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.

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

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

This work is a historically situated ethnography of the rise in psychiatric discourses in Iran since the 1990s. It explores the trajectory of emerging psychiatric selves in the convergence of the social and the psychological. I examine psychiatric mindsets, the ways different sectors of the society embody, internalize, and modify psychiatric discourses to articulate and understand their distinct generational experiences and sedimented anxieties. Generational in my inquiry has to do with the way different generations experiences the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war, new forms of citizenship and the politicization of their bodies and minds. This ethnography is interdisciplinary, intimate and multi-sited. Its areas include medical training and practice, neuroscientific explanatory models for mental illness and it treatment, biomedical modes of thinking versus psycho-dynamic ones, the subjective experience of being or wanting to be medicated, the historical trajectory of the field of psychiatry in the 2 0 th century Iran and its knowledge communities, cultural material such as cinema and literature, shifting gendered and gendering paradigms of motherhood, biomedical modernization, and the discursive processes that give rise to emerging psychiatric selves. The 1990s paradigm shift is a significant pretext to the emergence of spaces in literature, art and particularly Persian blogs, where belated articulation and dialogical reconstruction of traumatic memory create forms of identification, and grounds for making sense of the past in order to heal, cope and move on. / by Orkideh Behrouzan. / Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2010. / "September 2010." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 268-278).

This thesis is first and foremost about oppression - the oppression experienced in our society by those with particular impairments. It is also about technology - the new information and communication systems which have increasing primacy in today's world. Specifically it is about the ways in which the communication systems of a disablist society hold both opportunities and threats for disabled people and their organisations in the twenty first century, perhaps changing the boundaries of the disabled category. In drawing on literature from both the sociology of technology and disability studies, it contributes to two bodies of academic work. It is intended as a welcome palliative to the growing tendency towards speculative futurology that characterises both disciplines, since it places an empirical study at centre stage. It is unusual in that its main emphasis is on domestic usage of communication systems, not on their use in employment. The research participants were largely unwaged people, many of them in older age groups. The study gave participants the opportunity to describe their experiences and opinions of technological developments in the last throes of the twentieth century. Access to communications systems emerged as a major issue, with disabled people facing a variety of barriers to their beneficial use of technology. Concerns were voiced however about the provision of such systems constituting little more than a 'technical fix', cutting welfare costs,enforcing further segregation and distracting attention from the real source of disabled people's oppression. These findings highlight the increasing importance of more radical social transformation. The opportunities and threats presented by the utilisation of communication systems are examined through an analysis of their usevalue - how they allow or disallow the satisfaction of basic unmet needs. In conclusion, various recommendations are proposed which will go some way towards making technology more accessible and appropriate for disabled people. It is however acknowledged that this will merely treat a symptom of their oppression, not eradicate the cause.

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, September, 2020 / Page 229 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-228). / Scientists in the late 1950s in the United States gained technological capabilities to test for signs of extraterrestrial life. While exobiologists developed visual techniques to detect whether sites beyond Earth might harbor microbes, "biosignatures," radio astronomers searched for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the form of "technosignatures." This dissertation explores how scientists since the Space Age have constructed experimental assemblages to imagine, relate to, and investigate the alien and exotic microbes -- unknown, indeed, as-yet-imperceptible, objects -- / through familiar sensory metaphors of seeing (exobiologists) and listening (SETI scientists). From historical material gathered at various D.C. archives, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Library of Medicine, I show how exobiologists' technologies of vision rendered anew images of the Moon, Mars, Venus, and the Earth from afar and at surface, affording scientists the ability to conceptually anticipate relationships between their world and others. Through a epistemic pratice I call "gaze-scaling," they yoked the concept of "island" to "planet," casting extraterrestrial sites as fragile laboratories of life that beckoned exploration. I next draw from immersive participant observation since 2016 to engage ethnographic sonar on the SETI group Breakthrough Listen based at U.C. Berkeley, California. I analyze how they construct criteria of intelligence through "experiments of anticipation" that are parametrized to hear from a commensurable subject. / I theorize "figures of listening" in both observational protocols and as a preemptive attunement to Other intention, acts that configure an alien who would be not just perceptible, but relatable. If exobiologists envisioned universal standards of biochemistry that would map life's common origins, SETI astronomers have traded on imagined superhuman characteristics of the alien -- more benevolent, wiser, and technologically superior -- to suggest human futures. I outline how the alien has been imagined through three potent analogical figures: as artifacts, animals, and angels. Furnished by feminist epistemologies and queer theories of care around multispecies becomings -- traditions that have persistently challenged ontological stability across species, gender, race, and spacetime -- / I theorize those analogies as acts of "reflexive alienation": a mode of worldmaking in which scientists imagine Others imagining them. Future-oriented extraterrestrial objects held in abeyance cultivate Earthly concepts of being.. / by Claire Isabel Webb. / 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

