Browsing by Author "Roberts, Jody Alan"
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- Creating Green Chemistry: Discursive Strategies of a Scientific MovementRoberts, Jody Alan (Virginia Tech, 2005-12-13)In this dissertation, I examine the evolution of the green chemistry movement from its inception in the early 1990s to the present day. I focus my study on the discursive strategies employed by leaders of the movement to establish green chemistry and to develop and institute changes in the practice of the chemical sciences. The study looks specifically at three different strategies. The first is the construction of a historical narrative. This history comes from the intersection of the chemical sciences with environmentalism in the United States retold to place chemistry in a central position for understanding global environmental health issues and green chemistry as the natural response to these problems. The second involves the attempts made to develop a concrete definition for green chemistry as well as a set of guiding principles for the practice of this alternative form of chemistry. The establishment of the definition and the principles, I argue, constitutes an important move in constituting the field as a very specific interdisciplinary group with a forged identity and the beginnings of a system for determining what properly "counts" as green chemistry. The third comes from the intersection of this history within the defining principles of the movement intersect to create a specific set of green chemistry practices, and how these practices manifest themselves in conference and pedagogical settings. Finally, I offer an overview of where the movement currently stands, offering a critical perspective on the future potential of the field. I argue that recent episodes indicate that the movement has not succeeded in accomplishing what it set out to do, and will continue to encounter problems unless a refashioning of the movement takes place. To offer perspective on green chemistry as a movement, I examine it through the lens of other (e.g., Frickel and Gross 2005) attempts to explore scientific movements as a special class of social movements.
- Instruments and Domains of Knowledge: The Case of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, 1956-1969Roberts, Jody Alan (Virginia Tech, 2002-05-09)In this thesis, I traced the development of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy through the pages of the Journal of Organic Chemistry (JOC) from the year 1956 to 1969 to understand how organic chemists and Varian Associates?the makers of the first commercial NMR spectrometers?negotiated the identity of the NMR spectrometer. The work of the organic chemists was examined through their publications in the JOC. Examining the abstracts from the JOC between the years 1956 and 1969 developed an understanding of the ways in which organic chemists used the instrument. To understand the role Varian Associates played in the development of NMR, I examined the company?s advertisements in the JOC. I traced the changes in advertising style and format in order to see how Varian Associates expected their instruments to be used. I drew three conclusions from this work: 1) organic chemists and Varian Associates together determined what an NMR spectrometer was and how it could be used; 2) the identity of the instrument was negotiated by these two groups, and the novel use of the instrument by the organic chemists and new schemes in advertising on the part of Varian Associates were attempts to shift this identity; 3) NMR spectroscopy was a domain of knowledge that was embodied in the NMR spectrometer, and that could only be accessed through the instrument.