well as how protestors challenge dominant narratives of security. As a scholar of Science, Technology, and Society, I am interested in understanding the sociotechnical elements of tear gas and how it operates within racial capitalism. This dissertation asks, in what ways has tear gas been used as a security technology mobilized to protect the State from political dissidents and what lessons can be learned from how social movement activists challenged the sociotechnical narratives surrounding tear gas? This is a social study of a particular security technology that is used in moments of contestation between State forces (military, police, and weapons industry) and radical social movements. I look at two specific kinds of contestation. The first are historical examples of contestations. That is, the interwar historical context in which tear gas emerges and examples from the 1960s through our contemporary political moment where it is used against social movements. The second is the contested space of biomedical knowledge, which has two major narratives associated with it. On the one hand, mainstream medical literature has examined tear gas using military research labs and military test subjects. This selective research has facilitated claims that tear gas is a "less-lethal" weapon that is practically harmless to those it is used on. On the other hand, social movement activists and street medics who are exposed to it on a regular basis have identified some real concerns surrounding its deployment, thereby challenging claims to its harmlessness.
Are All Bodies Good Bodies?: Redefining Femininity Through Discourses of Health, Beauty, and Gender in Body Positivity
Streeter, Rayanne Connie (Virginia Tech, 2019-06-06)
Previous research has explored the ways in which health, beauty, and gender discourses are used to promote and regulate an ideal of thinness. Further, research has explored how the fat acceptance movement and fitspiration has fought to resist such narratives. However, in the age of hashtag feminism a new group on social media, body positivity, has become the buzzword among celebrities, news conglomerates, and fashion companies. This study draws on interviews with body positive influencers and Instagram posts tagged #bodypositive and #fitspiration to examine the extent to which body positive influencers and users modify understandings of normative feminine body ideals and to what extent they resist and accommodate traditional discourses of gender, health, and beauty. In doing so, I explore which bodies are newly included and who is left out.
Automating Health: The Promises and Perils of Biomedical Technologies for Diabetes Management
Brantly, Nataliya D. (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-15)
Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) is an irreversible chronic autoimmune disease that affects millions in the United States. Individuals with T1D rely on biomedical technologies to manage their disability and to stay alive. The increased use of and reliance on automated technologies creates complex entanglements between human bodies, technologies and external factors including digital infrastructures creating what I term as "biotechnological organism." This U.S.-based study focuses on the most advanced biomedical technology used to manage T1D today, the Artificial Pancreas System (APS), to demonstrate how seemingly liberating automated biomedical technologies can entangle, subjugate, and confine those they aim to free. This study features the analysis of two distinct social groups by focusing on their risk discourses and risk reduction efforts. The first group is a community of regulatory experts represented by the American Diabetes Association (ADA). It provides an important perspective grounded in evidence-based science, established norms, and professional standards of medicine, healthcare, and research. The second group is the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) biological community represented by DIY innovators, patients, caregivers, and advocates. It provides a different but equally important perspective shaped by affective dimensions that reflect a phenomenological experience with biomedical technologies. The combination of these two perspectives along with the improved understanding of this disability, the complexity of entanglements between humans and machines, differing approaches to health automation and knowledge production practices elucidates important social, economic, and political issues. The significance of this work lies in its examination of how the improved understanding of health automation efforts can help inform policy and healthcare decisions.
Belief, Values, Bias, and Agency: Development of and Entanglement with "Artificial Intelligence"
Williams, Damien Patrick (Virginia Tech, 2022-08-15)
Contemporary research into the values, bias, and prejudices within "Artificial Intelligence" tends to operate in a crux of scholarship in computer science and engineering, sociology, philosophy, and science and technology studies (STS). Even so, getting the STEM fields to recognize and accept the importance of certain kinds of knowledge— the social, experiential kinds of knowledge— remains an ongoing struggle. Similarly, religious scholarship is still very often missing from these conversations because many in the STEM fields and the general public feel that religion and technoscientific investigations are and should be separate fields of inquiry. Here I demonstrate that experiential knowledge and religious, even occult beliefs are always already embedded within and crucial to understanding the sociotechnical imaginaries animating many technologies, particularly in the areas of "AI." In fact, it is precisely the unwillingness of many to confront these facts which allow for both the problems of prejudice embedded in algorithmic systems, and for the hype-laden marketing of the corporations and agencies developing them. This same hype then intentionally obfuscates the actions of both the systems and the people who create them, while confounding and oppressing those most often made subject to them. Further, I highlight a crucial continuity between bigotry and systemic social projects (eugenics, transhumanism, and "supercrip" narratives), revealing their foundation in white supremacist colonialist myths of whose and which kinds of lives count as "truly human." We will examine how these myths become embedded into the religious practices, technologies, and social frameworks in and out of which "AI" and algorithms are developed, employing a composite theoretical lens made from tools such as intersectionality, ritual theory, intersubjectivity, daemonology, postphenomenology, standpoint epistemology, and more. This theoretical apparatus recontextualizes our understanding of how mythologies and rituals of professionalization, disciplinarity, and dominant epistemological hierarchies animate concepts such as knowledge formation, expertise, and even what counts as knowledge. This recontextualization is then deployed to suggest remedies for research, public policy, and general paths forward in "AI." By engaging in both the magico-religious valences and the lived experiential expertise of marginalized people, these systems can be better understood, and their harms anticipated and curtailed.