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, September, 2020 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 376-398). / Highly automated cars -- unlike robots in factories -- must operate in existing social spaces, which are complex and hard to control. Unlike household robots, these systems are also fast and dangerous. The fundamental problem of getting robots to interact in the world will be getting them to do the "right thing" -- according to developers, users, and societies. But what is "right" is a matter of perspective, and there will be many ways to achieve any particular robotic performance. Through ethnographic fieldwork at a site of robotic vehicle development, I investigate alternative strategies for robotic cars and discuss their social implications. Supported by a framework from multispecies ethnography and the practices of robot developers, I argue that robots do not see like humans or experience the world as humans do. But they must be explicitly made to think -- to represent the world and act in it -- / in ways that work for people, and obey people's intersubjective assumptions about how robots will act in a given moment. Faced with this difficult set of design constraints, developers seek to humanize robots to make them socially acceptable, or robot-proof the world to make it safer for robots, through four idioms or strategies of heterogeneous engineering: mapping and annotating, perceptual omniscience, AI decision-making, and human-in-the-loop supervised operation. Social scientists involved in the design process challenge and complicate these four approaches, and introduce a fifth one: humanizing robots by allowing them to communicate via external human-machine interfaces. These idioms form a language by which to characterize approaches to socially integrated robotic systems. The debates between them show that different humanizing idioms imply different perspectives on social order, what it takes to be a competent social actor, and how humans and machines can work together. / Each idiom imagines different kinds of future worlds in which robotic technologies come to coexist with humans, with vastly different political consequences. Social scientists are vital participants in the project of exploring the contours of these futures, and I suggest new approaches and open questions for the development of social scientists' engagement in technology development. / by Erik Lee Stayton. / 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

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2016 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-228). / Caring for Star-Children: Autism, Families, and Ethics in Contemporary China studies the emergence and development of family caregiving for autistic children after 1982, when autism was first diagnosed separately in two cities in China. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at municipal specialist hospitals, community child-health clinics, autism rehabilitation centers, and homes of families with autistic children across six provinces, this study explores how social stratification and the turn towards self-governance not only made autism as an epistemic object, but has intersected with that category to create new forms of inequality. In the absence of thorough and consistent state initiatives, moral economies around the child's potential have sprung up. / Such moral economies lead actors such as medical professionals, philanthropic and educational organizations, and elite parent-activists to prioritize the young autistic child's potential, and to urge parents to become behavioral therapists for their own children. Parents are urged to let go of the normative societal expectation of recompense in the form of elderly care. I argue in this dissertation that the directives around these moral economies fail to take into account the local and gendered inequities that both produce, and constrain, parental diagnostic and therapeutic choices for their autistic children. Autism's spread as a diagnostic category has paralleled other spatial and economic disparities across the country. / The economic reforms which began in 1978 and the devolution of many public functions to the purview of local governments have led to dramatic regional disparities with respect to economic opportunity and, the availability and quality of healthcare, education and social services. Where professional and parental elites in cities such as Beijing refer to autistic children through the valorized term "children of the stars" (a phrase chosen so as to reduce stigma), and are able to provide children in these locations with prompt diagnoses and early therapy, to date many healthcare workers and families responsible for nurturing children in less developed regions of China have not even heard of such a diagnostic category. Many families from rural or otherwise resource-scarce locations in China are not able to obtain a timely diagnosis, much less access therapy for their children. / In managing care in landscapes of great disparity, families are turned into diagnostic and therapeutic internal migrants, as they travel across China in search of the appropriate doctors and therapy. I argue in this thesis that the post-socialist emphasis on choice, rather than care, in fact serves to legitimize neglect of the autistic adult and mother of the child. Autism advocacy rights which fail to take into account local forms of stratification thus serve to broaden the burden of care upon families. / by Emily Xi Lin. / 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

