Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 306-317). / This dissertation investigates Twitter parody accounts as a form of social critique and linguistic play across English, Japanese, and Arabic-one that is collaboratively created by the users, policymakers, and architects of Twitter. Together, apart, and in different constellations with governments and news media, these actors use parody accounts to recreate and experiment with everything from law to what constitutes a person. I argue that the Twitter parody account, both as negative critique and ambiguous personification play, is an off-platform use-an unintended use of platform, site, or app that is allowed to endure, with varying degrees of official encouragement, silence, and ignorance. Drawing on ethnographic, linguistic, and legal analysis, the dissertation details the contours of this use, its adversaries and proponents among traditional structures of authority, and how the platform has ratified and deployed it globally. Chapter 1, Aspect Shift, examines how a parody account works at a linguistic level through the name and profile photo play of a classic political parody account. Chapter 2, The Account-Person, proposes that personhood on Twitter is a cyborg entity and investigates five elements the shape this account-person: number, body, position, world, and time. Turning to parody accounts' relationship with authority, chapter 3, Warranting Parody, investigates why some in positions of authority mobilize apparatuses of power against parody accounts. Not all governmental employees, however, see parody accounts as threats. Chapter 4, Tweeting Like a State, explores the development of norms around parody among a key, but often overlooked group of contemporary interpreters of representative government: governmental social media managers. Chapter 5, The Social Media Contract, argues that the history of Twitter's parody policy is the history of its still-emerging social contract, a contract shaped by user demands, the abdication of traditional authorities, and Twitter's own interests. This social contract has uneven globality-as chapter 6, Of Policyness and Global Polysemy, shows through examining Twitter's parody policy across languages. Finally, in the conclusion I bring these various strands together through the concept of usership, a member relationship entangled with citizenship yet largely asserted and negotiated with corporations rather than governments. / by Amanda Johnson. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The thesis utilises newly available legal and municipal archives to study the historical geography of colonial Bombay through five interlocking themes and periods from 1870-1930. This spans the period between the boom and bust in the cotton trade during and after the American Civil War - when Bombay was a colonial mercantile port - to its emergence as of one of India and Asia's largest industrial cities after the First World War. Separate chapters explore the history of railway and telegraph networks, standardisation and time-keeping, land acquisition and valuation, cadastral surveying and property registration, and the urban built environment. From the perspective of the colonial city, the history of these formations looks less like the smooth unfolding of singular standards of money, time or space, than a protracted war of position fought out across a century by experts, elites and the masses. This thesis seeks to deepen the social and political history of urbanization in South Asia beyond concepts of colonial technology transfer or nationalist resistance by examining the everyday politics of stock and real estate speculation, public clocks, land and private property, maps and topographical surveys, and buildings and streets in colonial Bombay. These "modern" technologies of calculation, coordination and control in the urban environment both created and depended on new scales of power and capital accumulation, or particular configurations of industrial technologies, civic institutions and urban space. / by Shekhar Krishnan. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2001. / "February 2001." / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, p. 631-784). / This thesis traces the development of American bacteriology during the first quarter of the twentieth century. While bacteriology experienced a period of rapid growth, an enduring disciplinary anxiety equally characterized the field. In particular, bacteriologists feared increasing specialization and conceptual fragmentation. Leading practitioners repeatedly worried that their science constituted a collection of unrelated techniques, carried out in the service to other practical endeavors without the benefit of an underlying theory or unifying language. I suggest that the sources of bacteriology's rapid professional growth equally accounted for this sense of conceptual impoverishment and disciplinary privation. Typically, bacteriologists focused on what bacteria did rather than what they were in any biological sense. The first three chapters provide a comprehensive survey of the institutional contexts bacteriology (e.g., medical schools, public health laboratories, water sanitation works, dairies, land-grant colleges, and agricultural experiment stations). For the most part, bacteriologists studied bacteria only so far as to isolate, identify and eliminate pathogens. Dairy and soil bacteriologists, however, sought to distinguish productive types of bacteria, and render those forms more active, a direction that led them to consider a range of phenomena and organisms normally occluded by the practices of medical, public health, and sanitary bacteriology. / (cont.) The final three chapters of the dissertation trace the attempts of American bacteriologists to render their science less fragmented and more biological, focusing in particular on the actions of the Society of American Bacteriologists (SAB). Established in 1899, the SAB endeavored to bridge the divergent interests and practices of American bacteriologists. Through its inclusive membership, ecumenical leadership, diverse meeting programs, and society journal, the SAB served as an organizational exploration of those shared aspects of the discipline. Furthermore, the SAB issued a comprehensive chart for the identification of unknown cultures. While never endorsed as its official methods, the chart soon formed the basis of undergraduate and graduate training, while it guided research programs and published papers. In addition, the serial revisions of the chart led bacteriologists to consider many fundamental aspects of bacteria. Lastly, the SAB struggled to reform bacterial systematics. At the time of the SAB's founding, bacteriology languished under a state of taxonomic chaos, with each specialty offering its own system of naming and grouping bacteria. Believing that this linguistic fragmentation precluded the emergence of a unified discipline, the SAB overhauled bacterial systematics, arranging bacteria according to their detailed morphology, physiology, and likely evolutionary histories. / (cont.) While the SAB's taxonomy did not find immediate adherents, it did become authoritative by way of the classroom and laboratory. The SAB issued a new comprehensive determinative guide, the Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology, which incorporated the SAB's scheme. As the Bergey's Manual became ubiquitous to laboratory practice and course instruction, American bacteriologists unwittingly adopted a broader range of considerations ... / by Eric D. Kupferberg. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-241). / by George Michael O'Har. / Ph.D.

At this time writing, Sweden has reached a record high immigration from countries both within and outside the EU. In correspondence with this massive migratory movement the question of integration becomes prioritized and one of the aspects arising due to this is the possibility to access the labor market. Analyzing the Swedish labor market situation, it is shown by evidence that there is an extensive ethnic discrimination that is partly linked to the recruitment process. Legislators both from Swedish and European level have issued acts to prevent employment discrimination because of ethnicity in order to maintain the protection of the fundamental right to non-discrimination and equal treatment. On the other hand, in support with legislation there is a possibility for the employer to justify indirect discrimination in the recruitment procedure by applying a criterion for certain language skills. Furthermore, this language criterion can occur to be a particular disadvantage for people who do not master the Swedish language fluently as a native. In order to justify a discriminatory act like this, the court must investigate whether the criterion is proportionate by applying a proportionality test. This study intends to investigate and analyze the case-law on ethnic discrimination disputes derived from the Swedish Labor Court and the European Court of Justice and throughout that establish if the Swedish Labor Court case-law is compatible with EU-law. In order to answer the research questions, a legal dogmatic method has been used in combination with an EU legal method. The investigation shows that the Swedish Labor Court is addressing the principle of proportionality in a manner of minimum standards which mainly focuses on the underlying reasons for the action that is linked to benefit the interest of the employer. The investigation also shows that the Swedish Labor Court lacks to obtain the standards that is set in provision of the burden of proof that is set by EU-law and Swedish law.

No description available.

No abstract

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-389). / Although vision was seldom studied in Antebellum America, color and color perception became a critical field of scientific inquiry in the United States during the Gilded Age and progressive era. Through a historical investigation of color science in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that attempts to scientifically measure, define, and regulate color were part of a wider program to construct a more rational, harmonious, and efficient American polity starting from one of the very baseline perceptual components of reality - the experience of color. As part of this program, I argue secondly that color science was as much a matter of prescription as description - that is, color scientists didn't simply endeavor to reveal the facts of perception and apply them to social problems, they wanted to train everyday citizens to see scientifically, and thereby create citizens whose eyes, bodies, and minds were both medically healthy and morally tuned to the needs of the modern American nation. Finally, I argue not simply that perception has a history - i.e. that perceptual practices change over time, and that, for Americans of a century ago, experiences of color sensations were not taken as given but had to be laboriously crafted - but also that this history weighs heavily upon our present day understanding of visual reality, as manifested not least of all in scientific studies of vision, language, and cognition. Employing a close reading of the archival and published sources of a range of actors including physicist Ogden Rood, semiotician Charles Peirce, logician Christine Ladd-Franklin, board game magnate Milton Bradley, and art professor Alfred Munsell, among others, this study reveals the origins of some of the most deeply-rooted conceptions of color in modern American culture. / by Michael Paul Rossi. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

No description available.

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 318-333). / This dissertation is an ethnographic study of reproductive travel between Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Based on interviews and observations primarily carried out in a private In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinic in Northern Cyprus, between November 2014 and January 2016, it investigates how and why Turkish couples travel to the Turkish-speaking part of the island of Cyprus to access biomedical reproductive services - namely, donor gametes and sex selection through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis - that are legally unavailable in Turkey. By combining anthropology of secrecy with feminist studies of assisted reproductive technologies, this dissertation argues that Turkey's ban on gamete donation has helped to normalize IVF in the country by reinforcing the heteronormative nuclear family ideal: that is, if gamete donation is unavailable to Turkish people, then married couples who conceive using IVF are presumed to be genetically related to their children. / However, I argue further that this normalization of IVF is only able to rest upon the national ban on gamete donation so long as access to donor gametes continues to be available - transnationally and clandestinely facilitated through a network of inter-clinical and inter-lab relations between Turkey and Northern Cyprus that have been formed over the last decade. In other words, these travels constitute a discursive and geographical space at the margins of, but fully integral to, Turkish reproductive biopolitics, in which secrecy is essential to diverse actors (including couples, egg donors, clinics, and the Turkish state) for multiple reasons. This ethnographic study of reproductive travels connecting Turkey and Northern Cyprus complicates the familiar analysis of transnational reproductive inequalities by demonstrating the plurality of Turkish experience. In doing so, it also extends the non-western scope of anthropological studies of transnational reproductive travel. / By adding a transnational dimension to the study of national reproductive politics, this dissertation reveals the ways in which Turkey's current ideological, social and economic transformations shape the dynamics for the materialdiscursive (re)making of borders and boundaries of both Turkish families and the Turkish-nation in the Northern Cypriot IVF clinics. / by Burcu Mutlu. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) / Ph.D.inHistory,Anthropology,andScience,TechnologyandSociety(HASTS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society