The Carceral Body Multiple: Intake in the New York City jails
Ludwig, Ariel Simone (Virginia Tech, 2020-03-27)
This ethnographic dissertation project is an applied philosophical project that takes an ontological and critical phenomenological approach to the enactment of carceral bodies. This dissertation set out to answer two central questions. First, how do jail intake processes enact carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the ontological implications? Second, how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? The process of answering these questions offers an early attempt at empirical abolitionist science and technology studies research as it offers an intervention in the essentializing biomedical and criminological understandings of "the criminal." This is achieved by tracing the enactment pf carceral bodies across the domains of datafication, space, and time. First, with the advent of digital technologies, the science and technology of criminality continues to be informed by the desire to use metrics to identify and define criminal man. Like their precursors, however; when taken together these quantified characteristics contribute to the production of a body predisposed not to crime but to incarceration. This predisposition arises out of datafication and algorithmic characterization. The data comprising the raw material of this assignation pulls together the digitization of one's race, ethnicity, school (reflective of the school-to-prison-pipeline), address, sex, socio-economic status, disability status, mental health status, etc. Carceral algorithms, and the structures they arise out of, inform one's incarcerability. The carceral body of data and its risks are multiple and are represented in a number of ways, just as it is experienced variously. There are infinite permutations of the intake process across which categories come to stand in for human suffering, for risk, for job performance, etc. The data generated and its infrastructures are reflective of the broader political and socioeconomic context. The role of data collection, management, and analysis surrounding the intake process makes visible the politics and stakes of the carceral bodies enacted. The two primary epistemologies and attendant professions brought to bear upon the carceral body are medicine and criminology. These epistemologies rely upon quantification, categorization, and calculations of risk to generate data from which carceral knowledge is made (and in turn makes). This project characterizes the data infrastructures of the jails as socio-technical objects, practices, and architectures that are multiple and complex. It is through this lens that managerialism, algorithms, and knowledge production are characterized. Together, these facets provide insight into the making of carceral bodies of data and the logics and mechanisms of the carceral-data-industrial-complex. Second, this project addresses the spatialities that carceral bodies are generative of and situated in. The spaces of intake are suffused with values, politics, and epistemologies that play out in a number of ways. In order draw out these facets, the ontological approach was integrated with carceral geography. This approach elevates micro-scales of space and time, placing the personal and particular beside within the broader social and political contexts. This shift in scale has important implications for the study of correctional facilities as it is from this scale that the complexities, relationalities, materialities, contradictions, and multiplicities are visible. This approach relates to Foucault's carceral archipelago, which conveys the complexities of carceral spaces, surveillances, and their leakiness. Carceral geography's reading of Foucault requires an engagement across carceral societies that incorporates the body as a prime site from which to understand complex dynamics of control. Carceral geography offers a helpful approach drawing out spatialities enacted through performances and experiences, making concertina wire fences permeable and ever-mutable. The carceral body carries carceral spaces within it and beyond it that arise out of epistemes, policies, and practices that are mutually reinforcing and enmeshed. These embodied spaces include emotions and mental self-scapes alongside digitally recorded diagnoses and correctional designations. When considering how security infrastructures permeate society, well beyond correctional facility gates, this has important implications for this carceral society. The buildings and physical spaces of incarceration are read as reflective of the values and logics of the state, this brings into view the extra-penological function of incarceration, in which specific populations are disproportionately removed and disciplined/ punished by the state even before they are determined to be guilty or not guilty by a court. This hyper-incarceration of certain populations underlines the spatial logics of carceral networks that reflect the machinations of a neoliberal state that disappears those who have been Othered via carceral networks. This takes on even more problematic hues when considering the torturous conditions unsuitable for any creature, including humans. Third, despite Western constructs of linear or absolute time, the study of the carceral temporal body demonstrates the relativities, multiplicities, and disjunctures that challenge the notion of a universal clock. This dissertation tells of carceral bodies made into and across multiple time points. Bodies become metaphoric timeclocks through managerial oversight processes in which they are assigned varying times across different electronic record systems, with these different from their time of arrest and remand. In this space, the temporal jurisdictions diverge, giving rise to frictions and conflict. Further, these assigned temporalities differ greatly from the ways time is experienced across embodied states (e.g. experiencing acute withdrawal symptoms). The theoretical frameworks employed to understand carceral time are designed to address how carceral bodies come to be anticipated. In part, this is enacted through professional and bureaucratic routines that are often protracted and repetitive. These routines give rise to waiting and urgency. This empirical engagement with carceral temporalities draws out epistemic and experiential forces. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that drawing out the ontological multiplicities of mass incarceration can countermand its fixities and generate abolitionist epistemologies. Abolition has generative potentials that coalesce with science and technology studies' investment in the otherwise. Over time carceral abolition has come to refer to a wide range of social movements, theoretical frameworks, and activism. The various approaches to abolition share a sense of urgency and resistance to gradual or eventual change, as this has historically led to the perpetuation and maintenance of racialized criminal justice systems and mass incarceration. Carceral epistemologies (e.g. penology, criminology, biomedicine, public health) are steeped in racisms and classisms, which inform broader imaginaries of crime and criminality. As political discourse has been reduced to simplistic chants and pithy soundbites, the aim of this dissertation has been to "complicate the discourse" surrounding the carceral-industrial-complex and the carceral body in particular. Understanding the carceral body through its ontological multiplicities serves as the grounds from which resistances to the status quo can be formulated. This is vitally important in light of the diffuse assemblages detailed in this project and the pervasiveness of carceral logics. In sum, this dissertation has demonstrated that carceral bodies are made and not born. It points to the difficult work still needed and the utility of ethnography in eliciting the multiplicities of practices and materialities in carceral settings. The abolitionist dreams arising from this project demand the embrace of ontological multiplicities as new logics and imaginaries unweave the criminal justice system. While it does not fall within the purview of this project to delineate a specific set of directives, it does suggest that abolitionist dis-epistemology requires logics and tactics equally as multifaceted and nuanced as the criminal justice system itself.
Co-production of Science and Regulation: Radiation Health and the Linear No-Threshold Model
Tontodonato, Richard Edward (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-15)
The model used as the basis for regulation of human radiation exposures in the United States has been a source of controversy for decades because human health consequences have not been determined with statistically meaningful certainty for the dose levels allowed for radiation workers and the general public. This dissertation evaluates the evolution of the science and regulation of radiation health effects in the United States since the early 1900s using actor-network theory and the concept of co-production of science and social order. This approach elucidated the ordering instruments that operated at the nexus of the social and the natural in making institutions, identities, discourses, and representations, and the sociotechnical imaginaries animating the use of those instruments, that culminated in a regulatory system centered on the linear no-threshold dose-response model and the As Low As Reasonably Achievable philosophy. The science of radiation health effects evolved in parallel with the development of radiation-related technologies and the associated regulatory system. History shows the principle of using the least amount of radiation exposure needed to achieve the desired effect became established as a social convention to help avoid inadvertent harm long before there was a linear no-threshold dose-response model. Because of the practical need to accept some level of occupational radiation exposure, exposures from medical applications of radiation, and some de minimis exposure to the general public, the ALARA principle emerged as an important ordering instrument even before the linear no-threshold model had gained wide support. Even before ALARA became the law, it had taken hold in a manner that allowed the nuclear industry to rationalize its operations as representing acceptable levels of risk, even though it could not be proven that the established exposure limits truly precluded harm to the exposed individuals. Laboratory experiments and epidemiology indicated that a linear dose-response model appeared suitable as a "cautious assumption" by the 1950s. The linear no-threshold model proved useful to both the nuclear establishment and its detractors. In the hands of proponents of nuclear technologies, the model predicted that occupational exposures and exposures to the public represented small risks compared to naturally occurring levels of radiation and other risks that society deemed acceptable. Conversely, opponents of nuclear technologies used the model to advance their causes by predicting health impacts for undesirable numbers of people if large populations received small radiation exposures from sources such as fallout from nuclear weapon testing or effluents from nuclear reactor operations. In terms of sociotechnical imaginaries, the linear no-threshold model was compatible with both of the dominant imaginaries involved in the actor-network. In the technocratic imaginary of institutions such as the Atomic Energy Commission, the model served as a tool for qualified experts to make risk-informed decisions about applications of nuclear technologies. In the socially progressive imaginary of the citizen activist groups, the model empowered citizens to formulate arguments informed by science and rooted in the precautionary principle to challenge decisions and actions by the technocratic institutions. This enduring dynamic tension has led to the model retaining the status of "unproven but useful" even as the underlying science has remained contested.