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 155-169). / This ethnography tracks a diverse set of scientific practices that have developed new technologies for the conservation of artworks and cultural heritage. I examine how scientists in physics, chemistry, and biology have intervened in the restoration of artifacts ranging from faded abstract expressionist paintings to the crumbling clay terraces of an archaeological site. Reporting on archival research, interviews, and participant-observation, I juxtapose three case studies in the U.S. and Italy-two in which physics (Cambridge, MA) and chemistry (Florence) are conscripted into the realm of high modem art, and another in which biological knowledge (Milan) informs the preservation of artistic tradition and craft heritage. / In analyzing interventions in digital projection technology (light), nanotechnology (colloids), and biotechnology (microbes), I argue that scientists today transform artifacts of culture into instances of technoscientific nature through what I call the "technoscientific re-enchantment of art." Aura, philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote, is the ineffable and singular charisma that confirms an artwork as "the original." He added that technological reproducibility through film and photography strips art of its ritualistic authority, liberating it of the fetish of authenticity. To the contrary, I find, technology today is enlisted as a mode of authenticity's material production. Art's aura, in the age of technoscientific reenchantment, does not disappear but rather, is re-valued through analogy-analogies made through the discursive and material practices that liken light to paint, the colloidal substance of the human body to that of artworks, and microbes to patina. / Laboratory scientists, I show, are recasting the materials of art and heritage to make the terms of their recovery amenable to technoscientific mediation. In so doing, scientists contribute to enduring ethical debates within art history and heritage preservation-debates about how to interpret an artist's intent and an object's pristineness or historicity. Finally, I explore a fourth field site, the Vatican Museums, as a framing device for understanding the stakes in contemporary conservation practice. Drawing on the anthropology of art and heritage, science and technology studies, and art history, I explore the multiple, ever-changing claims of technoscientific expertise over matters of the materiality, aesthetics, and history of artifacts. / Grace Kim. / 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

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 260-277). / This ethnography tracks visualization and pedagogy in the burgeoning field of structural biology. Structural biologists are a multidisciplinary group of researchers who produce models and animations of protein molecules using three-dimensional interactive computer graphics. As they ramp up the pace of structure determination, modeling a vast array of proteins, these researchers are shifting life science research agendas from decoding genetic sequence data to interpreting the multidimensional forms of molecular life. One major hurdle they face is training a new generation of scientists to work with multi-dimensional data forms. In this study I document the formation and propagation of tacit knowledge in structural biology laboratories, in classrooms, and at conferences. This research shows that structural biologists-in-training must cultivate a feel for proteins in order to visualize and interpret their activity in cells. I find that protein modeling relies heavily on a set of practices I call the body-work of modeling. These tacit skills include: a) forms of kinesthetic knowledge that structural biologists gain through building and manipulating molecular models, and by using their own bodies as mimetic models to help them figure out how proteins move and interact; and b) narrative strategies that assume a teleological relationship between form and function, and which figure proteins through analogies with familiar human-scale phenomena, such as the pervasive description of proteins as "machines." What I find is that these researchers are not only transforming the objects of life science research: they are training a new generation of life scientists in forms of knowing attuned to the chemical affinities, physical forces and movements of protein molecules, and keyed to the tangible logic and rhetoric of "molecular machines." / (cont.) This research builds on concerns in the feminist science studies literature on modes of embodiment in scientific practice, and contributes to studies of performance in science by examining visual cultures as performance cultures. In addition, I incorporate historical studies of the life sciences to map the making of the protein-this intricately crafted entity whose forms and functions, I argue, are recalibrating scientific expertise, reanimating biological imaginations, and reconfiguring the very contours and temporalities of "life itself." / by Natasha Myers. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS