Department of Science, Technology, and Society

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    Ideology and the Clamshell Identity - Organizational Dilemmas in the Antinuclear Power Movement
    Downey, Gary L. (University of California Press, 1986-06)
    This ethnographic study examines the role of ideology in the development of organizational dilemmas in the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear protest group active in New England during the late 1970s. In 1977, the Alliance received national recognition for its use of consensus decision making and nonviolent civil disobedience during a highly publicized two-week incarceration following an attempted occupation of the Seabrook nuclear plant. But over the next few years, sharp internal disagreements developed over the use of these strategies, leading ultimately to a factional split. I extend theory from symbolic anthropology to integrate the analysis of ideology into the study of resource mobilization without sacrificing the latter's emphasis on rational calculation. My analysis shows that the Alliance's anti-nuclear ideology established an egalitarian identity for the group which structured both the initial selection of strategies and later efforts to modify them.
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    New Technology for a New Nation: Building an Internet Culture in Estonia
    Abbate, Janet E. (1999)
    As in many areas of the history of technology, studies of the Internet are still largely limited to the United States and other established capitalist democracies. More research is needed on how such technologies are created, disseminated, and used in the very different context of emerging nations undergoing rapid political, economic, and cultural change. In this paper I explore the development of the Internet in Estonia since its introduction in June 1992, less than a year after the country declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Estonia’s speed in establishing an Internet infrastructure has been remarkable: in the first six years it connected over 20,000 computers, making Estonia the 15th highest European country in network connections per capita. As these figures suggest, Estonians have not been mere passive recipients of foreign technology; rather, various groups in Estonia have actively embraced the Internet for a wide range of economic and social ends. Despite the country’s commitment to free-market economics, commercial enterprises did not take the lead in providing network services. Rather, the government promoted Internet growth through its education and economic policies. A national educational network, EENet, was established in 1993, and in 1997 the Ministry of Education launched a program called Tiger Leap to upgrade the nation’s school system and connect every school to the Internet. The government also created the EEBone network to interconnect the nation’s fifteen county capitals, support regional development, and—looking toward increased economic integration with Europe—help Estonia participate in the European Union’s plans for a “Global Information Society.” In addition, non-governmental organizations such as the Open Estonia Foundation have provided funds to create Estonian-oriented Web content and to train the public in the use of the Internet, and a United Nations report on human development in Estonia has recommended increased public access to information technology. Another important factor in encouraging Internet growth has been Estonia’s historically close ties with Finland, which leads Europe in Internet connectivity and provides Estonia’s link to the rest of the Internet. After assessing the relative importance of economic, political, geographic, and cultural factors in accelerating Internet participation in Estonia, I ask how expansion of Internet access has affected Estonian society. One already visible symptom is a generation gap: surveys show that while 3/4 of Estonian teenagers have used computers, only 1/5 of their parents have done so. Other data suggest that Estonians have adopted a cooperative approach to using what is still a scarce and expensive technology, often going to friends’ and neighbors’ homes to use computers. Drawing on field research, I will attempt to uncover ordinary Estonians’ attitudes toward and motivations for Internet use; the ways in which different social groups have appropriated this technology for their own aims; and how the Internet has fit into—or disrupted—established cultural practices.
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    The Dilemma of Case Studies Resolved: The Virtues of Using Case Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science
    Burian, Richard M. (MIT Press, 2001-12)
    Philosophers of science turned to historical case studies in part in response to Thomas Kuhn's insistence that such studies can transform the philosophy of science. In this issue Joseph Pitt argues that the power of case studies to instruct us about scientific methodology and epistemology depends on prior philosophical commitments, without which case studies are not philosophically useful. Here I reply to Pitt, demonstrating that case studies, properly deployed, illustrate styles of scientific work and modes of argumentation that are not well handled by currently standard philosophical analyses. I illustrate these claims with exemplary findings from case studies dealing with exploratory experimentation and with interdisciplinary cooperation across sciences to yield multiple independent means of access to theoretical entities. The latter cases provide examples of ways that scientists support claims about theoretical entities that are not available in work performed within a single discipline. They also illustrate means of correcting systematic biases that stem from the commitments of each discipline taken separately. These findings illustrate the transformative power of case study methods, allow us to escape from the horns of Pitt's ?dilemma of case studies?, and vindicate some of the post-Kuhn uses to which case studies have been put.
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    Emotions and Narrative Selves
    Hardcastle, Valerie Gray (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003-12)
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    Rediscovering the King of Woodpeckers: Exploring the Implications
    Walters, J. R.; Crist, E. L. (Resilience Alliance, 2005-12)
    The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has long held a special place in the psyche of North American conservation, eliciting unusually colorful prose, even from scientists, as an icon of the wild. The reverence in which it was held did little to slow the habitat loss that led to its apparent extinction 60 years ago. A consequence of the emotion and attention associated with the amazing rediscovery of this species is that conservation biologists will be under considerable pressure to make good on this "second chance." This poses a challenge to conservation paradigms that has important political consequences. First, the decline of the species is due to habitat loss, recovery from which has been much more seldom achieved than recovery from declines due to impacts on vital rates. This challenge is exacerbated by the enormous area requirements of the species. Second, the species at best exists as a critically small population. It will be difficult to make the case that a viable population can be established without undermining the small population paradigm that underlies conservation strategies for many other species. This has already resulted in some political backlash. Conservation of this species is best based on the one point of clear scientific consensus, that habitat is limiting, but this may result in additional political backlash because of conflicts with other land uses.
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    Cradle of a revolution? The industrial transformation of Louisiana's lower Mississippi river
    Allen, Barbara L. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006-01)
    This article provides an overview of the petrochemical industry's transformation of Louisiana's Lower Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans from the early 1900s to the present. First there is a broad discussion of why the industry choose this location for development. The focus is then on a historical understanding of how the conditions for the environmental justice movement came to exist. These include: patterns of early land ownership with both race and class implications; early, systematic denial of employment to African Americans, willful lack of industry oversight on the part of regulators; and tax and development schemes that depleted local community coffers and services.
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    "Liberal Education Has Failed": Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America
    Wisnioski, Matthew H. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)
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    Combating Racialized and Gendered Ignorance: Theorizing a Transactional Pedagogy of Friendship
    Olson, Philip; Gillman, Laura J. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)
    The article explores the problem of epistemological ignorance. Drawing on the literature of feminist epistemology, in particular the epistemologies of ignorance, it theorizes white ignorance and male ignorance and how it is possible to gain consciousness about one's ignorance, as well as how to be responsible for what one does not know. The article explores ignorance as unconscious habits that inform our mental schemas, our social interactions, and our physicality. It identifies and analyzes these habits of ignorance, drawing on our experiences as team teachers (one a philosophy professor, and the other a professor of women's studies and literary studies) who co-taught an interdisciplinary doctoral seminar in feminist epistemology. It describes and illustrates the pedagogical and scholarly processes that led us to view epistemology as a practice of inquiry that combats ignorance by demanding an inclusive partnership across traditional and counterhegemonic approaches to knowledge. The article claims that a transactional pedagogy of friendship makes possible the disruption and rehabituation of epistemic habits of ignorance, moving inquirers in the direction of more inclusive, reliable, and responsible knowledge.
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    Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute
    Wisnioski, Matthew H. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)
    This essay explores MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies to address two major absences in understandings of art/science/technology collaboration: 1) what drew scientists and engineers-not just elite policymakers and polymaths, but thousands in the rank and file-to the arts in the first place; and (2) what compelled the institutions of postwar technoscience to provide financial and material support for such endeavors? The essay employs the notion of "aesthetic virtue" to explain the linkage of the contradictory ideals of creativity and to demonstrate the vital role of institutionalization in an increasingly professionalized and academic domain of contemporary art.
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    Review essay: Killer Apps and Technomyths
    Abbate, Janet E. (Historical Studies In The Natural Sciences, 2013-02-01)
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    Engineers of Change
    Wisnioski, Matthew H. (2014-02-18)
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    Choices and Challenges 2014: Intellectual Property in the Digital Age
    Choices and Challenges (Virginia Tech, 2014-02-27)
    The Choices and Challenges Forum brochure includes a schedule of events held Feb. 17, 2014, at the Lyric Theatre and Graduate Life Center at Donaldson Brown.
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    Mobile Learning in Brazil: Management and Implementation of Current Policies and Future Perspectives
    Rosa, Fernanda R.; Azenha, Gustavo S. (Zinnerama, 2015-08-14)
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    Epistemic Burdens and the Value of Ignorance
    Olson, P. (2015-12-13)
  • WE CAN REBUILD YOU: disabled bodies in technological imagination
    Heflin, Ashley Shew (2016-02-04)
    Invited Talk at Old Dominion University
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    Code Switch: Rethinking Computer Expertise as Empowerment
    Abbate, Janet E. (Virginia Tech, 2016-05-06)
    Claims that technical mastery of computing and new media will provide a route to economic success for oppressed groups have become ubiquitous in American public discourse. From commercial enterprises like Codecademy, to grassroots nonprofits like Black Girls Code, to state mandates for computer science in public schools, learning to code has been positioned as a quick fix for structural disadvantage. But such claims fail to locate coding within larger discourses about race, gender, and capitalism that constrain its liberatory potential. This paper unpacks “code” as a keyword: a socially powerful term with multiple, contested, historically contingent uses. I will ask: How does the discourse around coding construct competence and authority—and does it tend to preserve or challenge technical expertise as a white male preserve? How is the current meaning of “code” derived in part from related keywords such as “STEM,” “diversity,” “innovation,” or “computational thinking”? What are the historical roots of the coding movement, and how do computer education projects of the 1960s reveal alternate possibilities for programming as an empowering practice? To what extent have women and minorities involved in coding efforts been able to define their own goals, priorities, and definitions of expertise and success?
  • Up-Standing Norms, Technology, and Disability
    Heflin, Ashley Shew (2016-05-13)
    Presentation as part of a panel on Discrimination and Technology at IEEE Ethics 2016