Cultural Encounters in Medicine: (Re)Constituting Traditional Medicine in Taiwan under Colonization, Modernity, and Exchange
Tsai, Hung-Yin (Virginia Tech, 2021-08-04)
Today we have many alternative medicines, not a few of which connect back to aboriginal cultures. Some of these alternative medicines were born under the influence of European imperialism, as they were not "alternative" until modern empires and modern medicine came to these distant regions. The present study begins with a broad question: how did conceptions of the relationship between modern Western medicine and traditional local non-Western medicine come to be? To explore the historical origins of these two conceptions, I focus herein on Japanese colonial Taiwan (1895–1945), where modern medicine became dominant while traditional medicine also flourished. My research finds that the historical realities of colonial Taiwan were not reflected in the progressive narrative of medicine. According to this narrative, modern medicine became dominant around the world while traditional medicines were swept into the ash heap of history because only modern medicine was the true, effective science of preventing, diagnosing, and treating physical ailments. The history of colonial Taiwan teaches us a much different lesson: practitioners of traditional medicine there were a significant part of the public health system during the colonial period. For example, they rallied against the plague in the late 19th century, diagnosing and treating patients when antibiotics had yet to be developed. Even so, the island witnessed an institutional medical shift, in which licensed practitioners of modern medicine deified modern medicine and denigrated traditional medicine, labeling the latter "primitive" and "non-medicine." In response, practitioners of traditional medicine produced new narratives aiming to challenge this colonial boundary between medicine and non-medicine. These practitioners' fundamental argument was that traditional medicine, though epistemologically different from modern medicine, was still legitimate medicine. From this effort, we now have the widely held belief today that both modern medicine and traditional medicine are legitimate, but distinct, medicines. This historical outcome of colonial resistance occurred worldwide. In my study, I identify the social, political, and colonial contexts of medical resistance in Japanese Taiwan, revealing their roots in issues related to inequality, distrust, economic affordability, and conceptions of body and health care.
Enactment of LGBTQ Health in Medical Curriculum
Herling, Jessica Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-13)
This dissertation examined the extent to which medical educational institutions adapt their curriculum to meet the needs of a marginalized patient population, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. Because LGBTQ populations experience significant health and health care disparities in comparison to heterosexual and cisgender populations, medical education and medical curriculum about LGBTQ health has been described as a key area of intervention for improving doctor-patient interactions and health system structures to better accommodate these populations. Through a 10-month long ethnography of a medical school, I examined the formal, informal, and hidden curricula surrounding LGBTQ health to explore how medical schools train and thus adequately prepare medical students to provide care to these patients. To investigate these issues, I conducted over 100 hours of participant observation of medical classes and clinical rotations, with particular attention to clinical case studies and online learning modules that are relevant to LGBTQ health, and LGBTQ health initiatives on the academic medical center campus. I also conducted 46 semi-structured interviews with faculty, students, administrators, LGBTQ Health Center employees, and LGBTQ patients about LGBTQ health care at the medical school and about how these groups define and implement LGBTQ health at the institution. Findings suggest that the content, placement, and delivery of LGBTQ health in the curriculum influence how medical students learn to see themselves as capable of providing care to these patients. In particular, the nebulous nature of LGBTQ health makes it difficult for students to learn to enact it in practice. This research asserts that to create medical curriculum about LGBTQ health that will help alleviate health care disparities, medical schools cannot simply add LGBTQ health into their curriculum without fundamentally changing how they teach sex/gender and sexuality to their students as well as centering intersecting inequalities in their teaching. As such, this dissertation calls for a shift to queer health to decentralize sex/gender and sexuality binaries and focus on the practice of learning about LGBTQ health rather than fulfilling a competency. Ultimately, this research theorizes medical education as a space for the enactment of LGBTQ health whereby the complexity of sex, gender, sexuality, and identity gets negotiated by medical faculty, students, administrators, and LGBTQ community members.
Engaging with the Invisible: STS Groundwork in an Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Patrick, Annie Yong (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-20)
This dissertation is a study of groundwork in Engaged Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research. Engaged STS scholars reframe STS knowledge and move it beyond the traditional scope and boundaries of the field. They use various methods such as critical participation, making and doing, situated interventions, and experimentation to critically engage with their fields of study. These scholars have evaluated their work within the context of the disciplinary outsider, described their use of high-level pragmatic frameworks, and used the arts to bring critical social issues to the public eye. Yet, when I decided to use STS engagement methods to bring visibility to the lesser-known communities in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech, I found a lack of work documenting the groundwork and experience of engagement. I could not locate groundwork regarding negotiation, designing the most appropriate intervention, collaboration strategies, or confronting my fears and doubts about being in the field. Therefore, in this dissertation, I identify and examine my engagement experience in three interventions within the ECE department to bring visibility to the groundwork of STS engagement. The limited-series podcast Engineering Visibility was a platform to bring visibility to the less dominant communities in the ECE department. Highlighting the experiences of women in engineering, the first-generation student, inclusion and diversity, and the non-traditional student fostered a shared identity and sense of belonging within the ECE department. On the ground, this project examined the need to protect participants' visibility through invisibility. Interventionist Protectivity conceptualizes how I combined trust, accountability, and social awareness to protect my participants' from social scrutiny. The second project was a seminar titled "Expand Your ECE Career." The seminar exposed students to a "broader range of careers" by challenging the traditional ideas of success. The seminar featured four ECE alumni with successful careers in law, finance, and fashion entrepreneurship. Additionally, this intervention pointed out the inadequacies of traditional forms of project assessment. I describe how I measured intervention success through other assessment methods such as "assessment per mobility." The last project was a data-driven white paper that translated the care work of the undergraduate academic career advisors and framed it to be understood by the ECE faculty. The care work done by the academic advisors was underappreciated in its connection to undergraduate student success. On the ground, I discussed the importance of identifying the advisors and the faculty's social construction to create an intervention that translated the advisors' work to be valued by the faculty. Lastly, I conclude with a discussion summarizing the overall lessons learned from the three interventions and discussing my experience of engagement. My engaged STS experience is discussed through my framing of the concept of self-confrontation and the work of avoiding the term of STS being deemed as useful.
From Surviving to Metaviving: A New Rhetorical Formation in Metastatic Breast Cancer Patient Discourse
Mengert, Julie Lynn (Virginia Tech, 2022-04-28)
This dissertation explores how language has evolved as metastatic breast cancer (MBC) has shifted from an imminent death sentence to a potentially chronic disease. War rhetoric, of which the survivor trope is a part, has been the primary mechanism by which healthcare defines the cancer experience. Using Celeste Condit's framework of rhetorical formations, I question if a new rhetoric of breast cancer is indeed emerging as new developments in medicine allow women with terminal disease to live longer. My data reveals that this new rhetorical formation, of which metavivor rhetoric is the anchor point, contains its own key metaphors and rhetorical appeals. In metavivor rhetoric, the focus becomes living with cancer, in which simply existing through a sense of homeostasis develops as the central part of the rhetoric. In this homeostasis as the key part of metavivor rhetoric, a cure is not the focus, as it is in survivor rhetoric. I explore how this emerging rhetoric supersedes the war rhetoric that is deeply entrenched in medical discourse--especially breast cancer--for decades, and how metavivor rhetoric builds upon and repudiates the war rhetoric. Through my qualitative rhetorical analysis of a popular breast cancer message board for patients with metastatic disease, I coded 589 posts to see how women use language to discuss living with MBC, and Condit's concept of rhetorical formations allows me to argue more specifically for the changes I see in patient discourse. My analysis revealed that women living with MBC argue against war/survivor rhetoric and prefer metavivor rhetoric and its ancillary terms, allowing them to transition to an acceptance of their own mortality. I conclude that a new rhetorical formation has taken shape within MBC patient discourse, with implications for women's mortality as they live with a chronic disease, and as I look to the future of this research, my goal is to promote rhetorical changes that will help to enfranchise women with MBC into the broader breast cancer discourse in the United States.
Hallucinating Facts: Psychedelic Science and the Epistemic Power of Data
Stamm, Emma (Virginia Tech, 2020-03-18)
This dissertation is a theoretical study of the relationship between digitality, knowledge, and power in the age of Big Data. My argument is that human medical research on psychedelic substances supports a critique of what I call "the data episteme." I use "episteme" in the sense developed by philosopher Michel Foucault, where the term describes an apparatus for determining the properties associated with the epistemic condition of scientificity. I write that the data episteme suppresses bodies of knowledge which do not bear the epistemic virtues associated with digital data. These include but are not limited to the capacities for positivistic representation and translation into discrete digital media. Drawing from scientific reports, I demonstrate that certain forms of knowledge regarding the therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics cannot withstand positivistic representation and digitization. Henceforth, psychedelic research demands frameworks for epistemic legitimation which differ from those predicated on the criteria associated with the data episteme. I additionally claim that psychedelic inebriation promotes a form of thinking which has been called, by various theorists, "negative," "abstract," or "idiosyncratic" thought. Whereas the data episteme denies the existence of negative thought, psychedelic research suggests that this mental function is essential to the successful deposition of psychedelic substances as adjuncts to psychotherapy. For the reasons listed above, psychedelic science provides a uniquely salient lens on the normative operations of the data episteme. In the course of suppressing non-digitizable knowledge, the data episteme implements what Foucault conceptualizes "knowledge-power," a term which affirms the fact that there is no meaningful difference between knowledge and power. Here, "power" may be defined as the power to promote but also to retract conditions on which phenomena may exist across all sites of social, intellectual, and political construction. I write that the data episteme seeks to both nullify the preconditions for negative thought and to naturalize the possibility of an infinite expansion of human mental activity, which in turn figures mentality as an inexhaustible resource for the commodity of digital data. The data episteme therefore reifies the logic of ceaseless economic proliferation, and as such, abets technologized capitalism. In the event that the data episteme fulfills its teleological goal to become total, virtually all that is thinkable would yield to economic subordination. I present psychedelic science as a site where knowledge which challenges the data episteme is empirically necessary, and which, by extension, attests to the existence of that which cannot be economically subsumed.
Intersections: Resilience
Franze, Simone; Hester, Rebecca; Meitner, Erika S.; Lawrence, Jennifer (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2018-11-07)
This discussion panel unpacks the political, economic, and social impacts of resilience. Panelists speak to resilience in the trade industry, climate change, the human body, and the commonalities between the three.
Living on the Edge of Burnout: Defamiliarizing Neoliberalism Through Cyberpunk Science Fiction
Alphin, Caroline Grey (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-01)
A dominant trend in cyberpunk scholarship draws from Fredric Jameson's diagnosis of postmodernism as the logic of late capitalism, using Jameson's spatial pastiche, schizophrenic temporality, and waning of affect, along with Jameson's characterization of Baudrillard's simulacrum to interpret postmodern cultural artifacts. For many cultural critics, the city of cyberpunk is thoroughly postmodern because parallels can be drawn between the cyberpunk city and the postmodern condition. However, very little work has considered the ways in which cyberpunk can defamiliarize the necro-spatial and necro-temporal logic of neoliberalism. This project moves away from more traditional disciplinary aesthetic methods of analyzing power and urban systems, such as interpretation and representation. And, it problematizes the biopolitical present in three different ways. First, by weaving in and out of an analysis of the narratives, discourses, and spatio-temporalities of cyberpunk and neoliberalism, I seek to produce epistemological interferences within these genres/disciplines, and thus, to disrupt the conceptual and lived biopolitical status-quo of late-capitalism. The goal is to open the door for discomfort with and a critical awareness of the necrotic conditions of competition by highlighting the fictive nature of neoliberalism. Second, this study problematizes accelerationism as a viable alternative to leftist politics and suggests in the end that accelerationism is a form of neoliberal resilience. It does this through an analysis of the biohacker that reframes this subject in terms of accelerationism and the logic of intensity. I argue that the biohacker is the accelerationist subject Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek advocate for in their "Accelerationist Manifesto," suggesting that this accelerationist subject is, in the end, a neoliberal subject that fits easily within the conditions of competition. This study argues that the biohacker in its numerous forms reflects an underlying pure neoliberalism at work within accelerationism and its neoliberal governmentalities. I suggest that far from being an alternative to leftist politics, accelerationism may further the goals of neoliberalism in its desire to accelerate to a purified market space. And, finally, this study works towards offering a biopolitics that theorizes death in terms of ordinariness and suggests that biopolitics is still a useful analytic within neoliberalism. In other words, Foucault's biopolitics can do more than theorize a genealogy of biological racism and genocide. Rather than advocate for moving beyond biopolitics, this study argues instead that neoliberal biopolitics can still be understood in terms of Foucault's analytic, and that perhaps, we need to disentangle Foucault's work from Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics."
Morphological Freedom and the Construction of Bodymind Malleability from Eugenics to Transhumanism
Earle, Joshua Giles (Virginia Tech, 2021-12-14)
This dissertation examines how the human bodymind has been seen as malleable by science, technology, and policy practitioners from the Eugenic era in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, to the future imaginaries of Transhumanists and technology innovators. I critique the main goal of these practitioners – to perfect the human bodymind and through that perfection, perfecting human society – as utopic, impossible, and amoral. I argue instead, that we are intra-dependent – dependent on and through each other and our ecological contexts. I ground this argument both in the lived experience of those whose bodymind arrangements go against our normative expectations – folks like disabled people, queer and transgender people, body modders, and more – and in the philosophical metaphysics of Karen Barad's Agential Realism. I argue that we can only produce a future where bodymind alteration is acceptable if we first value different bodymind arrangements. I argue both that we cannot consider ourselves individuals, separate from the world or each other, and that multiplicity of bodyminds is a generative, heterotopic (neither utopic nor dystopic), force toward which we ought strive through engaging intentionally with each other in care relations.
Native voices: Native peoples' concepts of health and illness - Panel discussion
Bowers, J. Michael; Copeland, Nicholas M.; Ferguson, Victoria; Hester, Rebecca; Hey, Christina K. Mae; Cook, Samuel R.; Pannabecker, Virginia; Trinkle, David B. (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2016-09-20)
This panel discussion was a joint effort between University Libraries, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, and American Indian Studies. Virginia Pannabecker, Health, Life Science, and Scholarly Communications Librarian; David Trinkle, Associate Dean for Community and Culture, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine; and Sam Cook, Director, American Indian Studies at Virginia Tech led the planning effort. Panelist Victoria Ferguson (not featured in the video recording) provided an introduction and led a discussion at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine event location in Roanoke.
The panel was part of a series of events complementing the display of the exhibit Native Voices: Native Peoples' Concepts of Health and Illness (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/) at Newman Library from September 16th to October 25th, 2016. The exhibit was developed and produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). The American Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office, in partnership with NLM, toured the exhibition to America’s libraries. It was brought to Virginia Tech by University Libraries; Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine; American Indian Studies; Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise; Division of Student Affairs: Intercultural Engagement Center; and the Moss Arts Center.
The exhibit examined concepts of health and medicine among contemporary American Indian, Alaska native, and Native Hawai'ian people. The traveling exhibition, produced by the National Library of Medicine, featured interviews and works from native people living on reservations, in tribal villages, and in cities. Topics included: Native views of land, food, community, earth/nature, and spirituality as they relate to Native Health; the relationship between traditional healing and Western medicine in native communities; economic and cultural issues that affect the health of Native communities; efforts by Native communities to improve health conditions; and the role of Native Americans in military service and healing support for returning Natives veterans.
Political Applications of Systems Theory in the Twentieth Century: From Cybernetic Control to Spontaneous Emergence
Glasson, Hannah Gray (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-17)
This dissertation is a realist intellectual history of systems theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Systems theory can be defined as the study of the informatic patterns that are found within a variety of complex phenomena, both natural and social. The science behind systems theory emerged from wartime engineering projects, and was promoted by major philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Theoretical concepts from the nascent systems sciences, including the subfields of information science, cybernetics, and systems biology, migrated into social science fields including political theory and economics. The social applications of systems theory were heavily promoted by major figures within both America's counterculture, and America's neoliberal revolution. Systems theory injected strong elements of political thinking and political reasoning into natural and social scientific fields alike. The integration of systems theory into natural science fields such as biology was paired with an expanded understanding of the purposes of science. These purposes ranged from the attempt to capture sophisticated, systemic mechanisms of control within life processes, to the attempt to describe the spontaneous, creative, and free self-organization within living systems. Likewise, in economics and the social sciences, systems theory provided an apt conceptual terminology to imagine human society as either an intricately interwoven system of control and coercion, or as a spontaneously organizing source of human freedom. Systems approaches to economics rejected simplistic descriptions of human motivation and behavior, and emphasized the importance of collective processes that do not follow central direction. While Friedrich Hayek is the most well-known economist to utilize systems theory, other less known figures such as Kevin Kelly and George Gilder played a major role in the development of systems based, informatic approaches to social and economic thought. Hayek is often blamed for the development of speculative, systems approaches to economics that minimize the importance of material reality. Contradicting this consensus, I argue that Kelly and Gilder are better exemplars of this speculative rejection of materiality. I also challenge the dominant consensus within political theory scholarship that argues that systems theory can only be understood as a tool and modality of control. Instead, I show that freedom and control co-exist ambiguously in systems theory discourses, and that the lasting appeal and uptake of systems theory within American culture must be interpreted in this light.
Producing Knowledge about Astronaut Health Risks: Navigating Interdisciplinary Actor-Networks
Morton, Stephen Gerard (Virginia Tech, 2023-06-07)
When astronauts return from a space mission they smile for the cameras, but behind the scenes they undergo grueling rehab to recover from the effects of space and may face long-term health consequences. Space flights lasting more than thirty days are considered long-duration and may impact astronauts' long-term health due to space exposure; this requires the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop new scientific, medical, and space operational knowledge to counteract and mitigate harmful effects. Understanding how knowledge production occurs is an important analytical and policy issue at NASA. This dissertation explores knowledge production about astronaut health risks using structured and unstructured interviews conducted at Johnson Space Center, the home of mission control for NASA. Applied Actor-Network Theory using a stage analysis shows how various human and non-human actors create this knowledge, constructing, combining, and passing facts across disciplinary boundaries about health risks. A normative analysis of informant statements demonstrates how knowledge and values regarding their understanding of long-term astronaut health risks impact the actions and policies developed at NASA. Steven Hilgartner (1992) suggests that risk research has done very little examination of the social construction of risk objects. He further suggests (1992) that studies fail to systematically examine the construction of causal attribution networks that link chains of risk objects to harm. (Hilgartner, 1992, p. 40-41) This study remedies that lack concerning space medicine by filling in the intellectual, social, and institutional processes that link space flight characteristics to physical harms.
Qualitative exploration of the medical learner's journey into correctional health care at an academic medical center and its implications for medical education
Hashmi, Ahmar H.; Bennett, Alina M.; Tajuddin, Nadeem N.; Hester, Rebecca; Glenn, Jason E. (2020-10-19)
Correctional systems in several U.S. states have entered into partnerships with academic medical centers (AMCs) to provide healthcare for persons who are incarcerated. One AMC specializing in the care of incarcerated patients is the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB), which hosts the only dedicated prison hospital in the U.S. and supplies 80% of the medical care for the entire Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). Nearly all medical students and residents at UTMB take part in the care of the incarcerated. This research, through qualitative exploration using focus group discussions, sets out to characterize the correctional care learning environment medical trainees enter. Participants outlined an institutional culture of low prioritization and neglect that dominated the learning environment in the prison hospital, resulting in treatment of the incarcerated as second-class patients. Medical learners pointed to delays in care, both within the prison hospital and within the TDCJ system, where diagnostic, laboratory, and medical procedures were delivered to incarcerated patients at a lower priority compared to free-world patients. Medical learners elaborated further on ethical issues that included the moral judgment of those who are incarcerated, bias in clinical decision making, and concerns for patient autonomy. Medical learners were left to grapple with complex challenges like the problem of dual loyalties without opportunities to critically reflect upon what they experienced. This study finds that, without specific vulnerable populations training for both trainees and correctional care faculty to address these institutional dynamics, AMCs risk replicating a system of exploitation and neglect of incarcerated patients and thereby exacerbating health inequities.
Role of Social Media and Computing in Organizations aiding Asylum Seekers and Undocumented Migrants in the United States
Rama Subramanian, Deepika (Virginia Tech, 2020-09-03)
Every year, an increasing number of displaced people arrive at the United States of America's border to request asylum. Several groups are working to help migrants by providing them with essential items and services, housing, and legal advice. Drawing on ethnographic findings, this work presents a situated perspective of how citizen responders utilize technological systems to provide relief to those affected by the immigration crisis. Often, these citizens with common goals come together to form organizations. This study investigates how social media and technology support on-the-ground work, advocacy work, care-work, and invisible work of these organizations. Further, I highlight how technological systems fail organizations and how the emergence of care-work replaced these systems. Finally, I make design recommendations to social media and technological systems' design to boost the efficacy of collective crisis response by citizens.

Browsing by Author "Hester, Rebecca"

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